H-172: the board prices ten of thirty-two kickers, and the slot has no ordering skill. (1) Is coverage really partial? (2) Does the served kicker line order kickers within a week at all? (3) Does any observation of the kicker (his fitted distance mix, his team's trailing FG attempts) add order beyond the team anchor?

Owner lane: Not recorded

Question

H-172: the board prices ten of thirty-two kickers, and the slot has no ordering skill. (1) Is coverage really partial? (2) Does the served kicker line order kickers within a week at all? (3) Does any observation of the kicker (his fitted distance mix, his team's trailing FG attempts) add order beyond the team anchor?

Prediction

Literal 'no ordering skill' REFUTED: A0 within-week Spearman about +0.10 to +0.15, 95% excluding 0. Candidates nil: A1/A2/A3 E1 contrasts |d| < 0.01 and E2 within +/-0.02 points, Bonferroni-6 spanning 0. Frozen in protocol.json before any arm ran.

Finding and verdict

SPLIT. Coverage half CONFIRMED (9 of 32 kickers priced on the 2026-09-20 board, all rostered; DEF prices 32). 'No ordering skill' REFUTED as literal: the served kicker line orders kickers at within-week Spearman +0.144 [+0.109, +0.178] on 2019-25 walk-forward, exceeding all 200 shuffle draws, and every bit of that order is the team anchor's (C2 identity). The observation half MEASURED NOTHING: neither the kicker's own fitted distance mix nor his team's trailing FG attempts moves order or MAE (all six Bonf-6 intervals span 0; placebos equally large). Prediction was right on all three parts.

Reasoning

A kicker's fantasy week is FG count x distance + PATs; the count is where the variance is, and the market anchor already carries the count's predictable part. Distance mix moves a line by tenths of a point; trailing FGA is mostly the same team-scoring signal the anchor holds. The residual size: MAE 3.63 pts against a within-week rank correlation of 0.14 -- almost all of a kicker-week is unexplained by anything tried here.

Next action

Decision/build, not this lane: price all 32 kickers on the board as DEF already is (P1); the order the served line carries is worth about +1.65 pts/week top-quartile over bottom-quartile, which only matters if the candidates are visible. Research candidates left in this layer: kicker accuracy (trailing FG% shrunk) and weather/dome x distance, both not in this family.