About Off the Upright
What is a doink?
A doink is when a kicked ball strikes the goal post (upright, crossbar, stanchion, camera, or even the base). It might bounce through for a score or bounce away for a miss.
Why track doinks?
The doink is one of the most recognizable plays in the NFL. I started this project with a hunch: that doinked kicks have a psychological impact on the opposing team. After watching Matt Prater doink an extra point through for the Bills and knowing the Bengals were done, I had to find out if the data backed it up.
I couldn't find the data I needed, so I started building it.
For the long version of how this project got built, including the part where I learned my own theory wasn't quite right, read the first DoinkTale.
How is the data collected?
Every doink in this database is manually verified against source material, game footage wherever it can be found, otherwise reports from multiple independent media outlets (not one syndicated report carried by several). Nothing is added automatically: each entry is reviewed and confirmed by a person before it's published.
I cross-reference broadcast replays, play-by-play logs, and historical scorebug graphics to confirm which game I'm looking at. For older games where broadcast quality varies, the network-specific scorebug reference guides tell me what era I'm in. Community submissions get the same treatment before they go in.
When a doink turns out to be wrong, it's removed from the database and recorded on the errata page with the reason for the correction. That includes play-by-play write-ups that described a doink that never happened. Silent deletion is how data quality rots; transparent correction is how it gets better.
If you know of a doink I'm missing, submit it - I review every submission. I don't claim to have every doink in NFL history. Not yet, anyway.
Off the Upright posts new doinks on Facebook, Instagram and Bluesky, with videos on YouTube.
Off the Upright also has a Discord server.
What counts as a doink?
The ball must visibly strike the goal post or something mounted on it: upright, crossbar, stanchion, base or camera. Kicks that hit and go through count (Good). Kicks that hit and miss count (No Good). Kicks that pass cleanly through or miss wide without contact don't count. Nullified plays (timeouts, penalties, dead balls) are excluded from the dataset, though I sometimes preserve the story in the game notes.
What's with the radar?
Game pages show where each doink hit the goal post. Every contact between the ball and the post is a ping: the first strike, plus any bounce off the other upright or the crossbar on the way through (or out). Each ping is manually identified from the footage and stored with the doink, so the radar shows what the kick actually did.
What is a moot doink?
A moot doink takes its name from a moot point: something that doesn't matter to the larger discussion. It's a doinked field goal or extra point that likely wouldn't have changed the outcome of the game.
Moot doinks may seem like they don't matter, but for kickers fighting to make the team, these kicks are part of the story (and sometimes part of the roster battle).
On Fun Stats, a doink counts as moot when the game stayed 8 or more points apart even if every one of that kicker's missed doinks had been made.
A brief history of the doink
Doinks are as old as the goalpost itself. The trouble is that the goalpost (and the kicker, and the rules) keep changing.
Before 1974, the goalposts sat on the goal line - right in the middle of the action. Shorter kicks hit the posts at full velocity, and the uprights were basically an extra defender. Doinks were almost certainly more common, but good luck finding the footage.
The rise of soccer-style kickers - pioneered by Hall of Famer Jan Stenerud in the late '60s - changed things too. More spin, more curve, different bounce behavior off the uprights compared to the old straight-on toe kicks.
The last game ever played with goalposts on the goal line was the 1974 Pro Bowl, where Nick Mike-Mayer's 45-yard miss off the upright and crossbar became the last doink of the goal-line era. When the posts moved to the end line that fall, the whole geometry of kicking changed: longer flight path, different angle of approach, fewer direct collisions with iron.
But when did they get so tall?
The "slingshot" design the NFL adopted in 1967 (named for its profile from the side) already had telescoping uprights that could reach 30 feet. By the time the rule made 30-foot uprights official in 1974, the maintenance crews had already done the work, making this a non-story.
The move to taller posts wasn't about the kickers. It was about the refs. Anything happening above the upright is a judgment call, and the league prefers not to make those. Taller posts buy back (some) certainty.
In 2015, the NFL moved the extra point back from the 2-yard line to the 15-yard line, turning a near-automatic 20-yard kick into a 33-yard attempt. The change surfaced a whole new category of doinked XPs that had been basically extinct for decades.
The title chart on the first DoinkTale visualizes the rule change's impact directly: an ever-growing cluster of doinks form the peak at the 33-yard line in the 2015–2026 era, while the 1974–2014 era has more of a molehill.
Coverage: Off the Upright currently tracks 1006 verified doinks spanning the 1974–2026 seasons. Coverage is complete from 1996, preseason through postseason. I'm backfilling 1974 through 1995 as video evidence surfaces, so if you have knowledge (or even better, footage) of doinks not recorded here, please submit it here. The earliest verified doink with footage is from Super Bowl IX, played in January 1975 to close the 1974 season.
The 1974 Pro Bowl is the last game outside the explicit tracking scope. Mike-Mayer's doink is documented via the official NFL game book and contemporary newspaper accounts and lives on a standalone page since Pro Bowl games don't fit the franchise-based tracking model.
Can I use this data?
Yes. Download the dataset as CSV for research, analysis, or settling an argument. If you reference it publicly, please credit Off the Upright and link back to offtheupright.com. Building a site or service that needs to pull the data live? Request an API key.
RSS Feeds
Subscribe to stay current on the doink database:
- Latest Doinks - the 50 most recent doinks by game date
- Recently Added & Updated - new entries and corrections
- DoinkTales & Playbook - new long-form writing and visualizations as they publish
Attributions & Credits
This project wouldn't be possible without the work of NFL historians, digital archivists, and other passionate NFL content creators, especially doinkback.com, Baseballer24, Savage224 Gaming, and Savage Brick Sports on YouTube.
For game data, roster verification, and large-scale doink discovery, I rely on two open sports data projects that are foundational to Off the Upright and countless other passion projects:
- Pro Football Reference for game scores, schedules, and historical context, and
- nflverse for the play-by-play data that helped identify hundreds of previously uncatalogued doinks.
I'm grateful to both communities for keeping NFL history open and accessible.
Contact
Have a question, tip, or just want to talk doinks? contact@offtheupright.com
On social media, find Off the Upright at @thedoinkdatabase. The data releases and the nfldoinkeR package are on GitHub.