The Doink Compass
The simplest question about kicking (which kicker is the most doink-prone?) has the worst answers. Sort by career total and the leader is whoever played longest. Sort by per-season rate and the leader is whoever played in fits and starts. Both numbers describe tenure, not the kicker.
Two questions, asked together, do better. How often does a kicker hit the upright? And when they do, does the ball go through? The first one measures volume. The second measures conversion. They don't track each other, so a chart can pull them apart.
Reading the Compass
The horizontal axis tracks doink rate, meaning career doinks divided by career games played. A doink rate of 0.0625 works out to roughly one doink every sixteen games, or about one a season. Above that line a kicker sits on the right half of the Compass. Below it, the left. The vertical axis tracks made-doink conversion, the percentage of a kicker's career doinks that bounced through for a score. Above 30%, top half. Below, bottom. The two lines cross to make four quadrants, and each one fills with a different kind of kicker.
The bottom-left quadrant looks unusually sparse, and that's the point. Doinks are a thing that happens, and the kickers who do it rarely have less of it to plot. The lower-left corner is where the quietest careers settle. At the far edge: The Bironas Class, kickers with zero career doinks during the window, who appear as hollow markers at the very edge of the corner. Rob Bironas himself is the namesake. Across 596 career kicks at 85.7% FG accuracy, his record contains zero doinks — and at the dataset's lowest qualifying doink rate (Olindo Mare's, roughly one doink per 68 games), Bironas would have been expected to register about eight. He registered none. It's not a rounding error. It's a statistical anomaly. The Bironas Class isn't its own quadrant or archetype, just the limit case of the Doink Deserters: kickers whose record stays clean.
The Four Archetypes
The Bank-Shot Syndicate
High Volume · High Conversion · Top-Right Quadrant
The architects of the iron. These kickers strike the post often enough that you can't call it rare. And yet, when contact happens, the bounce goes their way more often than not. Skill, luck, or something about how leg power changes the bounce? Pick your favorite explanation. The doinks keep going through.
Current exemplar: Chris Boswell (12 career doinks, 42% made).
The Magnetic Cursed
High Volume · Low Conversion · Bottom-Right Quadrant
The Parkey Zone. The uprights act as a tractor beam, and the iron is strictly no-entry. High-volume tragedy where the post is a brick wall, never a backboard. These are the careers that come down to single moments. The misses are what stick.
Current exemplar: Rodrigo Blankenship (6 career doinks, 0% made).
The Precision Opportunists
Low Volume · High Conversion · Top-Left Quadrant
They don't find the upright often. But when they do, the kick has the right English to spin through. Efficiency at its most accidental. Few kickers actually live here. The high-conversion-low-volume corner is genuinely thin, more of a tendency than a club.
Current exemplar: Dan Bailey (9 career doinks, 67% made).
The Doink Deserters
Low Volume · Low Conversion · Bottom-Left Quadrant
Doinks happen, but rarely, and when they do the bounce usually goes the wrong way. Not strangers to the iron, exactly — just kickers who don't have much of a relationship with it either way. Their doinks are a season-marker thing, not a career-defining thing.
Current exemplar: Nick Folk (15 career doinks, 7% made).
What the Compass Misses
The framework is a frame, not a verdict. A few honest limitations.
Distance is collapsed. A kicker whose doinks all happened on 50+ yard attempts is plotted the same as one whose doinks were all chip shots. The Compass treats every doink as one tally on the volume axis and one win-or-miss on the conversion axis. The article-side analysis (see A Fool's Library of Alexandria) digs into the distance question.
Clutch context is invisible. A doink in a 35-point blowout sits next to a doink in overtime. Both push a kicker the same amount on the chart. The broader dataset has game-altering classification. Could it feed a future Compass variant? Sure. Doesn't yet.
Field goals only. Extra points are excluded from this view. The 2015 rule change pushed extra points back to a 33-yard attempt, which reshapes XP doink rates so heavily that mixing them with FGs would warp the volume axis. An XP version of the Compass is on the maybe-someday pile.
Career length is implicit. A four-doink rookie sits next to a twenty-doink ten-year veteran if their per-game rates and made-rates line up. The Compass is a snapshot of behavior, not of accomplishment. See methodology for the threshold filters that keep the chart honest.
Methodology
The Compass plots field goal doinks only, 2005 through 2025. To qualify, a kicker needs at least four career doinks across two or more seasons; single-season spikes are excluded because one-game-three-doink streaks aren't a career pattern. Marker color reflects franchise tenure where applicable. The vertical axis caps at 60% (kickers above that ceiling are plotted at the boundary as edge markers). The horizontal axis ranges from 0.02 to 0.105 doinks per game, with the high-volume threshold at 0.0625 (≈ one doink per sixteen-game season). The Bironas Class (kickers with zero career doinks during the window) appears as hollow markers in the bottom-left corner.
The chart is a snapshot. Kicker positions update as the dataset grows, both as new doinks are verified and as historical games surface from archival footage.
The Full Field
Every kicker who qualifies, plotted together. This is the anchor view. It shows where kickers actually land, and which corners of the chart get crowded versus which stay empty.