They are abused one minute, adored the next, excoriated one week, embraced the next.

Place-kickers are pro football’s punching bags, an itinerant population, ready to pack up their tees at a moment’s notice, accustomed to being run out of town at the whim of a coach. They are like office temporaries, hired for a limited time, liable to be discarded suddenly. It is the nature of their work.

The drill is the same every week. Stand on the sideline, minding your business while the game goes on, mostly ignored by the large people all around you. Then, with the game on the line, the coach pats you on the back and sends you in to win it.

Nothing to it.

Just don’t miss.

“I always felt, if I had two bad games in a row, I’d get cut,” said Jan Stenerud, the only pure place-kicker in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Stenerud embraced that circumstance, lasting 13 years in Kansas City and four more in Green Bay before a final season in Minnesota, through good times and bad.

“I always felt you hurt your team more on a bad day than you helped on a good day,” he said. “The difference between success and failure is a matter of inches. It’s a high risk and a high reward business.”

Extra points are viewed as automatic. Yet a bad snap or a bad hold and they are doomed. Martin Gramatica of Tampa Bay missed one that cost the Super Bowl champs a win early in the season. Detroit’s Jason Hanson had to pull up on one in the Lions’ loss at Denver last Sunday.

Arizona’s Bill Gramatica, Martin’s brother, is so exuberant when he nails field goals that he leaps in the air to celebrate. Two years ago, he went up, came down wrong and tore ligaments and cartilage in his knee.

Out for the season.

Not good.

Matt Bryant of the New York Giants has ridden this emotional roller coaster for the last two years, 20 games worth of ups and downs. Last season, he won a game with four field goals, the only points the Giants scored that day. Afterward, defensive lineman Keith Hamilton blinked in amazement.

“I didn’t know who that guy was,” Hamilton said. “I thought he was one of the equipment guys. I saw him sitting in the locker room. I didn’t know him at all.”

In this season’s second week, Bryant was a hero against Dallas, kicking a go-ahead field goal on a wet field with 11 seconds to play. Then he was a goat, putting his squib kickoff out of bounds to give the Cowboys a comeback opportunity they converted.

Stenerud was more understanding than most people about the mishap.

“That squib kick – I saw replays,” he said. “It can bounce sideways quite a bit. The next time, it will stay in the field. That was a combination of inexperience, excitement and bad luck.”

A week later, Bryant was the goat against Washington, missing a 37-yard fourth quarter field goal that would have sealed the victory. Then he was the hero, kicking the 27-yard game-winner in overtime, despite a bad snap.

And so it goes.

The former pawnbroker shrugged off the ups and downs of a kicker’s life. “You have to have thick skin,” he said.

And when outsiders howl at his miscues, Bryant ignores them.

“That would be like me critiquing an opera singer,” he said. “I don’t have a clue about how to sing opera or play a piano.”

Mercifully, the Giants had a bye last weekend so Bryant could rest his nerves and his foot. His psyche gets its next test Sunday against Miami.

The Dolphins, of course, had the poster boy for the kicking community in Garo Yepremian, a short fellow from Cyprus, who happened to be quite adept at putting his foot into footballs.

He looked out of place, but that was not an issue when he led the league in field-goal percentage three times. It became one in the Super Bowl at the end of the Dolphins’ 1972 perfect season.

Miami ran the table that year, 14-0 in the regular season, two playoff wins and then the 14-7 Super Bowl win over Washington. The Redskins’ lone TD came with 2:07 to play on a botched field goal and fumble that was recovered by Mike Bass after Yepremian’s lame attempt at a pass. The kicker’s explanation of the play is a classic.

“Many big people were chasing me,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do. So I thought I would surprise them and throw it.”

For Miami, two good things came out of that misadventure.

It was too late in the game to do much damage to the Dolphins, and unlike Gramatica, Yepremian didn’t get hurt.

AP-ES-10-04-03 1202EDT