It is especially heartbreaking when the decline is one of both the mind and the body. We can accept the greatest of all time slowing down, failing to push a pile or missing a tackle. Less easy is watching Justin Tucker stare down a field goal perpetually hooking outside of its intended parameters; a painter who can no longer feel the canvas or a golfer who now preempts all his shots with a warning to bystanders. Name your malady: yips, shakes, hiccups … it’s an awful curse and one that deserves nothing but the deepest of sympathy.
Tucker is the greatest kicker in NFL history. He came into this season as the most accurate and decorated of all time, and still holds the record for the longest kick made in an NFL game. This year, he has a career-low 73.9% field goal rate, which will almost assuredly snap his stretch of five consecutive Pro Bowl nods. He has been asked to explain in every way how he went from the picture of machine-like accuracy to a player who, just a few months ago, I saw talking to Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh after the game and being told: “Just be happy we won.” Another game in which his performance lingered like crime scene fingerprints.
Indeed, Baltimore has been winning in spite of Tucker and on Sunday he missed two more field goals and an extra point—more misses than he has had in entire seasons in previous years. In 2024, he missed a field goal in each of the first three games to start the season, and has now missed at least one kick in four of his past six games. The Ravens are the only team in the NFL with a former special teams coordinator as a head coach, and one of the few with a kicking-specific coach on the staff who can address specific concerns more accurately than many coordinators (none of whom are kickers). Each week he is buried in a sea of microphones talking about aim points and launch angles, as if anyone in his orbit could understand how well he’d done his job for so long and how frustrating it is that he can—for now—no longer do it.
But even Harbaugh has to know that Sunday’s 24–19 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles was a breaking point. He is a coach who is wonderfully attuned to the mental game and is managing a complex staff full of vastly different personalities. Having been in the NFL for so long, there’s a certainty he can find a way to unceremoniously set Tucker aside for a bit off the active roster while he harnesses his craft in private.
Maybe privacy is what’s necessary right now in lieu of a conveyor belt of fears that, no matter how hard Tucker tries to compartmentalize, are clearly surfacing each time he approaches the ball to attempt a kick.
The issues, of course, are multifaceted. Harbaugh has to decide between the heartbreak and the absolute hysteria that a kicker tryout would cause in Baltimore and … inaction. The Ravens do not currently have a kicker on their practice squad, but one would assume even that transaction would lead to hard questions he must answer in public. Harbaugh would have to either gamble that Tucker will figure it out or gamble that someone who is available on the street right now could come in and digest the enormity of replacing a well-loved team pillar who may not want the break that Harbaugh is offering. He would have to assume that his team—which is 8–5 and also carrying the weight of last season’s home loss in the AFC title game—would not fall under the wave of cynicism knowing that making it into opposing territory offers about the same chance of logging points as spinning a roulette wheel.
For a coach so able to win in the margins, his treatment of Tucker has been a lesson in humanity unlike so many unceremonious dumpings that have taken place around the league. Unfortunately, Harbaugh has delayed the process long enough.
We are often not privy to answers for our most obvious questions. Last year, we wondered perpetually why the Kansas City Chiefs would not sign another wide receiver when all Patrick Mahomes’s top weapons seemed to do was drop the ball or line up offside. Perhaps Harbaugh’s calculations to this point have been relatively simple based on his own knowledge of the locker room and his innate belief in Tucker.
But the parameters have changed now that we can envision the tangible effect—the literal difference between Baltimore and the NFL’s other best teams. Dealing with heartbreak is never easy, but allowing Tucker to continue on this way will have far more disastrous consequences.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as The Ravens Have to Do Something About Their Justin Tucker Problem.
