Maybe the Ravens should head down to the nearest 7-Eleven and see whether the store has a two-for-one sale on kickers. It’s time for pure panic in this town.
Justin Tucker, perhaps the best kicker in NFL history, made two field goals Sunday, but it was his two misses in a 24-19 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles that has this city buzzing.
The Ravens trailed 14-12 at halftime but had a chance to regain the lead with impressive drives of 55 and 57 yards to open the third quarter.
But Tucker’s 47-yard field goal attempt on the first possession sailed wide left, and the second, from 53 yards, drifted wide right. That’s pretty bad for a player who earned nicknames such as “Mr. Automatic” and “Mr. Reliable” during his 13-year career.
Worse yet, Tucker missed an extra point attempt after tight end Mark Andrews’ 14-yard touchdown pass from Lamar Jackson that would have put the Ravens ahead, 10-0, with 3:49 left in the first quarter.
Yikes. Black Friday turned into Blue Sunday.
After the game, Ravens coach John Harbaugh, a former special teams guru during his time as an assistant in Philadelphia, was asked about Tucker, and he gave his best answer. It was the right answer.
A trip to the 7-Eleven is not an option.
“We’ve been working through it,” Harbaugh said. “You work through it with every single player. Every single thing you fight to try to help guys to be successful. We’ll do that. If you’re asking me, ‘Are we going to move on from Justin Tucker?’ I’m not really planning on doing that right now; I don’t think that’d be wise.
“But he’ll tell you, [and] he’ll be the first to tell you he needs to make kicks, because he can. I just think if you look at Justin Tucker’s history, you’d have to say he’s capable of doing that. That’s something that he’s going to want to do, and we’re all going to want him to do it.”
You really didn’t expect anything different, did you? Kickers and punters are weird people. They can go into outer space without a spaceship. Seriously. They have fragile minds and psyches, and if they go off into the deep end, you might never get them back.
So, Harbaugh is playing it cool. There are a lot of kickers on the free agent market, but would you rather a replacement or a struggling Tucker?
Right now, the Ravens have to massage Tucker’s ego and make him feel great about himself. Would you prefer Tucker or possibly another Billy Cundiff?
Take Tucker. He has the resume and the Ravens can’t afford to have a revolving door at this point. This kicker situation could get sloppy and out of hand. It’s one thing if a team is rebuilding, but another when a team has high expectations with star players such as Jackson, running back Derrick Henry and middle linebacker Roquan Smith.
You have to feed the monster and make Tucker as comfortable as possible. It’s one thing to bring in a kicker or a bunch of them to challenge for the No. 1 job in training camp — like former Ravens coach Brian Billick did with Matt Stover at the turn of the century — but another to add one this late in the season.
Now is not the right time.
“As simply as I can put it, I missed the kicks, and I’ll leave it at that,” Tucker said. “ I just left the points out there. I feel like I cost us this one, but it doesn’t really do anybody any good to dwell on it. The only thing that we can do — that I can do — is just continue to work, move forward, take it one kick at a time. I hate that I’ve had to have this same conversation over the course of this season, but that’s something that comes with the territory in this job description.
“The kicks are either good or they’re not, and today, I did not do a good enough job to help our team win the football game.”
There are several theories to explain Tucker’s recent failures. Before this season, there were already talks about how he was headed to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton. But he has missed field goal attempts of 53, 56, 46, 50, 47, 50, 47 and 53 yards this season. He also has missed two extra point attempts.
As ESPN’s Bill Barnwell noted, Tucker missed as many or more kicks Sunday than he missed during the entire season in 2012, 2013, 2016, 2017, 2019 or 2021.
One theory is that his leg is weaker, and that happens to everybody. One day you just wake up, and it’s gone. It’s finished, and maybe that’s why most of his failed attempts have gone wide left because he is driving the ball too hard.
Then, there is another excuse. Kickers go into slumps. It happens to the best of them. The only way to get out of it is to either get them counseling, or let them work it out. At this point of the season, it’s best to leave Tucker alone.
“It’s just a matter of a matter of … I’ve said this before, that each kick kind of lives in its own world,” Tucker said. “Whether it’s a PAT [point after touchdown] or a field goal from ‘this’ hash going in ‘this’ direction or vice versa, each kick kind of has to live on its own. And yes, I’ll leave it at that.”
There won’t be many changes in the way he attacks the ball.
“I wasn’t really trying to compensate for any other kicks that had gotten away from me previously, because, like I said, each kick is its own, it lives in its own world, and it’s its own challenge,” Tucker said. “So, the fact that a number of kicks have gone left on me didn’t have anything to do with why the 53-yarder, why I pushed it right. It was just a matter of I didn’t strike the ball on the target line — or on the exact target line that I wanted to — on that given kick.”
So, nothing is going to change at this point, and nothing should. Harbaugh knows he has to ride this out, much like Billick did with Stover back in 2000. Remember, the Ravens went five games without a touchdown but Stover, next to running back Jamal Lewis, became the second most important player on the offense that season.
Harbaugh has to roll the dice with Tucker as well. Because of the fragile psyche, you don’t want to push a kicker to the point of no return, not with four games remaining in the regular season.
Kickers are a different breed.
“We’re going to treat this week just like any other break that we’ve had before,” Tucker said of the bye week. “We’re going to turn over every stone, and I will do that, individually, for sure, just to address any and all issues I may have with my technique, anything tangible, anything concrete that I can make it a point to remedy … That’s what I mean when I say [that] the only thing that I can do is just get back to work. The only thing that we can do is just back to work and do the things that we know will help our team win football games.”
The Ravens have much more to lose at this point than parting ways with possibly the greatest kicker in NFL history.
They are wise to leave him alone.
Have a news tip? Contact Mike Preston at epreston@baltsun.com, 410-332-6467 and x.com/MikePrestonSun.