Justin Tucker may well feel his days with the Baltimore Ravens are numbered after the team drafted kicker Tyler Loop. In fact, with the selection of Loop in the sixth round, the Ravens became the most recent NFL team to draft a kicker. Every other team had done so at least once in the past, except them.
While drafting kickers is rare—it happens roughly 1-3 times per year—being a draft pick doesn’t guarantee success. But teams don’t draft a kicker unless they see an obvious need, or the potential for one. At the very least, the Ravens put Justin Tucker on notice and then some.
“We kind of felt like we had to draft” Loop, Ravens GM Eric DeCosta said, without referencing Tucker. But clearly they never feel like they had to draft a kicker before. He claimed that he had not given much consideration to his All-Pro kicker’s roster spot, but that beggars belief.
Of course the Ravens are thinking about Justin Tucker, but it’s not just because of a potential suspension looming. Facing numerous allegations of sexual misconduct, he is currently under investigation by the NFL. But the team’s bigger concern, actually, is his performance.
As the Ravens continue to turn their unwritten zero-tolerance policy into confetti, they have to figure out what’s going on with Justin Tucker. He fell off a cliff last season, posting a 73.3-percent success rate on field goals. It dropped him below 90 percent for his career, as he bled his own blood. Now, five of his eight misses were from 50-plus yards, but 50-yarders are no longer a barrier. In fact, 2024 marked the most historic season for long-range kicking in NFL history.
So never mind the fact that the Ravens might not even have temporary availability for Justin Tucker. The bigger question is whether they would even want him on the field for performance reasons. After drafting Mike Green, they can’t pretend to claim the moral high ground anymore.
During his first decade in the NFL, Tucker made 91.1 percent of his field goals. He rightly earned praise as the greatest kicker in NFL history, with Hall of Fame chatter looming—exceedingly rare for a specialist. He went 100-for-111 from 40-49 and 48-for-66 from 50-plus, and was virtually automatic inside 40.
Over the past three years, however, Tucker has not been the same player, and it has cost the Ravens some games. He has just an 82.7-percent success rate, going 20-for-25 from 40-49 and 16-for-30 from 50-plus. And yet he has been perfect from inside 40 in that span. Of his eight career missed extra points, half of them have come since 2022.
And now the Ravens have Tyler Loop in addition to Justin Tucker after they were active in scouting kicker, purely, of course, by coincidence. Now, Loop will have to earn the job, of course—unless Tucker is suspended—but he’s a Raven for a reason. That reason is because Tucker is no longer the man we thought he was, on and (allegedly) off the field.
