[Baltimore Sun] What’s wrong with Ravens kicker Justin Tucker?
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Most would remember NFL kicker Matt Stover for an enduring career that spanned 19 years, mostly with the Ravens, and in 2000 saw him help them to their first Super Bowl title. It was in that season that Baltimore failed to score an offensive touchdown in five straight games but won two of them on the right leg of its All-Pro, who went on to lead the league in attempts and makes during the regular season and booted the game-winner against the Tennessee Titans in the divisional round of the playoffs.
But “Automatic Stover,” as Ravens legend and Pro Football Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Lewis dubbed him, wasn’t always so.
Over Stover’s first three years in Baltimore from 1996 through 1999, he made just 75.9% of his field goals. That included missing his last five attempts of the 1997 season and three more in the 1998 opener. Former coach Brian Billick also once chased him down the sideline in front of his teammates, demanding to know if he could just make the next kick.
Current Ravens kicker Justin Tucker has yet to endure such discomfiture from current coach John Harbaugh, but he has sunken to a similar level of struggle.
In the Ravens’ four losses this season, Tucker has missed five field goals. That included failing to convert a 56-yarder in a 3-point loss to the Las Vegas Raiders in Week 2 and missing from 47 and 50 yards in Sunday’s ugly 18-16 defeat against the Steelers in Pittsburgh.
Through 11 games, his six misses are already one more than all of last season and with one more miss he will tie his career high, which came in 2015 when he connected on 33 of 40 attempts.
“Certainly haven’t lost any confidence in Justin Tucker,” Harbaugh said Monday, adding that he has no plans to bring in any competition for the job. “He’s definitely our best option, and he’s going to make a lot of kicks – I really believe that – going forward.”
Tucker, who turns 35 on Thursday and has slipped from the most accurate kicker in league history to second, believes that as well.
“I’m still confident I’m going to go out there and nail every single kick,” he said following Sunday’s game. “Part of the way we stay confident is by continuing to work and trust the process. I might sound like a broken record, but it’s a part of what brings us success — is just trusting the process and then taking it one kick at a time.”
But as uneasiness grows among the fan base, there is at least some reason to believe and not fret.
For one, none of Tucker’s misses (53, 56, 46, 50, 47 and 50 yards) have come up short — all have been wide left. For another, history.
Some of the best kickers of all-time have overcome periods of turbulence in otherwise long and fruitful careers, including Stover, who bounced back to make 83.8% of his 563 career attempts and landed in the Ravens Ring of Honor.
He did so by going back to fundamentals. Sometimes, that meant praying to remind himself that he would be OK no matter what happened on the field. Sometimes, it meant figuring out with his wife how to reduce some stresses of home life. Sometimes, it meant reviewing his kicking journals to see what worked in previous seasons.
“I had to work through a lot. I had to overcome bad performance. It’s part of the game,” Stover said. “The desire to want that ball is the No. 1 trait a kicker has to have. I always worked myself back into that mode after I had a poor performance. It didn’t make that next kick easy. In fact, it was a bit more difficult. But I wasn’t running from it. I jumped right back into the fire, and that’s how I handled it emotionally.”
Others turned to outside help.
Morten Andersen’s Hall of Fame career spanned a quarter century, mostly with the New Orleans Saints, and he connected on the second-most field goals in history. But the “Great Dane” — Andersen was born in Copenhagen — wasn’t always great.
Just three seasons after being the NFL’s best kicker in terms of accuracy in 1986, when he made 26 of 30 attempts and missed just one from inside 50 yards, he was one of the worst.
In his eighth season and just two years removed from a league-high 28 field goals made, Andersen connected on only 20 of 29 kicks for what ended up being a career-low 69% (minimum 20 attempts), which ranked in the bottom third in the league that year. Five other times, he failed to crack 75%.
Which is why early in his career he tapped sports psychologist Dr. John Silva to help him out of a funk.
“It didn’t take that long after we started working to straighten a few things out,” Silva, an emeritus professor of sports psychology at the University of North Carolina, recalled. “We had to tighten up Morten’s routine and get him really disciplined that no matter what happens, make or miss, he stayed steadfastly with his preparation routine on the sidelines and with the routine he used on the field. We took away the mystique about different distances.”
Silva advised Andersen and other clients to put “situational” confidence — the elation felt after a made kick or the devastation from a miss — in their back pockets and instead focus on “dispositional” confidence, a belief in their abilities over the long haul.
“You’re only as good as your last kick; that’s such nonsense to be honest with you,” Silva said, arguing against an “old-fashioned” method of motivational thinking that he considers damaging to elite athletes.
Silva doesn’t know Tucker but said he would advise him not to mess with his technique or let in too many outside voices.
“His skill and routine have gotten him this far in his career,” he said. “The worst thing he could do now is start fooling around with it in season. … I would imagine he’s going to come out of this slump. I worked with a lot of place kickers. If they’re good and they have long careers, they all go through some period of time where things aren’t exactly right for them.”
Varying examples abound, present and past.
Before Raiders kicker Daniel Carlson went on to become one of the most accurate kickers in NFL history, his entree into the league was abruptly interrupted. A fifth-round pick by the Minnesota Vikings in 2017, he beat out veteran Kai Forbath for the starting job only to promptly miss three field goals, including two in overtime, in a Week 2 game against the Green Bay Packers that ended in a 29-29 tie.
He was waived the next day and replaced by Dan Bailey.
“I think most of it was just technical things,” Carlson told AL.com in 2018. “Things that I had known about and wanted to improve for quite some time, even before my senior year of college at Auburn, I wanted to work on some things, but just was kind of too close to the season that I didn’t want to make those adjustments.
“So there were adjustments that needed to be made before I obviously got to that, that technically would have helped me out a lot. And so, you know, of course I got cut, and I actually was able to make those adjustments after. That is kind of one of the bright side of things, silver lining is that I was finally able to make those adjustments that I needed to for a long time. You don’t have a lot of time off after your senior season of college.”
Two months after being fired by the Vikings, Carlson hit three field goals for the Raiders in a 23-21 victory over the Arizona Cardinals, including the game-winner as time expired.
He went on to make all but one of his field goals that season and his 94.1% set a then-franchise record, a mark he eclipsed by converting on 33 of 35 attempts (94.3%) in 2020.
“I learned a couple things,” Carlson said. “I think it was a little bit of redemption from that. And just to kind of have that feeling, ‘OK, I’m confident again, I’m back to where I wanted to be back then.’”
Former longtime kicker Gary Anderson, who played for the Steelers from 1982 to 1994 and the Vikings from 1998 to 2002, along with four other teams, likewise wasn’t immune in a career that lasted over two decades.
Though he was a two-time All-Pro, four-time Pro Bowl selection and ranks third in games played (353), points scored (2,434) and field goals made, he is perhaps most often remembered for a kick that he missed.
In 1998, Minnesota went 15-1 and Anderson became the first kicker to convert every field goal and extra point during the regular season and had connected on 122 straight kicks. But in the NFC championship game at home against the Atlanta Falcons, he missed a 39-yarder with 2:11 remaining that would’ve given the Vikings a 10-point lead. Instead of Minnesota playing in its fifth Super Bowl and first since the 1976 season, the Falcons tied the game then won in overtime — with Andersen, the former Saint, knocking in a 38-yard field goal for the victory.
The losing Anderson, meanwhile, went into a tailspin the next season, making just 19 of 30 field goals with his 63.3% a career low. But the following year he rebounded by converting on 22 of 23 attempts and over the final four seasons of his career he never missed fewer than 77.3% of his field goals.
“It certainly was difficult,” Anderson told the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 2019 on the 20-year anniversary of the painful memory. “I took tremendous pride throughout my career about being the one guy on the team that everyone could count on in a critical situation and that time, that particular kick, I missed the kick. So, yeah, that was certainly a difficult thing to deal with.”
“I always had an understanding that as a field-goal kicker, part of your job description is you’re kind of the most visible guy out there,’’ he said. “That’s just the nature of the job. As hard as you try to make all your kicks, you’re not going to make them all. Unfortunately, sometimes you’re going to miss a very important kick. You’d be in dream land if you’d think everything was going to be rosy all the time.”
And that’s why there is still plenty of belief in Tucker, from the man himself to those in the building to those who have been in his shoes.
“What’s going on with Justin is very micro,” Stover said. “It could be a technique thing he’s fighting through. You kick great all week and then you get out there and your heart rate gets up a little bit and you try a little too hard. You try a little harder and you attack it too much. You ask a lot of golfers. You’ve got to get comfortable in your skin and just hit it easy.
“Justin has set a standard that’s never been seen in the NFL. Who am I to say he’s not going to work out of it? Of course he is.”
Baltimore Sun reporter Childs Walker contributed to this story. Have a news tip? Contact Brian Wacker at bwacker@baltsun.com, 410-332-6200 and x.com/brianwacker1.
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