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How Justin Tucker Became the Greatest Kicker in N.F.L. History

https://nyti.ms/3KvwhuN

Nice write up by the NYT.

The confidence, persistence, and all-out obsession required to play the least understood position on the field.

By Wil S. Hylton

Published Aug. 31, 2022Updated Sept. 1, 2022

Justin Tucker felt off. It was Sept. 26, 2021, and he was standing on the turf at Ford Field in Detroit for the third game of his 10th season as a place-kicker for the Baltimore Ravens. The game was almost over, and the Ravens had all but lost. Unless, with three seconds left on the clock, Tucker could boot the ball through the yellow uprights 66 yards downfield — a longer field goal than anyone had ever kicked in the N.F.L.

The distance wasn’t a problem for Tucker. Or anyway, it shouldn’t have been. Tucker had kicked hundreds of balls farther than 66 yards. On game days, he began his warm-up by testing the strength of his leg in a series of increasingly long kicks. He never knew how far he could make it. Some days, he would blast it through from 75 yards. Others, he couldn’t break 70. But 66 was not, for Tucker, a lot of yards. “Typically, from 65, I’m able to get it there,” he says.

Except this wasn’t a typical day. All through warm-ups, Tucker had been struggling for distance. One by one, every kick fell short of 65 yards. “I just didn’t feel quite right from the moment I got out on the field,” he says. “So when we’re looking at a 66-yard field goal, I knew I was going to have to just find something a little bit extra.”

As Tucker jogged onto the field, he saw his snapper, Nick Moore, setting up at the line of scrimmage. His holder, Sam Koch, was seven yards back, where he would pin the ball for the kick. Tucker and Koch had been working together for a decade. They spoke a common language, but there was little to say now. Each knew that Tucker was having a weak day, and neither felt confident. They crouched briefly on the field, and Koch put a loose piece of turf back in place, then Tucker hopped on it with both feet to make sure the spot was flat. He tapped a toe to indicate exactly where he wanted the ball, then he started pacing away to prepare for the kick.

Tucker knew he couldn’t rely on his usual field-goal technique. He and Koch had spent years practicing it to millimetric precision, but if it wasn’t going the distance in warm-up, he couldn’t risk it with the game on the line. To gain more power, he would have to make changes. He decided to make several. He would set up in a new position, jog to the ball at a different cadence and rotate his hip so far through the swing that he would have to land on the wrong foot. Tucker had no idea whether it would work, but he knew it was the best chance to win the game.

He picked a new starting point and took a deep breath. Then he nodded for the snap and bolted forward, reaching the ball just as Koch pinned it to the ground. Tucker planted his left foot by the ball and bent his knee, leaning hard to the left as his right leg swooped down and his foot walloped the ball with everything he had.

Usually, Tucker knew at the moment of impact whether a kick was good. This time, it was anyone’s guess. He watched along with the rest of the crowd as the ball soared downfield, dropping quickly as it approached the end zone. Then he saw it smack into the crossbar and shoot vertically into the air. Tucker heard the boink, but it was impossible to tell from midfield whether the ball had bounced back toward him or forward through the goal posts. Then he spotted a firefighter who worked for the Ravens standing at the end of the field. “I saw Avon go like this,” Tucker says, raising his arms to signal a good kick, “and it all kind of came together — first, like, ‘Holy [expletive], we won!’ and then, ‘We broke the record!’”

Tucker streaked down the field as the stadium roared. His teammates hoisted him into the air, and broadcasters bellowed in disbelief. “Did that just happen?” the announcer Adam Archuleta cried on CBS. “I’ve never seen anything like it!” The kick would be played and replayed endlessly on sports channels and social media, with pundits declaring it “a thing of destiny” and “one of the greatest plays in N.F.L. history.” By the end of the season, it was still reverberating in recaps and highlight reels, and in February, the N.F.L. declared it the “Best Moment of the Year.” But in all the hype and celebration, something curious stood out: Almost no one seemed to realize that Tucker had changed his kick.

You can pretty much always start an argument by declaring someone the greatest of all time, but the case for Tucker is becoming hard to dispute. One week after his 66-yard boink set the distance record, he broke another by making his 300th field goal in fewer games than anyone in history. Tucker also holds the N.F.L. record for accuracy. Since his rookie year in 2012, he has made 91.1 percent of his field-goal attempts, and over the past decade, he has scored an average of 136 points per year — which is more than any other player, in any position, ever. When the Ravens announced last month that Tucker’s contract would be extended through 2027, precisely no one was surprised that his $24 million deal was the largest ever given to a kicker.

Even so, like any kicker, Tucker occupies an awkward position. Kicking is the most consequential and least understood aspect of the sport. Place-kickers often lead their teams in scoring — 49 of the 50 highest-scoring players in history have been kickers — and they tend to be called to the field in their teams’ most critical moments: trailing by a point or two, with seconds left on the clock and miles of green to go. Every fan in every city can remember some harrowing game when all was lost until their place-kicker trotted out. Yet even the most ardent fan rarely knows much about kicking itself. Something peculiar happens at the sports bar when a place-kicker takes the field: All the granular nit-picking and arcane hairsplitting over the performance of other players will suddenly dissolve in a childlike hush of please God let him make it.

Partly, that’s because a kick happens so fast. Even on a 70-inch screen in slo-mo, the kicker is little more than a blur. But mostly, it’s because kicking has nothing in common with the rest of football. Sure, the beginning of a field-goal attempt resembles a normal play: Each team gathers at the line of scrimmage to lunge forward at the snap. But the crush of bodies almost never affects the kick itself. By the time the first lineman wraps a meaty paw around another, the ball is already sailing to the holder, and in the space of 1.3 seconds, it’s hurtling toward the uprights. For the kicker, those 1.3 seconds may as well be another game. Unlike a quarterback — reading the coverage, searching for targets, scrambling to avoid a Watt brother — the place-kicker has nothing to gain by watching the field. His job is not to anticipate the opposition or back up his teammates. It is to enter a kind of trance, as if he were the last man on earth, and perform a complex choreography of his own.

Tucker at a practice in August. The exaggerated skipping motion of his follow-through was inspired by the place-kicker Stephen Gostkowski.Credit...Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

The details of that choreography are specific to his body. He has spent the bulk of his adult life searching for ways to improve them: adjusting his angle of approach to the ball, tinkering with the timing of each step, perfecting the orientation of his plant foot and making fractional changes to the arc and trajectory of his swing. He has considered the effect of a three-degree increase in the rotation of his hip on the backswing. He has trained the joints of his leg to move in opposite directions simultaneously, so his thigh can begin its advance toward the ball while his knee is still drawing back. He has carefully calibrated the sequence of his proximal-to-distal movements to exploit the kinematic potential of his own proportions.

None of this is unique to the football kicker. The biomechanical exactitude would be familiar to a dancer or figure skater, and the incongruous interlude of a field goal has echoes in other sports — like a penalty kick in soccer or a free throw in basketball. What’s odd is how little a field goal has in common with football. Penalty kicks and free throws, after all, highlight a fundamental skill of their game. A field goal flips the fundamentals of football on their head. It interrupts a throwing game to let everything ride on a kick. It replaces the elegance of a spiral pass with tumbling, end-over-end rotation. It turns the spectacle of 22 bodies competing in coordinated combat into an extraneous sideshow for one player’s solitary performance. That is to say, what’s remarkable is not only the kick itself but that it happens in the middle of a football game, with the outcome on the line and 17 million people watching in terrified anticipation — most of whom have no idea what the kicker is actually doing.

Growing up in the Westlake suburbs of Austin, Texas, Tucker lived on a cul-de-sac at the bottom of a hill teeming with kids his age. On any given afternoon, they might race through the streets on bikes and scooters or throw together an impromptu ballgame on the massive lawn across the street. Even then, Tucker was consumed by an almost cartoonish need to win. That was clear from the age of 4, when his parents enrolled him in a youth soccer league. “I remember losing a game and just crying my eyes out — being so pissed off, and mad, and upset, and sad and devastated,” he says. “And I remember my mom and dad both having to console me, like: ‘Hey, man, it’s just a game! You guys are 4, it’s OK!’”

But Tucker’s intensity kept growing. At 10, he was accepted by a competitive club team and began traveling for games. “I remember making the team and realizing, Man, these other kids are pretty good,” he says, “but I want to be the best!” Tucker practiced constantly. He was forever dribbling a ball through the house, battering the baseboards and smudging the walls as he raced from room to room. By the time he entered middle school, his obsessive focus was developing a sharp edge. “I was probably a jerk,” Tucker says, “chewing other kids out for lack of effort. There were two or three of us who really wanted to win, but I was the one who vocalized it — and not in the most positive way. I’d be crushing other kids, and then their parents would be like, to my parents, ‘Hey, you need to get that under control!’”

As Tucker recalls this, he is neither self-conscious nor especially regretful. “I’m wired a certain way,” he says. But Tucker also went through a deeply traumatic experience that may have accelerated his ferocious drive in those years. One day in fifth grade, a teacher gathered his class to break the news that one of their classmates had been in a tragic accident. He was traveling with his mother and sister on a small plane that his stepfather was piloting. There were complications in landing, the teacher explained, and no one survived. Tucker burst into tears. The student was his best friend. He left the room and was followed by a teacher, who tried to comfort him until his mother arrived.

Looking back, Tucker says he was lucky to be surrounded by family and friends. “I could always talk to somebody,” he says. “I could talk to my parents, I could talk to my sisters, I could talk to my teachers.” But mostly, he didn’t. “A lot of the processing I did at that point in time was on my own,” he says. “It was, you know. ...” His voice trails off. “I think I’ll just leave it at that.”

Over the past decade, Tucker has scored an average of 136 points per year — which is more than any other player, in any position, ever.Credit...Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

At least two changes in Tucker’s life seemed to emerge from the loss of his friend. One was his longtime fantasy of becoming a pilot. His mother’s father was an Air Force veteran who flew missions over Vietnam, and Tucker had been fascinated by his stories, and by aircraft in general, since the age of 7. There was a framed poster above his bed showing the cockpit of a 737, but the dream of flight would fade. The tragedy also gave Tucker a heightened sense of urgency. He was acutely, if prematurely, aware that life is fleeting and more determined than ever to make his own exceptional. “To have an existential crisis at 11 years old — and not now, at 32 — is kind of strange and serendipitous,” he says.

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If Tucker’s amplified intensity was alien to his soccer teammates, it was the prevailing spirit of Texas football. Although he joined his first team at the comparatively doddering age of 13, he instantly felt at home in the punishing fraternal culture. “I loved how guys would be yelling at each other, and pissed off and fired up and excited and pumped, all at the same time,” he says. By the end of his first season, in eighth grade, Tucker was playing half a dozen positions — including kicker, at which he thrived.

Tucker’s local high school, Westlake, happened to be one of the country’s premier football programs and a breeding ground for N.F.L. stars, including Drew Brees. Tucker made the varsity team in his sophomore year, playing alongside future pros like the quarterback Nick Foles, the tight end Kyle Adams and the linebacker Bryce Hager. Even so, Tucker stood out. By the fall of his junior year, he was being scouted by colleges, and in February, he accepted a scholarship to kick for the University of Texas. But Tucker couldn’t bear to wait through another year of high school, so he spent the summer taking classes at Austin Community College, earning enough credits to graduate a semester early and become a Longhorn in January. “I was like, I’m going to get there as quickly as I can,” he says. “The more I can do before the football season starts, the better chance I have to play on Week 1.”

Tucker didn’t just play on Week 1. He was on the field for every game over the next four years. As a freshman, he kicked off 94 times, for an average distance of 64.5 yards. As a sophomore, he kicked off 99 times, averaging 62.3 yards, and he completed 43 punts with an average distance of more than 40 yards. Tucker finally got the chance to kick field goals as a junior, making 23 of 27 attempts. By the time he smacked a game-winning field goal against the team’s bitter rival, Texas A&M, in his senior year, it was starting to look as if a pro career was more likely than not. In early 2012, he declared for the N.F.L. draft and posted a video clip online that showed him making 10 consecutive field goals from multiple points on the field. At the end, he walked by the camera, saying only, “Pick me.”

A few days before the draft, Tucker received a visit from Jerry Rosburg, the special-teams coordinator for the Ravens, who took him to breakfast and watched him practice for nearly an hour. By the time Rosburg left, it was clear that he was impressed, and Tucker knew that the team’s kicker, Billy Cundiff, was coming off a weak year. He had missed an easy field goal in the final seconds of the A.F.C. championship game, bringing the Ravens’ 2011 season to a sudden and bitter end. But Tucker also knew the odds of being drafted as a place-kicker were long. Only one had been selected the previous year, and none the year before.

In the last week of April, he watched the agonizing ordeal of player selection. It was a good year for kickers: four were selected. Justin Tucker wasn’t one.

A field-goal attempt can be broken down into about half a dozen parts. There’s the setup, when a kicker paces from the ball to a starting position a few yards back. There’s the approach, as he jogs toward it in two or three accelerating steps. There’s the plant, when he lands his nonkicking foot a few inches from the ball, and the backswing, when he draws his leg back with a bend at the knee before unloading into the kick. Finally, there’s the follow-through, as his foot continues past the ball. Each of these movements has its own set of customs and conventions, but none are obligatory, and most kicking coaches encourage players to experiment on their own.

That’s because anybody who’s serious about kicking knows that nobody knows that much. At a basic geometric level, the shape of a football is weird. It can be formally described as a “prolate spheroid,” which is another way of saying that it looks like a regular ball getting sucked into a vacuum hose. Scientists have been studying the aerodynamics of spherical objects for centuries, but experiments on the American football are comparatively rare, and the scientific literature on tumbling footballs is basically a couple of dissertations and a handful of obscure papers.

“The reason not many people have looked into it is because it’s a very hard problem,” says Timothy Gay, a professor of physics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, whose book “Football Physics” touches on kicking. “The tumbling ball is much tougher to model than a spiral pass.” For one thing, by rotating end over end, the ball is constantly changing how much of its surface meets wind resistance. For another, rotation itself can affect a ball’s trajectory, which is how baseball pitchers use spin to throw a curveball. But calculating that “Magnus effect” is substantially more difficult on a misshapen ball, particularly if it’s not only tumbling but also wobbling side to side.

In the absence of scholarly research, kickers conduct their own. Their focus is not the football, per se, but how subtle changes in a kick affect it. The average N.F.L. place-kicker may not be able to tell you exactly how many millimeters below the ball’s centerline is the best place to strike for distance, or precisely what angle his foot should be rising from the grass at the moment of impact, but setting aside the numerical values, of course he knows. He has made hundreds of kicks with thousands of variations to develop his kicking technique, adjusting dozens of details in each part of the process, and dozens more within those — how far away to set up, how quickly to take each step of the approach, how close to plant the nonkicking foot, how far back to cock the kicking leg. Once the kicker has found his method, consistency is crucial. The smallest shift in one movement will carry into the next, magnifying with each step until things go literally sideways.

All of which is to say that being a place-kicker requires more than power and coordination. Obviously, it helps to have plenty of both, and Tucker always has. “He had that type of leg — you could see the leg speed, and how the ball came off his foot like an explosion,” says Doug Blevins, a kicking coach who worked with Tucker while he was in high school. But Blevins also trained several other great kickers — including Adam Vinatieri, David Akers and Olindo Mare — and what distinguished them was not just physical ability but a strange combination of opposing psychological traits. On one hand, a kicker needs extreme confidence. “He wants to be in that situation where it all depends on him,” Blevins says. “All great kickers bring a certain amount of arrogance to the table.” And yet to perfect a kick requires an almost inexhaustible reserve of humility and patience as they subject themselves to an endless barrage of punctilious criticism and microscopic correction. “If I had to point to one thing as most important,” Blevins says, “that’s it.”

“He had that type of leg,” a kicking coach that worked with Tucker in High School says, “you could see the leg speed, and how the ball came off his foot like an explosion.”Credit...Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

Looking back, Tucker understands why he wasn’t selected in the 2012 draft. Although he practiced tirelessly, the university had no dedicated kicking coach, and he had reached the limit of what he could teach himself. “I would have been maybe — and this is a big maybe — an 80 percent kicker in the N.F.L., which simply doesn’t cut it for a team with Super Bowl aspirations,” he says.

But Tucker got another chance. Just minutes after the final pick in the draft, his cellphone rang. It was Jerry Rosburg, the Ravens coach who had come to see him work out. Rosburg hadn’t been able to persuade the team’s management to use a draft pick on a kicker, but he invited Tucker to attend their rookie camp as an unsigned free agent. If the other coaches saw what Rosburg had seen, there was a chance they would sign him.

Tucker flew to Baltimore in May. On his first day, he kicked a 55-yard field goal that got the attention of everyone on the field. At the end of his second day, Rosburg called him into a meeting with the team’s kicking consultant, Randy Brown — who spent the next two and a half hours playing video of Tucker’s performance and pointing out everything he did wrong.

“His evaluation was essentially that I was not consistent enough in my set up,” Tucker says. “I was at too wide of an angle at the top of my stance, and I was taking my steps with only my plant spot in mind — as opposed to giving the spot of the ball equal consideration.” As the meeting wound down, Tucker promised to follow Brown’s advice, but privately, it made him nervous to reconstruct his technique in the middle of training camp. “I asked them at the end of the meeting for a little grace while I’m trying to figure this out,” he says. “Like, can you guys bear with me tomorrow, and don’t get rid of me if the ball’s not coming off my foot exactly how I want it? And they essentially said, ‘Yeah ... but no.’”

The next day Tucker returned to the field with a knot in his stomach, but he set up for his first kick as Brown suggested. “And the first ball comes off my foot like a rocket, and then the next one and the next,” he says. “I just felt like I had command over the ball, something every kicker chases.” Tucker made every kick that day. Over the next few days, he made kicks like he had only imagined. By the time he returned home, he wanted a position with the Ravens more than ever. They were one of the only N.F.L. teams with a designated kicking specialist, and he was eager to find out how much more Brown could teach him. For the next two weeks, Tucker waited to hear from the Ravens. He turned down offers to practice with two other teams. He knew it was a gamble, but he was determined to kick for Brown. Finally, the call arrived, and he was offered a spot on the Ravens’ preseason roster. That would allow him to participate in the four preseason games, but either he or Cundiff was likely to be cut when the season began and the roster tightened. Tucker accepted the offer and returned to Baltimore, making six of seven field goals that he attempted in those games, including two of 50 yards or more. At the end of the month, the team announced that Tucker, not Cundiff, was staying.

Fans in Baltimore were stunned. In The Sun, the columnist Kevin Cowherd insisted that it was a mistake to “go into the new season with a rookie kicker,” questioning whether Tucker would be able to perform under pressure. “I have this image in my mind: Ravens vs. Pittsburgh Steelers,” he wrote. “National TV audience tuned in. Ravens line up for a field-goal attempt with the game on the line. Welcome to the N.F.L., Justin Tucker.”

Tucker would make 90.9 percent of his field-goal attempts that year, including four against the Steelers; one that clinched the divisional round of the playoffs in double overtime against the Broncos; and two in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, which the Ravens won by three points. He also finished the season with a perfect record for extra points — a streak that would continue for the next five seasons, as Tucker rose to the top of the league.

It’s easy to look back on that rise as if it were preordained, an inevitable result of incomparable but inexplicable talent. In fact, what has distinguished Tucker from his first day with the Ravens is a relentless effort to get better. He has kept tinkering with his technique, week after week and season after season, as if he were still a rookie gunning for a spot on the team. Most of that tinkering is nearly undetectable. Even legendary N.F.L. kickers are sometimes astonished by his consistency. “He’s the most in-rhythm kicker that I’ve ever seen,” says Stephen Gostkowski, a former place-kicker for the New England Patriots. “He’s got the muscle memory to do the same thing every time. The guy is just absolutely amazing.”

Yet Tucker is also always searching for small ways to drive the ball a hair farther or straighter or more reliably down the middle. In a pinch, he will tear down and rebuild parts of his technique entirely. When he finished the 2015 season with a disappointing record on long-distance field goals, he stewed and simmered, then immersed himself in footage of Gostkowski, who seemed to be making them all. “Stephen was absolutely outperforming me,” he says, “and his style was unique at the time.”

Most kickers try to slow down their leg after striking the ball to avoid being thrown off balance. Some allow their leg to maintain just enough speed to lift them slightly off the ground, so their plant foot briefly skims the grass before landing a couple inches forward. Gostkowski took that skipping motion to a level approaching satire — after striking the ball, his leg continued forward with such velocity that it launched his body into the air, forcing him to hop several feet downfield before he regained balance.

In his warm-up for practice the next day, Tucker attempted his first kick in a half-joking imitation. “Running through the kick, just totally exaggerated,” he says. He watched the ball pop off his foot with shocking speed, rocketing toward the uprights and smashing into a camera pole positioned directly at the center. He made three more kicks the same way. All three hit the pole. “So the first attempt I had that day with the team present was a 64-yarder,” he says, “and I just applied this new technique, the Gostkowski technique, and I don’t think I’d ever hit a ball as far in my life.” In the coming season, Tucker would use the skipping technique for every kick, missing just one of 39 field goal attempts to end the year at the top of the league, with a field-goal percentage of 97.4 percent.

Tucker has been skipping through his kicks ever since, but more important, so have countless other players at every level of the sport. A technique that even Tucker found comically eccentric has, in part through Tucker’s prominence, already become respectable. One kicking manual published last year, Eric Piccione’s “The Art of Kicking,” recommended “a Justin Tucker skip-through to ensure you’re getting downfield.”

But if Tucker’s tinkering with technique has helped to change the sport, it has also given him a unique range of options on any given play. That’s what made his record-setting 66-yard field goal possible — not the innate strength of his leg or the meticulous method that he has developed for field goals. On a day when everything felt off and his usual technique wasn’t delivering distance, he could tinker some more and cobble together a new kick on the fly. It was, he says, a hybrid approach, with elements that he normally uses for a kickoff. “So I took an extra half a step back into my stance, and I took a little crow hop into the ball, and a combination of divine intervention, adrenaline, technique that we had practiced for more than a decade, all came together in that moment.”

He said this on a blustery morning at the Ravens Training Facility a few weeks later, gazing through a bank of windows at the howling wind. Practice was about to begin, and he was eager to get outside. Tucker insists on testing his leg in all conditions: If the field is slick with ice and snow, or the sky is black with driving rain, he will drag his snapper and holder outside to see if they can beat the weather.

Today, as he suited up in the locker room, a scrum of reporters was milling around. They circled from player to player, asking detailed questions and nodding intently at the usual insipid answers: ball down the field, 110 percent, one play at a time. Tucker stood by his locker at the far end of the room and watched the commotion as he strapped on the last of his gear. Practice would start in less than a minute, but the reporters showed no sign of leaving.

Tucker waited a few minutes longer, then pulled out a four-foot length of PVC drain pipe that was stashed by his locker. He raised the end to his mouth and, with the embouchure of a trombonist, unleashed a deafening wail. The room fell silent, but only for a moment. When the chattering resumed, he blew the makeshift horn again, and then again a few seconds later. Tucker kept blowing the horn until the last reporter gave up and shuffled out. Then he returned the pipe to its hideaway and did what he has always done. Tucker got back to work.

Wil S. Hylton is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote for the magazine about masculinity and violence.

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How Justin Tucker Became the Greatest Kicker in N.F.L. History https://nyti.ms/3KvwhuN Nice write up by the NYT. The confidence, persistence, and all-out obsession required to play the least under

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They are probably waiting for the first home game against aggy.

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Pretty damn good person …..  

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7 hours ago, Orale said:

How Justin Tucker Became the Greatest Kicker in N.F.L. History

https://nyti.ms/3KvwhuN

Nice write up by the NYT.

The confidence, persistence, and all-out obsession required to play the least understood position on the field.

By Wil S. Hylton

Published Aug. 31, 2022Updated Sept. 1, 2022

Justin Tucker felt off. It was Sept. 26, 2021, and he was standing on the turf at Ford Field in Detroit for the third game of his 10th season as a place-kicker for the Baltimore Ravens. The game was almost over, and the Ravens had all but lost. Unless, with three seconds left on the clock, Tucker could boot the ball through the yellow uprights 66 yards downfield — a longer field goal than anyone had ever kicked in the N.F.L.

The distance wasn’t a problem for Tucker. Or anyway, it shouldn’t have been. Tucker had kicked hundreds of balls farther than 66 yards. On game days, he began his warm-up by testing the strength of his leg in a series of increasingly long kicks. He never knew how far he could make it. Some days, he would blast it through from 75 yards. Others, he couldn’t break 70. But 66 was not, for Tucker, a lot of yards. “Typically, from 65, I’m able to get it there,” he says.

Except this wasn’t a typical day. All through warm-ups, Tucker had been struggling for distance. One by one, every kick fell short of 65 yards. “I just didn’t feel quite right from the moment I got out on the field,” he says. “So when we’re looking at a 66-yard field goal, I knew I was going to have to just find something a little bit extra.”

As Tucker jogged onto the field, he saw his snapper, Nick Moore, setting up at the line of scrimmage. His holder, Sam Koch, was seven yards back, where he would pin the ball for the kick. Tucker and Koch had been working together for a decade. They spoke a common language, but there was little to say now. Each knew that Tucker was having a weak day, and neither felt confident. They crouched briefly on the field, and Koch put a loose piece of turf back in place, then Tucker hopped on it with both feet to make sure the spot was flat. He tapped a toe to indicate exactly where he wanted the ball, then he started pacing away to prepare for the kick.

Tucker knew he couldn’t rely on his usual field-goal technique. He and Koch had spent years practicing it to millimetric precision, but if it wasn’t going the distance in warm-up, he couldn’t risk it with the game on the line. To gain more power, he would have to make changes. He decided to make several. He would set up in a new position, jog to the ball at a different cadence and rotate his hip so far through the swing that he would have to land on the wrong foot. Tucker had no idea whether it would work, but he knew it was the best chance to win the game.

He picked a new starting point and took a deep breath. Then he nodded for the snap and bolted forward, reaching the ball just as Koch pinned it to the ground. Tucker planted his left foot by the ball and bent his knee, leaning hard to the left as his right leg swooped down and his foot walloped the ball with everything he had.

Usually, Tucker knew at the moment of impact whether a kick was good. This time, it was anyone’s guess. He watched along with the rest of the crowd as the ball soared downfield, dropping quickly as it approached the end zone. Then he saw it smack into the crossbar and shoot vertically into the air. Tucker heard the boink, but it was impossible to tell from midfield whether the ball had bounced back toward him or forward through the goal posts. Then he spotted a firefighter who worked for the Ravens standing at the end of the field. “I saw Avon go like this,” Tucker says, raising his arms to signal a good kick, “and it all kind of came together — first, like, ‘Holy [expletive], we won!’ and then, ‘We broke the record!’”

Tucker streaked down the field as the stadium roared. His teammates hoisted him into the air, and broadcasters bellowed in disbelief. “Did that just happen?” the announcer Adam Archuleta cried on CBS. “I’ve never seen anything like it!” The kick would be played and replayed endlessly on sports channels and social media, with pundits declaring it “a thing of destiny” and “one of the greatest plays in N.F.L. history.” By the end of the season, it was still reverberating in recaps and highlight reels, and in February, the N.F.L. declared it the “Best Moment of the Year.” But in all the hype and celebration, something curious stood out: Almost no one seemed to realize that Tucker had changed his kick.

You can pretty much always start an argument by declaring someone the greatest of all time, but the case for Tucker is becoming hard to dispute. One week after his 66-yard boink set the distance record, he broke another by making his 300th field goal in fewer games than anyone in history. Tucker also holds the N.F.L. record for accuracy. Since his rookie year in 2012, he has made 91.1 percent of his field-goal attempts, and over the past decade, he has scored an average of 136 points per year — which is more than any other player, in any position, ever. When the Ravens announced last month that Tucker’s contract would be extended through 2027, precisely no one was surprised that his $24 million deal was the largest ever given to a kicker.

Even so, like any kicker, Tucker occupies an awkward position. Kicking is the most consequential and least understood aspect of the sport. Place-kickers often lead their teams in scoring — 49 of the 50 highest-scoring players in history have been kickers — and they tend to be called to the field in their teams’ most critical moments: trailing by a point or two, with seconds left on the clock and miles of green to go. Every fan in every city can remember some harrowing game when all was lost until their place-kicker trotted out. Yet even the most ardent fan rarely knows much about kicking itself. Something peculiar happens at the sports bar when a place-kicker takes the field: All the granular nit-picking and arcane hairsplitting over the performance of other players will suddenly dissolve in a childlike hush of please God let him make it.

Partly, that’s because a kick happens so fast. Even on a 70-inch screen in slo-mo, the kicker is little more than a blur. But mostly, it’s because kicking has nothing in common with the rest of football. Sure, the beginning of a field-goal attempt resembles a normal play: Each team gathers at the line of scrimmage to lunge forward at the snap. But the crush of bodies almost never affects the kick itself. By the time the first lineman wraps a meaty paw around another, the ball is already sailing to the holder, and in the space of 1.3 seconds, it’s hurtling toward the uprights. For the kicker, those 1.3 seconds may as well be another game. Unlike a quarterback — reading the coverage, searching for targets, scrambling to avoid a Watt brother — the place-kicker has nothing to gain by watching the field. His job is not to anticipate the opposition or back up his teammates. It is to enter a kind of trance, as if he were the last man on earth, and perform a complex choreography of his own.

Tucker at a practice in August. The exaggerated skipping motion of his follow-through was inspired by the place-kicker Stephen Gostkowski.Credit...Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

The details of that choreography are specific to his body. He has spent the bulk of his adult life searching for ways to improve them: adjusting his angle of approach to the ball, tinkering with the timing of each step, perfecting the orientation of his plant foot and making fractional changes to the arc and trajectory of his swing. He has considered the effect of a three-degree increase in the rotation of his hip on the backswing. He has trained the joints of his leg to move in opposite directions simultaneously, so his thigh can begin its advance toward the ball while his knee is still drawing back. He has carefully calibrated the sequence of his proximal-to-distal movements to exploit the kinematic potential of his own proportions.

None of this is unique to the football kicker. The biomechanical exactitude would be familiar to a dancer or figure skater, and the incongruous interlude of a field goal has echoes in other sports — like a penalty kick in soccer or a free throw in basketball. What’s odd is how little a field goal has in common with football. Penalty kicks and free throws, after all, highlight a fundamental skill of their game. A field goal flips the fundamentals of football on their head. It interrupts a throwing game to let everything ride on a kick. It replaces the elegance of a spiral pass with tumbling, end-over-end rotation. It turns the spectacle of 22 bodies competing in coordinated combat into an extraneous sideshow for one player’s solitary performance. That is to say, what’s remarkable is not only the kick itself but that it happens in the middle of a football game, with the outcome on the line and 17 million people watching in terrified anticipation — most of whom have no idea what the kicker is actually doing.

Growing up in the Westlake suburbs of Austin, Texas, Tucker lived on a cul-de-sac at the bottom of a hill teeming with kids his age. On any given afternoon, they might race through the streets on bikes and scooters or throw together an impromptu ballgame on the massive lawn across the street. Even then, Tucker was consumed by an almost cartoonish need to win. That was clear from the age of 4, when his parents enrolled him in a youth soccer league. “I remember losing a game and just crying my eyes out — being so pissed off, and mad, and upset, and sad and devastated,” he says. “And I remember my mom and dad both having to console me, like: ‘Hey, man, it’s just a game! You guys are 4, it’s OK!’”

But Tucker’s intensity kept growing. At 10, he was accepted by a competitive club team and began traveling for games. “I remember making the team and realizing, Man, these other kids are pretty good,” he says, “but I want to be the best!” Tucker practiced constantly. He was forever dribbling a ball through the house, battering the baseboards and smudging the walls as he raced from room to room. By the time he entered middle school, his obsessive focus was developing a sharp edge. “I was probably a jerk,” Tucker says, “chewing other kids out for lack of effort. There were two or three of us who really wanted to win, but I was the one who vocalized it — and not in the most positive way. I’d be crushing other kids, and then their parents would be like, to my parents, ‘Hey, you need to get that under control!’”

As Tucker recalls this, he is neither self-conscious nor especially regretful. “I’m wired a certain way,” he says. But Tucker also went through a deeply traumatic experience that may have accelerated his ferocious drive in those years. One day in fifth grade, a teacher gathered his class to break the news that one of their classmates had been in a tragic accident. He was traveling with his mother and sister on a small plane that his stepfather was piloting. There were complications in landing, the teacher explained, and no one survived. Tucker burst into tears. The student was his best friend. He left the room and was followed by a teacher, who tried to comfort him until his mother arrived.

Looking back, Tucker says he was lucky to be surrounded by family and friends. “I could always talk to somebody,” he says. “I could talk to my parents, I could talk to my sisters, I could talk to my teachers.” But mostly, he didn’t. “A lot of the processing I did at that point in time was on my own,” he says. “It was, you know. ...” His voice trails off. “I think I’ll just leave it at that.”

Over the past decade, Tucker has scored an average of 136 points per year — which is more than any other player, in any position, ever.Credit...Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

At least two changes in Tucker’s life seemed to emerge from the loss of his friend. One was his longtime fantasy of becoming a pilot. His mother’s father was an Air Force veteran who flew missions over Vietnam, and Tucker had been fascinated by his stories, and by aircraft in general, since the age of 7. There was a framed poster above his bed showing the cockpit of a 737, but the dream of flight would fade. The tragedy also gave Tucker a heightened sense of urgency. He was acutely, if prematurely, aware that life is fleeting and more determined than ever to make his own exceptional. “To have an existential crisis at 11 years old — and not now, at 32 — is kind of strange and serendipitous,” he says.

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If Tucker’s amplified intensity was alien to his soccer teammates, it was the prevailing spirit of Texas football. Although he joined his first team at the comparatively doddering age of 13, he instantly felt at home in the punishing fraternal culture. “I loved how guys would be yelling at each other, and pissed off and fired up and excited and pumped, all at the same time,” he says. By the end of his first season, in eighth grade, Tucker was playing half a dozen positions — including kicker, at which he thrived.

Tucker’s local high school, Westlake, happened to be one of the country’s premier football programs and a breeding ground for N.F.L. stars, including Drew Brees. Tucker made the varsity team in his sophomore year, playing alongside future pros like the quarterback Nick Foles, the tight end Kyle Adams and the linebacker Bryce Hager. Even so, Tucker stood out. By the fall of his junior year, he was being scouted by colleges, and in February, he accepted a scholarship to kick for the University of Texas. But Tucker couldn’t bear to wait through another year of high school, so he spent the summer taking classes at Austin Community College, earning enough credits to graduate a semester early and become a Longhorn in January. “I was like, I’m going to get there as quickly as I can,” he says. “The more I can do before the football season starts, the better chance I have to play on Week 1.”

Tucker didn’t just play on Week 1. He was on the field for every game over the next four years. As a freshman, he kicked off 94 times, for an average distance of 64.5 yards. As a sophomore, he kicked off 99 times, averaging 62.3 yards, and he completed 43 punts with an average distance of more than 40 yards. Tucker finally got the chance to kick field goals as a junior, making 23 of 27 attempts. By the time he smacked a game-winning field goal against the team’s bitter rival, Texas A&M, in his senior year, it was starting to look as if a pro career was more likely than not. In early 2012, he declared for the N.F.L. draft and posted a video clip online that showed him making 10 consecutive field goals from multiple points on the field. At the end, he walked by the camera, saying only, “Pick me.”

A few days before the draft, Tucker received a visit from Jerry Rosburg, the special-teams coordinator for the Ravens, who took him to breakfast and watched him practice for nearly an hour. By the time Rosburg left, it was clear that he was impressed, and Tucker knew that the team’s kicker, Billy Cundiff, was coming off a weak year. He had missed an easy field goal in the final seconds of the A.F.C. championship game, bringing the Ravens’ 2011 season to a sudden and bitter end. But Tucker also knew the odds of being drafted as a place-kicker were long. Only one had been selected the previous year, and none the year before.

In the last week of April, he watched the agonizing ordeal of player selection. It was a good year for kickers: four were selected. Justin Tucker wasn’t one.

A field-goal attempt can be broken down into about half a dozen parts. There’s the setup, when a kicker paces from the ball to a starting position a few yards back. There’s the approach, as he jogs toward it in two or three accelerating steps. There’s the plant, when he lands his nonkicking foot a few inches from the ball, and the backswing, when he draws his leg back with a bend at the knee before unloading into the kick. Finally, there’s the follow-through, as his foot continues past the ball. Each of these movements has its own set of customs and conventions, but none are obligatory, and most kicking coaches encourage players to experiment on their own.

That’s because anybody who’s serious about kicking knows that nobody knows that much. At a basic geometric level, the shape of a football is weird. It can be formally described as a “prolate spheroid,” which is another way of saying that it looks like a regular ball getting sucked into a vacuum hose. Scientists have been studying the aerodynamics of spherical objects for centuries, but experiments on the American football are comparatively rare, and the scientific literature on tumbling footballs is basically a couple of dissertations and a handful of obscure papers.

“The reason not many people have looked into it is because it’s a very hard problem,” says Timothy Gay, a professor of physics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, whose book “Football Physics” touches on kicking. “The tumbling ball is much tougher to model than a spiral pass.” For one thing, by rotating end over end, the ball is constantly changing how much of its surface meets wind resistance. For another, rotation itself can affect a ball’s trajectory, which is how baseball pitchers use spin to throw a curveball. But calculating that “Magnus effect” is substantially more difficult on a misshapen ball, particularly if it’s not only tumbling but also wobbling side to side.

In the absence of scholarly research, kickers conduct their own. Their focus is not the football, per se, but how subtle changes in a kick affect it. The average N.F.L. place-kicker may not be able to tell you exactly how many millimeters below the ball’s centerline is the best place to strike for distance, or precisely what angle his foot should be rising from the grass at the moment of impact, but setting aside the numerical values, of course he knows. He has made hundreds of kicks with thousands of variations to develop his kicking technique, adjusting dozens of details in each part of the process, and dozens more within those — how far away to set up, how quickly to take each step of the approach, how close to plant the nonkicking foot, how far back to cock the kicking leg. Once the kicker has found his method, consistency is crucial. The smallest shift in one movement will carry into the next, magnifying with each step until things go literally sideways.

All of which is to say that being a place-kicker requires more than power and coordination. Obviously, it helps to have plenty of both, and Tucker always has. “He had that type of leg — you could see the leg speed, and how the ball came off his foot like an explosion,” says Doug Blevins, a kicking coach who worked with Tucker while he was in high school. But Blevins also trained several other great kickers — including Adam Vinatieri, David Akers and Olindo Mare — and what distinguished them was not just physical ability but a strange combination of opposing psychological traits. On one hand, a kicker needs extreme confidence. “He wants to be in that situation where it all depends on him,” Blevins says. “All great kickers bring a certain amount of arrogance to the table.” And yet to perfect a kick requires an almost inexhaustible reserve of humility and patience as they subject themselves to an endless barrage of punctilious criticism and microscopic correction. “If I had to point to one thing as most important,” Blevins says, “that’s it.”

“He had that type of leg,” a kicking coach that worked with Tucker in High School says, “you could see the leg speed, and how the ball came off his foot like an explosion.”Credit...Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

Looking back, Tucker understands why he wasn’t selected in the 2012 draft. Although he practiced tirelessly, the university had no dedicated kicking coach, and he had reached the limit of what he could teach himself. “I would have been maybe — and this is a big maybe — an 80 percent kicker in the N.F.L., which simply doesn’t cut it for a team with Super Bowl aspirations,” he says.

But Tucker got another chance. Just minutes after the final pick in the draft, his cellphone rang. It was Jerry Rosburg, the Ravens coach who had come to see him work out. Rosburg hadn’t been able to persuade the team’s management to use a draft pick on a kicker, but he invited Tucker to attend their rookie camp as an unsigned free agent. If the other coaches saw what Rosburg had seen, there was a chance they would sign him.

Tucker flew to Baltimore in May. On his first day, he kicked a 55-yard field goal that got the attention of everyone on the field. At the end of his second day, Rosburg called him into a meeting with the team’s kicking consultant, Randy Brown — who spent the next two and a half hours playing video of Tucker’s performance and pointing out everything he did wrong.

“His evaluation was essentially that I was not consistent enough in my set up,” Tucker says. “I was at too wide of an angle at the top of my stance, and I was taking my steps with only my plant spot in mind — as opposed to giving the spot of the ball equal consideration.” As the meeting wound down, Tucker promised to follow Brown’s advice, but privately, it made him nervous to reconstruct his technique in the middle of training camp. “I asked them at the end of the meeting for a little grace while I’m trying to figure this out,” he says. “Like, can you guys bear with me tomorrow, and don’t get rid of me if the ball’s not coming off my foot exactly how I want it? And they essentially said, ‘Yeah ... but no.’”

The next day Tucker returned to the field with a knot in his stomach, but he set up for his first kick as Brown suggested. “And the first ball comes off my foot like a rocket, and then the next one and the next,” he says. “I just felt like I had command over the ball, something every kicker chases.” Tucker made every kick that day. Over the next few days, he made kicks like he had only imagined. By the time he returned home, he wanted a position with the Ravens more than ever. They were one of the only N.F.L. teams with a designated kicking specialist, and he was eager to find out how much more Brown could teach him. For the next two weeks, Tucker waited to hear from the Ravens. He turned down offers to practice with two other teams. He knew it was a gamble, but he was determined to kick for Brown. Finally, the call arrived, and he was offered a spot on the Ravens’ preseason roster. That would allow him to participate in the four preseason games, but either he or Cundiff was likely to be cut when the season began and the roster tightened. Tucker accepted the offer and returned to Baltimore, making six of seven field goals that he attempted in those games, including two of 50 yards or more. At the end of the month, the team announced that Tucker, not Cundiff, was staying.

Fans in Baltimore were stunned. In The Sun, the columnist Kevin Cowherd insisted that it was a mistake to “go into the new season with a rookie kicker,” questioning whether Tucker would be able to perform under pressure. “I have this image in my mind: Ravens vs. Pittsburgh Steelers,” he wrote. “National TV audience tuned in. Ravens line up for a field-goal attempt with the game on the line. Welcome to the N.F.L., Justin Tucker.”

Tucker would make 90.9 percent of his field-goal attempts that year, including four against the Steelers; one that clinched the divisional round of the playoffs in double overtime against the Broncos; and two in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, which the Ravens won by three points. He also finished the season with a perfect record for extra points — a streak that would continue for the next five seasons, as Tucker rose to the top of the league.

It’s easy to look back on that rise as if it were preordained, an inevitable result of incomparable but inexplicable talent. In fact, what has distinguished Tucker from his first day with the Ravens is a relentless effort to get better. He has kept tinkering with his technique, week after week and season after season, as if he were still a rookie gunning for a spot on the team. Most of that tinkering is nearly undetectable. Even legendary N.F.L. kickers are sometimes astonished by his consistency. “He’s the most in-rhythm kicker that I’ve ever seen,” says Stephen Gostkowski, a former place-kicker for the New England Patriots. “He’s got the muscle memory to do the same thing every time. The guy is just absolutely amazing.”

Yet Tucker is also always searching for small ways to drive the ball a hair farther or straighter or more reliably down the middle. In a pinch, he will tear down and rebuild parts of his technique entirely. When he finished the 2015 season with a disappointing record on long-distance field goals, he stewed and simmered, then immersed himself in footage of Gostkowski, who seemed to be making them all. “Stephen was absolutely outperforming me,” he says, “and his style was unique at the time.”

Most kickers try to slow down their leg after striking the ball to avoid being thrown off balance. Some allow their leg to maintain just enough speed to lift them slightly off the ground, so their plant foot briefly skims the grass before landing a couple inches forward. Gostkowski took that skipping motion to a level approaching satire — after striking the ball, his leg continued forward with such velocity that it launched his body into the air, forcing him to hop several feet downfield before he regained balance.

In his warm-up for practice the next day, Tucker attempted his first kick in a half-joking imitation. “Running through the kick, just totally exaggerated,” he says. He watched the ball pop off his foot with shocking speed, rocketing toward the uprights and smashing into a camera pole positioned directly at the center. He made three more kicks the same way. All three hit the pole. “So the first attempt I had that day with the team present was a 64-yarder,” he says, “and I just applied this new technique, the Gostkowski technique, and I don’t think I’d ever hit a ball as far in my life.” In the coming season, Tucker would use the skipping technique for every kick, missing just one of 39 field goal attempts to end the year at the top of the league, with a field-goal percentage of 97.4 percent.

Tucker has been skipping through his kicks ever since, but more important, so have countless other players at every level of the sport. A technique that even Tucker found comically eccentric has, in part through Tucker’s prominence, already become respectable. One kicking manual published last year, Eric Piccione’s “The Art of Kicking,” recommended “a Justin Tucker skip-through to ensure you’re getting downfield.”

But if Tucker’s tinkering with technique has helped to change the sport, it has also given him a unique range of options on any given play. That’s what made his record-setting 66-yard field goal possible — not the innate strength of his leg or the meticulous method that he has developed for field goals. On a day when everything felt off and his usual technique wasn’t delivering distance, he could tinker some more and cobble together a new kick on the fly. It was, he says, a hybrid approach, with elements that he normally uses for a kickoff. “So I took an extra half a step back into my stance, and I took a little crow hop into the ball, and a combination of divine intervention, adrenaline, technique that we had practiced for more than a decade, all came together in that moment.”

He said this on a blustery morning at the Ravens Training Facility a few weeks later, gazing through a bank of windows at the howling wind. Practice was about to begin, and he was eager to get outside. Tucker insists on testing his leg in all conditions: If the field is slick with ice and snow, or the sky is black with driving rain, he will drag his snapper and holder outside to see if they can beat the weather.

Today, as he suited up in the locker room, a scrum of reporters was milling around. They circled from player to player, asking detailed questions and nodding intently at the usual insipid answers: ball down the field, 110 percent, one play at a time. Tucker stood by his locker at the far end of the room and watched the commotion as he strapped on the last of his gear. Practice would start in less than a minute, but the reporters showed no sign of leaving.

Tucker waited a few minutes longer, then pulled out a four-foot length of PVC drain pipe that was stashed by his locker. He raised the end to his mouth and, with the embouchure of a trombonist, unleashed a deafening wail. The room fell silent, but only for a moment. When the chattering resumed, he blew the makeshift horn again, and then again a few seconds later. Tucker kept blowing the horn until the last reporter gave up and shuffled out. Then he returned the pipe to its hideaway and did what he has always done. Tucker got back to work.

Wil S. Hylton is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote for the magazine about masculinity and violence.

Thanks for posting. Great read.

Tucker is the best kicker in the history of the league. No one can argue that.

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Vic Mackey

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He's the best ever. Not even a doubt about it. The second be made that kick that night in Gomerville in 2011, his nuts dropped to the floor and gave never raised. And it has translated to the pros and he has a ring and has now made like 61 straight FGS in the 4th and OT. And 25 of 26 in these types of kicks.

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Jkwellborn

Jkwellborn 7033

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He's the best ever. Not even a doubt about it. The second be made that kick that night in Gomerville in 2011, his nuts dropped to the floor and gave never raised. And it has translated to the pros and he has a ring and has now made like 61 straight FGS in the 4th and OT. And 25 of 26 in these types of kicks.

The biggest surprise to me is the fact that hes missed one.
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shadow_operative

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6 hours ago, CfRhTxStBobcats said:

Whoever said hitting a fastball, or was it a curveball, is the hardest thing to do in sports never tried kicking a 50 yard fg.

Tucker is by far my favorite player in the NFL right now. Unbelievable how much power and speed he can generate through that skinny leg.

LOL. FG kickers do their job 85% of the time or more. the league wide batting average in the MLB this year was .243. hitting a baseball is incalculably harder than hitting a 50 yard FG. there are literally 15 year old kids who can smoke a 50 yard FG through the uprights.

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CfRhTxStBobcats

CfRhTxStBobcats 608

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1 hour ago, shadow_operative said:

LOL. FG kickers do their job 85% of the time or more. the league wide batting average in the MLB this year was .243. hitting a baseball is incalculably harder than hitting a 50 yard FG. there are literally 15 year old kids who can smoke a 50 yard FG through the uprights.

I was speaking in general terms for an athlete. Even a pitcher can typically hit a fastball 1 out of 10 times. Kind of doubt more than 1 other player on an NFL team could hit a 50 fg under game pressure.

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t_eight

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Another fancy write-up on Tucker - this time from the WSJ

Ravens’ Justin Tucker Is the Bigfoot of Baltimore - WSJ

The Bigfoot of Baltimore

Justin Tucker is the surest thing in football. But he gets nervous thinking about those kicks, too.

 

Owings Mills, Md.

In this town, you see lots of kids wearing his No. 9 jersey. Adults, too. A kicker. It feels a little eccentric, a personal statement in purple. Football fans usually fly the digits of the starry quarterback, the fleet receiver, the fearsome lineman patrolling the middle.

The kicker?

“It’s an honor that anybody would even think to go and buy a Justin Tucker No. 9,” Justin Tucker tells me. “That means the world.”

But of course they wear his number in Baltimore. Tucker’s the MVF, Most Valuable Foot, central to the identity of his team and this city. That’s Tucker in commercials for the local convenience store heaven, Royal Farms. That’s Tucker, a trained bass-baritone opera singer, a music major at Texas, singing “Ave Maria” at the Baltimore Basilica over Christmas.

That’s Tucker doing it again, last Sunday night, winning another game as the clock expired, sinking the rival Bengals, the coolest hoof in the game. The NFL’s data and analytics department noted that Tucker’s 43-yard winning kick was so on the money, so dead center, it would have been successful were the uprights only a half-yard wide.

“‘Automa-Tuck’,” is how Ravens linebacker Patrick Queen put it. 

Did you catch Tucker’s generous postgame interview on TV, in which he nerded out about the pleasure of getting the football delivered with “12 o’clock laces” and deflected glory to Ravens snapper Nick Moore and rookie holder Jordan Stout? Tucker seemed to invent a new statistical category when he credited Stout with his “first career game-winning hold.”

“From there, I’m just a system kicker,” Tucker said. “The ball kicks itself at that point.”

Yeah, right. System kicker. Ball kicks itself. By almost every metric, Tucker’s the best there is, the best there’s ever been, already, at age 32. He’s a lifetime 98.9% on extra points, hovering over 91% on field goals, and that winner against the Bengals was his 61st successful fourth quarter or overtime kick in a row. Over his eleven seasons, he’s 17 for 17 on kicks in the final minute of regulation or OT. 

Mmm-hmm, that’s right: he’s perfect. Oh, and last season Tucker set the NFL’s field-goal distance record, too, with a 66-yard winner against Detroit. 

It’s rare, but every once in a while, a talented human being finds their precise talent. That’s Justin Tucker. 

Sitting here at a table inside the Ravens practice facility, Tucker describes his methodical approach. Practice is a critical, offseason tinkering routine. In the “lab,” as he calls it, Tucker may tweak his approach. Once a modification is made, repetition is essential. It sounds dull. He loves it. 

“The Bruce Lee principle,” he says. “Practicing one kick 10,000 times, not just practicing kicking 10,000 times.”

Tucker considers kicking as much of a mental task as it is a physical one, a combination of technique and compartmentalization. 

“People think we’re hanging out at practice kicking a few balls,” he says. “I’m physically swinging my leg and trying to explode through each kick, but I’m also really working on my mind. I’m trying to improve my ability to focus. Even on the practice field, I’ll be breaking a pretty significant mental sweat in December and January when it’s 30 and 40 degrees out here.”

One point three seconds. It’s a Tucker mantra, the time he says he needs, from snap to kick, to lock in and get it done. Every variable is considered: temperature, wind speed, surface. Turf tends to be springier than grass. Domes are domes. Baltimore’s stadium, on the water with natural grass and no roof, is hardly placid. 

“I’ll jog out onto the field to attempt to kick, and the streamers on the top of the goal posts will be blowing at each other,” he says. “I just have to take a moment and laugh about it, because it is funny.”

Before and after those 1.3 seconds, Tucker allows himself to be human. All those edgy feelings you feel at home, watching a kicker get ready? Tucker thinks it’s healthy to feel those. 

“I’ll have all of the thoughts, from anxiety and fear to confidence, excitement, exhilaration, joy, celebration with my teammates and my coaches,” he says. “All of those feelings exist and they’re important. They need to be acknowledged.”

“They can be put away for 1.3 seconds while I see the snap, see the hold and see the ball off my foot.” 

He is so good he changes the way the Ravens operate, and the way head coach John Harbaugh coaches. In close, late-game situations, Baltimore’s offense effectively plays on a shortened field, since Tucker is so reliable from long distance. Opponents have to tweak their approach, too. Leave too much time on the clock, as Cincinnati did Sunday? You’ll find yourself at Tucker’s mercy.

“I thank God we’ve got Tuck on our side,” Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson said the other night. 

Kicker is habitually football’s loneliest, most volatile position—the skinny player off to the side, isolated, only as good as his last attempt. Tucker’s a franchise pillar, as much a part of this team as Jackson or Harbaugh or the red-eyed bird on the helmet. It’s why the Ravens recently re-signed Tucker to a four-year, $24 million extension, record money for a foot. 

It’s why they wear Justin Tucker’s No. 9 in Baltimore. 

A kicker. Theirs. 

 

 

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Droopy

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On 10/9/2022 at 10:39 PM, Gil Bang said:

 

Any golf fans find this a surprisingly simple explanation on how to focus while kicking putting? Visualization of all the moving parts and seeing the kick go in before it's kicked. I kicked FGs in HS and tried to do this as best I could, but this really resonates with me for golf, or any situation where focus is needed. Dudes a beast... and a Longhorn Legend. 🤘

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Valmy77

Valmy77 13626

Posted
Posted (edited)
43 minutes ago, Huckleberry said:

Popping in to remind everyone that the Texans drafted Randy Bullock from A&M in the 5th round the year that Tucker was available. 

Yeah well Bullock won the Lou Groza, All-American, and All-Big 12 over Tucker in College. The only thing Tucker ever won at UT was 2nd team Big 12 by the Sportswriters. The coaches didn't even think he was the 2nd best kicker in the Big 12. The Texans were not alone! I guess Tucker was raw dogshit in College, he should be glad the Ravens deigned to invite his shitty ass to camp.

Though to be fair Tucker only hit like 80% of his field goals in College which would be a shockingly horrible season by his NFL standards. Maybe not entirely unwarranted.

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AbraCadabra

AbraCadabra 120

Posted
Posted (edited)
18 minutes ago, Valmy77 said:

Yeah well Bullock won the Lou Groza, All-American, and All-Big 12 over Tucker in College. The only thing Tucker ever won at UT was 2nd team Big 12 by the Sportswriters. The coaches didn't even think he was the 2nd best kicker in the Big 12. The Texans were not alone! I guess Tucker was raw dogshit in College, he should be glad the Ravens deigned to invite his shitty ass to camp.

Though to be fair Tucker only hit like 80% of his field goals in College which would be a shockingly horrible season by his NFL standards. Maybe not entirely unwarranted.

Know nothing about how kickers are coached but reading the NYT article it appears he was not coached at all at Texas.. 

Quote

" At the end of his second day, Rosburg called him into a meeting with the team’s kicking consultant, Randy Brown — who spent the next two and a half hours playing video of Tucker’s performance and pointing out everything he did wrong.

“His evaluation was essentially that I was not consistent enough in my set up,” Tucker says. “I was at too wide of an angle at the top of my stance, and I was taking my steps with only my plant spot in mind — as opposed to giving the spot of the ball equal consideration.” As the meeting wound down, Tucker promised to follow Brown’s advice, but privately, it made him nervous to reconstruct his technique in the middle of training camp. “I asked them at the end of the meeting for a little grace while I’m trying to figure this out,” he says. “Like, can you guys bear with me tomorrow, and don’t get rid of me if the ball’s not coming off my foot exactly how I want it? And they essentially said, ‘Yeah ... but no.’”

The next day Tucker returned to the field with a knot in his stomach, but he set up for his first kick as Brown suggested. “And the first ball comes off my foot like a rocket, and then the next one and the next,” he says. “I just felt like I had command over the ball, something every kicker chases.”

All it took was one meeting to elevate. Blame Mack?

Edited by AbraCadabra
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Valmy77

Valmy77 13626

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Posted

Pretty sure it was Charlie Strong who never coached the Special Teams. Mack's teams had pretty good kickers and special teams in general...

though that year, 2010, when nobody could catch a kick does kind of suggest that maybe it was the players and not the coaches. I swear we would have won three more games in 2010 if we had fair caught every kick.

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Noogman

Noogman 161

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44 minutes ago, AbraCadabra said:

Know nothing about how kickers are coached but reading the NYT article it appears he was not coached at all at Texas.. 

All it took was one meeting to elevate. Blame Mack?

As much as we all enjoy blaming Mack, kickers aren't typically coached by anyone on staff, at least not at the college level. There are private kicking instructors that most elite kickers are going to starting early in high school and are coached by for the rest of their careers. That being said, a school with as much money as Texas should have an instructor on retainer.

One of the best things the Dallas Cowboys ever did from a special teams standpoint was hiring ex-kicker and instructor Chris Boniol to be an assistant special teams coach. He coached Dan Bailey when Bailey was one of the best kickers in the league.

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Sawbonz

Sawbonz 28208

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Posted
1 hour ago, Valmy77 said:

Yeah well Bullock won the Lou Groza, All-American, and All-Big 12 over Tucker in College. The only thing Tucker ever won at UT was 2nd team Big 12 by the Sportswriters. The coaches didn't even think he was the 2nd best kicker in the Big 12. The Texans were not alone! I guess Tucker was raw dogshit in College, he should be glad the Ravens deigned to invite his shitty ass to camp.

Though to be fair Tucker only hit like 80% of his field goals in College which would be a shockingly horrible season by his NFL standards. Maybe not entirely unwarranted.

I’m sorry I couldn’t hear you through the aggy heartbreak 

 

 

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