Why Justin Tucker is missing kicks this year, explained by a special teams coach

Is the Ravens’ Justin Tucker problem salvageable?

Justin Tucker is one of the best kickers in NFL history. The longtime Baltimore Ravens kicker is the league’s active leader in field goals made (414) and second-most accurate place kicker in the history of the sport, less than two-tenths of a percent less automatic than Harrison Butker of the Kansas City Chiefs.

But this season, Baltimore has had a Justin Tucker problem – at least, on the surface. Tucker is 19-for-27 on field goals and 42-for-44 on extra points this season, both of which would be career lows from an accuracy standpoint if they held for the remainder of the year.

We know the very best kickers are able to perform at a high level into their 40s absent an injury and Tucker has never missed a game. When Tucker has made good contact, he’s still able to drive the ball on long-range kicks, evidenced by his season long of 56 yards.

So that begs the question: what the hell is going on?

After watching all 10 of Tucker’s misses this season over and over again, zooming in on holder Jordan Stout and long snapper Nick Moore to look for signs of a bad operation, I was struggling to find an answer. I’m, admittedly, a kicking nerd, but I’m not a football coach with a trained eye. So I asked Fresno State special teams coordinator John Baxter, who has 35 years of collegiate special teams coaching experience.

I sent Baxter my Zapruder-esque films of all ten holds by Stout, ready to ask about the minuscule differences between where Stout placed his fingers on the ground and where the ball actually ended up being held and how that might affect Tucker’s ball contact.

He quickly shut down that line of thinking: “Not only are those holds exceptional,” Baxter said, “their operation is the envy of the league. Their snap-hold-kick process is one that a lot of people try to emulate.”

A lot of people includes Baxter, who became friends with Ravens coach John Harbaugh when Harbaugh was the Eagles special teams coordinator in the late 90s and early 2000s, while Baxter was in his first of two stints in Fresno. He took me through the details of the operation, from the fist-like target Stout presents to his snapper to Moore’s ability to never snap the ball too far into Stout’s body. Everything is right as rain with the operation, he insists.

Okay, so case closed. Tucker is washed, the living embodiment of Lightning McQueen’s crash in Cars 3. Father Time is undefeated, etc, etc.

Baxter hasn’t been following Tucker closely this season because Fresno State does their film reviews on Sundays. But before I let him go, he guessed that most of Tucker’s misses have been to the left. Indeed they have – nine of his 10 faults have swung outside the left post.

“Tucker has always been a guy who hits the ball really hard,” Baxter tells me. “He does what I call ‘crossing up’. When his right leg hits the ball, his left side crosses over, which tightens your follow through to stay on balance.”

An example of Tucker ‘crossing up’, from his miss against the Steelers this season.

“The harder you swing, the more active your left side has to be. If your left side is late, the ball is going to track left. When you pull it as hard as he pulls it – you can talk to a fade but a hook won’t listen. He swings as hard as any player that’s ever kicked. When you swing that hard, it’s easy to pull one.”

Tucker’s plant foot is also tighter to the ball than most kickers’ – notoriously so, Baxter says. That allows him to generate the 66-yard power he’s displayed as recently as 2021, but it also means that if he’s even a fraction off, the ball drifts left. As Baxter puts it: “When you start flirting with the left upright … if it’s going left, it’s not coming back.”

But this doesn’t explain why Tucker is suddenly pushing all of these kicks wide of the upright, even on the ones where his flight path and mechanics and snap-hold-kick operation look – to an untrained eye – perfect.

This, Baxter says, is where the math comes in.

When you kick a football, your leg swings in a semicircular motion. To kick a ball straight on, you ideally want to hit the ball at the very top of that arc, where the tangent line of the curve of your leg’s motion is closest to zero. Miss by even a degree or two, and there’s going to be some force moving the ball left for a right-footed kicker – the tangential force on your follow-through is directed to the left. Here’s a diagram of what I mean:

In somewhat plainer English, from Baxter: “If you measure one degree off over 50 yards, that’s four feet. The uprights are 18 feet, 6 inches. To understand a ball that hits the center of the uprights versus a ball that misses left, you’re talking about two degrees left. Two degrees! That’s how tight the tolerances are. You have 1.25 seconds while somebody else is trying to block it.”

Baxter provides me with a helpful exercise to illustrate this idea: go to a local football field and place a pen on the ground 50 yards away from the uprights. Point the pen right at the center of the uprights. Then tilt the pen ever so slightly – one or two degrees – and notice how the tip of the pen now points just inside or outside the upright.

These are the margins Tucker – and every other NFL kicker – is working with. And when you put it like that, making a field goal seems impossible.

Former Vikings punter Chris Kluwe pointed out on Bluesky that this minuscule mistiming may have a pretty simple explanation: Tucker is 35 years old. His body doesn’t move as fast as it used to, even if he’s only slowed down a hair. That alone is enough to push Tucker’s point of contact with the ball later into his motion, which in turn pushes the ball left. For a kicker like Tucker, whose process is so tight and hip-driven, those effects are magnified.

Now, there have also been a few balls from Tucker that have had an ugly flight path – a tumbling, wobbling ball rather than an end-over-end kick that flies straight. These are called X balls, and typically happen when a kicker fails to make good contact with the ball.

“What happens if you get a little too tight, and the ball gets a little bit closer to your ankle than your instep, you can hit an X ball,” Baxter says. We’ve already learned that Tucker’s plant foot is tight – it stands to reason that he’s just gotten a degree or two too tight on some of those X ball misses.

Baxter’s explanations are all pretty in line with what Tucker himself has been saying about this season’s results. The 35-year-old has told the media that he’s simply let a few kicks get away from him this year, something that happens to every kicker.

His 10 misses are already easily a career-high, surpassing a seven-miss season in 2015. But there’s also been a four-week stretch where he was 7-for-7 on field goals and 18-for-18 on extra points this season, and he still hasn’t missed a field goal inside 40 yards in four years.

For that reason, Baxter is hesitant to make any sweeping conclusions about Tucker’s washed-ness. “Everybody always wants there to be a reason,” he tells me. (He’s right. That’s why I’m on the phone with him.)

“In college football, I always have the same answer: we’re playing a game with 18-22 year old men with a ball that isn’t round. It would be really hard for me to say, ‘This is the reason why.’ There comes a point for all of us where performance is going to fall off. The biggest question for me is are we at that point?”

Tucker, despite his status as the second-most accurate kicker in the history of the sport, is still human. It’s very difficult for humans to replicate a process as ultra-precise as kicking under duress 71 times in a row with no flaws. Tucker’s ability to do it 69 times with only two faults in 2021 made him the GOAT to many people because it was insanely impressive.

Only four kickers have ever made every single field goal and extra point they’ve attempted in a single season – Gary Anderson in 1998, Jeff Wilkins in 2000, Mike Vanderjagt in 2003, and Garrett Hartley in 2008. In those four seasons combined, they made 4 kicks from 50+ yards. They also all had the benefit of the old 20-yard extra point.

When you take one of the hardest swingers in the history of the game, with a notoriously narrow plant foot, and narrow the margins – Tucker has attempted 17 of his 27 field goals from 40+, the fifth-highest ratio in the NFL this season – there is bound to be some variance.

Whether or not that variance is enough to plummet the kicking GOAT all the way down to second-to-last in accuracy this season is up to interpretation. He’s 35 years old, after all. As Baxter said, there’s a point where performance falls off for even the best of us.

And yet, even so, I think the Ravens are going to ride this out. They did so in 2015 when Tucker, then 26, missed four kicks in four weeks while on a much cheaper RFA tender than his current contract. They did it again when he missed three kicks in two weeks in 2022. “I don’t think that’d be wise,” Harbaugh told the media when asked if the Ravens were thinking about moving on after Tucker’s Week 13 performance, the first time he’s ever missed three kicks in a single game.

And yes, making kicks is Tucker’s job, as it is any kicker’s. His misses are subject to extra scrutiny because of his status, a godlike automaton put on earth to drill a ball dead center over and over like that Mark Rober kicking robot from a few years ago.

Tucker has alluded to shifting the operation’s aiming point right of center to account for his developing tendency to hook kicks left, but that change is also how he missed a kick wide right this past Sunday. Still, it’s about all Baltimore can do for the rest of this season if they mean what they say about sticking by the veteran.

Longer term, Tucker may be able to salvage some of these misses. But it would require tweaking his motion to account for his body being slower, moving his contact point earlier into a new motion and undoing thirteen years of muscle memory. That’s not a quick fix – it would take at least the entire offseason, if not longer. Kluwe, for what it’s worth, thinks it’s too late for Tucker to remedy it.

So maybe this is the end for Justin Tucker: a revolutionary doomed to usher in, but not enjoy the spoils of, the golden era of NFL kicking. Maybe it’s not – the proficiency of the Ravens staff is unrivaled, and if anybody is going to resurrect that which looks already dead, it will be Baltimore.

But in the meantime, take that pen out to your local high school field. Move it ever so slightly, like Baxter suggests. See how much that trajectory changes with even the slightest recalibration.

And then breathe in, and have patience.