Ravens Believe Justin Tucker Will Benefit From Challenging 2024 Season

For Justin Tucker, 2024 could be a season of all’s well that ends well.

After midseason struggles with a career-high eight field goal misses, Tucker finished by making his final 28 kicks (five field goals and 23 extra points).

But for a perfectionist like Tucker and an organization like the Ravens, they’ll spend the offseason not ignoring this year’s tough times but looking to improve because of them.

Head Coach John Harbaugh said he had a great, “really long, honest” conversation with Tucker after the season ended.

“Maybe we all saw that Justin Tucker is human,” Harbaugh said.

“It’s hard to be a great kicker in this league and be as consistent as he’s been, and he ran into that – this adversity – probably a lot later in his career than most of these guys do, but it’s something that probably had to happen in terms of his growth as a player and even as a performer.”

Tucker still stands as the most accurate kicker in NFL history with an 89.1 career field-goal percentage. He’s one spot above the Chiefs’ Harrison Butker, who also had some struggles this season. In seventh position is the Texans’ Ka’imi Fairbairn, who missed two field goals in the Texans’ playoff loss.

Even the best kickers sometimes go through rough patches, and Harbaugh said he saw Tucker go through a mental battle this season.

Harbaugh compared it to a golfer who has to replicate the same motion over and over again. The steps for Tucker were to stay balanced, follow through, and hit the football clean. He was consistently making kicks in practice, but it wasn’t transferring to games perhaps because he wasn’t in the “right frame of mind.”

It was up to Tucker – and Tucker alone – to overcome that, Harbaugh said.

“To pull himself out of that was going to be the test, and the fact that he went through that, pulled himself out of it … I think that’s going to serve him well going forward in his career,” Harbaugh said.