Justin Tucker sat encased in a sideline cape and hidden under a hood, alone with his thoughts and the millions of other people thinking them. He had just missed a 53-yard field goal that would have put the Baltimore Ravens ahead of the Philadelphia Eagles, and Tucker looked more than just morose. He looked even more than baffled. The most productive NFL kicker of the last decade looked like the living embodiment of a yip.
People speak of the yips often, usually in relation to a golfer with putting issues; for whatever it may be worth, the Oxford English Dictionary pegs the first use of the term as having been in 1935, in American Golfer. Everyone agrees on what it is: the sudden inability to perform a task one has performed many times before because the one performing the task is thinking too hard about the task itself and becoming overwhelmed by the very idea. It’s less that the task becomes more difficult and more that it just slips further and further out of perspective.
Placekickers aren't allowed the luxury of the yips. Kickers, as a rule, fall into only three categories: There are those who suck, those who will eventually suck, and those who are out of work, you just wait. The culture has decided through years of well-traveled if never fully rational ignorance to hate kickers, probably because of what they represent—a touchdown drive unfulfilled by the offense that makes the kicker necessary, some size-8 twerp jogging on to finish a job the mesomorphs couldn’t.
Justin Tucker, it is agreed, is the zenith of the art. He was certainly the face of the industry starting nearly a decade ago, and his work is spoken of with awe, at least until recently, when it has turned to pity. Even his coach, John Harbaugh, went to console Tucker after that 53-yarder doglegged left. That reduced Tucker’s percentage for the year to a grossly unseemly 70.6 percent, dead last among currently active kickers, which is to say those not yet cut or actively disabled.
What is important here is that every other kicker who has ever had the yips did not have them for long. This is not because they fix them, either. Yip-afflicted kickers get fired in a coach's mind seconds after the missed attempt and are generally told about it the next day with a backslap and a cardboard box, a particularly bloodless way to operate in a largely bloodless industry. Many of today's kickers are on their third, fifth, or seventh jobs because of it; those kickers who are with their original teams are both young and have not yet failed catastrophically—for example, Houston's John Christian Ka'iminoeauloameka'ikeokekumupa'a (a.k.a. Ka'imi) Fairbairn, whom we cite just because of his name.
Tucker was special, though, or at least was until this year. So special, in fact, that nobody noticed that his peak ended three years ago, when his run of exemplary distance kicking ended. He had gone six years of converting kicks 50 yards and longer at a jaw-slackening rate—he was 30-of-36—and had been declared the finest kicker ever as a result. Tucker’s excellence from distance authentically changed the game, reducing the game's fear of first 50-yard and then 60-yard field goals to the point where the first is dully routine and the second is only sort of a big deal. Anything inside 65 yards is deemed makeable even though the NFL record is 66, by Tucker himself. New England's Joey Slye was asked to kick a game-winning 68-yarder yesterday and fell a yard short. And don't even start with this.
But the funny thing about athletic reputations is that they are often cemented just as the recipient is starting to age out of the job. Those who age out of the gig are often resuscitated with other more desperate teams who believe that the lemon still has juice worth squeezing, both because it has already yielded so much and because finding the next great player is too difficult. People still think Tom Brady can play, and he's a broadcasting owner. People still think Barry Bonds can play, and he's a 60-year-old bicyclist. People thought Mike Tyson could still box, and he … well, he was still ripe to collect a payday to keep doing it, but he’s something else now. And yes, we've spared you the obligatory Aaron Rodgers sideswipe.
But kickers are different, and always have been. They are believed to be disposable even at a time when coaches have fallen in love with their strategic utility; 50-yard field goal attempts are on pace to be up 40 percent since this was written, and Tucker was the face and leg of that revolution.
Thus, there is some measure of irony that, in the most foot-heavy football season in the sport's history, the man most recognized for spurring that is being allowed to endure the torments of yip-hood like this. And his reward for this is to be supported with full throat by the man who, under normal circumstances, would have had him walked to the parking lot while lining up a six-way Tuesday kicking-audition jamboree, because that's how it's always been done with every other franchise.
Except the Baltimore Ravens. They've got Justin Tucker.
