Tyler Loop and the Ghosts of Kickers Past

There’s a moment every kicker dreads — not the moment of the miss, but the eternal aftermath of it. The walk off the field. The locker room silence. The texts from family that can’t undo what’s done. And then the offseason, longer and heavier than any other. Tyler Loop has walked that walk, felt the silence, read the texts.

Loop’s dream of lifting the Ravens to the playoffs quickly turned to a nightmare when he pushed a 44-yard attempt wide right. It was a brutal finish to a strong rookie season for Loop, as the Ravens fell in Pittsburgh to their archrivals, 26-24.

The Ravens became the first preseason Super Bowl favorite to miss the playoffs since the New England Patriots in 2008, when Tom Brady got hurt in the season opener.

Lamar Jackson put the team on his back in the fourth quarter, throwing touchdown strikes of 50 and 64 yards to Zay Flowers. Isaiah Likely hauled in a miraculous 26-yard catch on fourth-and-seven. It felt like divine intervention. Moments later, Loop’s miss triggered haunting memories of Billy Cundiff hooking a 32-yard field goal attempt left, in the final seconds of a 23-20 loss to the Patriots in the 2011 AFC Championship Game.

I remember friends and acquaintances asking for my thoughts on Loop during training camp in 2025. My standard reply was, “He looks good, has a strong leg and seems like a solid kid. But until he hits a walk-off game winner in Pittsburgh in December, the jury is still out.”

Well, it wasn’t December, it was January 4. But you get the picture.

Oh, and the jury IS still out.

The Miss

Loop’s 44-yard try was his first miss from inside 50 yards last season. Everything went properly in his process until foot hit leather. That’s when the first-year Raven said he made contact with the ball too low on his shoe.

“We call it hitting it thin,” Loop said. “It spins fast and goes off to the right. The second it made contact with my foot, I felt it lower. We talk about hitting on the fourth lace of the shoe. It felt a little lower down the foot and hit it thin.”

That’s a kicker who understands his craft. That’s also a kicker who understands exactly what went wrong and why — which is the first prerequisite for bouncing back.

He said his warmups were solid, each of his prior kicks went off without a hitch, and the process on the final play of the game was nearly perfect. The outcome was the only thing that went awry. His regular season backed that up. Loop had been outstanding last season, making 90% of his field goal tries (30-of-33) before lining up for the kick with the game on the line.

If Loop had converted the attempt, Baltimore would have won the AFC North and secured the No. 4 seed in the playoffs. That would have been quite the feat given that the Ravens opened the year at 1-5 and spent about a quarter of the season without quarterback Lamar Jackson.

The good news for Tyler Loop is that he’s not the first rookie kicker to have his soul ripped out by one miss. The bad news is that the history of those who followed is decidedly mixed.

The Ghost of Cundiff

The ESPN comparison to Billy Cundiff is fair, but the differences matter enormously — and they favor Loop.

Cundiff was not a rookie when he missed that 32-yarder in Foxborough. He was a veteran Pro Bowl kicker, selected to the AFC roster just one year prior. In the closing seconds of the 2011 AFC Championship Game on January 22, 2012, against the New England Patriots, Cundiff missed a 32-yard field goal that would have tied the game. The Ravens lost 23–20.

The Ravens stood by Cundiff through the offseason and brought him to training camp in 2012 as the expected starter. But he never recovered mentally or mechanically. Cundiff would miss nine field-goal attempts in 2011, though five were on attempts from beyond 50 yards. But his unforgettable miss was a 32-yarder, not 50. Some misses echo in eternity.

Cundiff was released by the Ravens on August 26, 2012; he was replaced by rookie kicker Justin Tucker. He signed in Washington and spent five weeks there, struggling mightily — converting just 58 percent of his field goals before ultimately being released. The miss didn’t just end his time in Baltimore; it effectively ended his career.

The Spiral of Blair Walsh

The more instructive — and sobering — comparison may be Blair Walsh, who followed a career trajectory eerily similar to Loop’s situation.

Walsh was a sixth-round pick by the Vikings in 2012, just as Loop was a sixth-round pick by the Ravens in 2025. In his first year, Walsh set the NFL records for the most single-season field goals of 50 or more yards and the highest field goal percentage by a rookie. He also earned Pro Bowl and first-team All-Pro honors.

That’s the dream trajectory, and Loop was walking a similar path before January 4, 2026.

Trailing 10-9 with 26 seconds left, the Vikings sent out Walsh to try to get the team to Arizona with a 27-yard field goal. What happened next was nothing short of unbelievable. The kick hooked wide left. Minnesota was eliminated. The city of Minneapolis was left stunned.

When Blair Walsh missed a game-winning chip shot against Seattle in the NFC Wild Card Game.
(video: @BackThenFB)pic.twitter.com/oAk7i4BAys

— Kalshi Football (@KalshiFB) June 23, 2026

Walsh maintained his composure publicly. “It is not going to ruin my life,” he said at the time.

He was wrong, at least professionally.

Walsh struggled through the first ten weeks of the 2016 season, missing four extra points along with four field goal attempts. He missed an extra point in a Week 10 loss to Washington, which led to his release from the Vikings on November 15, 2016. According to Pro Football Reference, he never again held a full-time starting job in the NFL. After missing a short game-winning kick during the 2015 playoffs, Walsh struggled the following season and was released from Minnesota.

The lesson here is that Walsh’s struggle was less about the miss itself and more about what it uncorked. The 2016 season revealed fragility that had been hiding behind elite performance. In 2016, his extra-point conversion rate dropped to 78.9 percent, the lowest in the National Football League. He also missed four of his first 16 field goals. In week nine, Coach Zimmer brought in a small collection of kickers to audition for Walsh’s spot.

The Ghost Nobody Talks About

And then there’s Scott Norwood, whose story is the original ghost at the kicker’s table.

Super Bowl XXV, played on January 27, 1991, cemented Norwood’s name in football history when he missed a 47-yard field goal attempt with 8 seconds left in the game, giving the New York Giants their 2nd Super Bowl victory and starting the Bills’ string of four consecutive Super Bowl losses.

Although the Bills signed Björn Nittmo as Norwood’s potential replacement in the 1991 offseason, Norwood remained with the Bills through that season. He actually performed admirably in the ensuing playoffs. He did make all five of his kicks in the 1991 playoffs, including a 47-yard attempt against the Chiefs and his only attempt in the Bills’ Super Bowl XXVI loss to Washington. But Norwood’s field-goal success rate dropped for a third straight year in 1991, which might explain why he lasted only one season beyond Super Bowl XXV.

Norwood himself would kick for one more season with the Bills before being replaced by Steve Christie for the 1992 season.

Wide right ended him.

Why Loop Is Different — Or At Least Why He Should Be

The history is grim, but context is everything.

Loop is 24 years old. He was not a veteran kicker with accumulated scar tissue from a decade in the league when this happened. He was a rookie, in his first season, replacing a franchise legend in Justin Tucker, inheriting one of the most scrutinized positions in the sport. He became the first kicker ever drafted in Ravens history. That alone tells you how highly the organization regarded him.

And when the moment came, he didn’t hide. Despite failing in the biggest moment of his career, Loop met with reporters and took questions after the game. He took responsibility for the miss, saying he simply “mishit the ball.” Loop took questions for over seven minutes before the interview ended.

That’s character. That’s not nothing.

John Harbaugh put his arm around Loop as they walked to the locker room. Long snapper Nick Moore and punter Jordan Stout flanked Loop’s sides as he spoke to reporters. The organization did not scatter. They stayed.

“It’s disappointing and it sucks, but also the nature of the job is I gotta move on and I gotta get ready for the next kick. That’s next year. Tomorrow starts training for that,” Loop said.

The difference between those words and the spiral of Walsh or Cundiff lies in whether Loop means them physically, not just emotionally. Walsh said the right things too. What undid him was mechanical inconsistency that the miss seemed to trigger. The extra points went sideways first, then the field goals followed.

Loop’s 30-for-34 regular season — with three misses all coming from beyond 50 yards — suggests a kicker whose fundamental mechanics are sound. The miss in Pittsburgh was a thin hit, a contact error on one kick, not a systemic breakdown. That distinction matters.

The Bottom Line

History says missed kicks of this magnitude loom large over careers. Cundiff never recovered. Walsh spiraled out of Minnesota within a year. Norwood lasted one more season and was replaced. The precedents are not encouraging.

But history also says that a young kicker with organizational support, mechanical awareness, and genuine accountability gives himself a fighting chance. Loop has all three.

Loop said, “We’ve been through a lot of adversity this year as a team early on. We fought, we fought and we fought and worked really hard together. Those guys have had my back, and I want to try my best to have theirs.”

The Ravens believe in him. The locker room believes in him. Now he has to go into an offseason and answer the only question that matters: Can he bury this and come back tougher, or will it haunt him the way it’s haunted others before him?

It has been a long offseason in Baltimore.

And for the man wearing number 33, it has been even longer.

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