The Baltimore Ravens signaled what they were about to do with kicker Justin Tucker on Sunday when head coach John Harbaugh said the team’s decision on Tucker’s future would be “based on football.”
Basically, what the organization was doing was saying, we’re going to cut bait on the guy after the disturbing sexual-misconduct allegations that emerged back in January, but it’s not because of the sexual-misconduct stuff, it’s because he missed a bunch of kicks last year, and that was why we picked a college kid in the NFL Draft.
Uh, huh.
After months of waiting to do the inevitable, the Ravens finally released Tucker, 35, on Monday, with the team’s GM, Eric DeCosta, issuing a statement about how “football decisions are incredibly difficult, and this is one of those instances.”
OK, yeah, sure, Tucker is, indeed, coming off a season in which he missed a career-high eight field-goal tries, but during the season, observers wrote off the issues with the misses as being related to the health of his plant leg.
And even so, he was 6-of-11 on kicks of 50+ yards, so it’s not like Harbaugh lacked confidence in his guy.
And neither did DeCosta, who in his Jan. 22 end-of-season media avail gave Tucker a vote of confidence, calling him “if not the best kicker of all time, one of the best,” noted that Tucker finished the season strong, and made it clear that he had “every expectation that Justin’s going to be a great kicker for us next year and moving forward.”
That was a week ahead of the damaging reporting work from The Baltimore Banner came to light.
The outlet published an investigative piece on Jan. 30 that detailed accusations of sexual misconduct from 16 massage therapists from eight high-end spas and wellness centers in the Baltimore area dating to the 2012-2016 time frame, so, from the first five years of Tucker’s career.
The details are, to be blunt, not good, not good at all: from the report, the alleged misconduct included Tucker “exposing his genitals, brushing two of them with his exposed penis, and leaving what they believed to be ejaculate on the massage table after three of his treatments.”
“Several therapists said Tucker’s behavior was so egregious that they ended his sessions early or refused to work on him again. And, at two spas, management said they banned him from returning,” the Banner reported.
The women, according to the report, “said they had long wanted to tell their stories.”
“I’ve told people about this over the years, and they either act like it’s hot goss[ip] or a joke. But it was really degrading,” said one therapist who worked on Tucker in 2016.
Tucker, not surprisingly, has denied the allegations, which he said are “unequivocally false” and he described the Banner‘s article as “desperate tabloid fodder,” as you would expect someone in his position to do.
The NFL began an investigation into the allegations within days, and whatever the league is doing with the allegations is still ongoing, with no word on its status or leaks on what the findings might end up being.
As whatever was being done was playing out there, the Ravens used a draft pick on Arizona kicker Tyler Loop, which told you what you needed to know about Tucker’s future, since NFL teams rarely waste picks on kickers.
To say the least, the fall from grace for Tucker is stunning. He was a beloved local figure known for his love for opera singing and his spots in TV commercials for Royal Farms, and on the field, the seven-time Pro Bowler owns the league’s best field-goal conversion rate (89.1 percent) and the record for longest successful kick, with a 66-yard kick in a 2021 game.
Baltimore had made Tucker the league’s highest-paid kicker last year, giving him a four-year, $22 million extension.
None of that money was guaranteed after Year 1 of the deal.
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Chris Graham
