There is nothing that will quite prepare Ravens rookie kicker Tyler Loop for the burden of replacing Justin Tucker. No guidebooks on following the most accurate kicker in NFL history exist. But Danny Gonzales tried his best last year.

In his lone season as Arizona’s special teams coordinator, Gonzales baked pressure into every practice with his star senior. The Wildcats would start with late-game scenarios — move-the-ball periods, two-minute drills, always ending with a field goal attempt. The end of practice would depend on Loop, too: Make a kick, and the workout’s over. Miss it, and the team runs.

Gonzales couldn’t remember the team ever having to run.

“The young man was clutch,” Gonzales, now Arizona’s defensive coordinator, said in an interview. “He’s the kind of guy that wants that pressure. He wants that opportunity. It’s never, ‘Let’s go score a touchdown.’ It’s always: He wants it to come down to him. And he has ultimate confidence in his ability, which is well deserved.”

With the Ravens’ release of Tucker, a seven-time Pro Bowl selection whose alleged inappropriate sexual behavior at Baltimore-area spas and wellness centers has come under NFL scrutiny, Loop is stepping into historic shoes. The sixth-round pick is the first kicker the Ravens have ever drafted. His predecessor is the Ravens’ all-time leading scorer, one of the most clutch players in NFL history, a Baltimore sports icon.

On Sunday, a day before general manager Eric DeCosta announced Tucker’s release, Ravens coach John Harbaugh acknowledged the limits of his special teams expertise. Would Loop be ready for Baltimore’s pressure cooker?

“I don’t think you’re ever going to really know,” Harbaugh said. “Everything guys do in their first year is like a new day. So if it’s a kicker, every kick is going to be the first time he’s done it over the course of his rookie season. So it’s always going to be a little bit of — certainly going to be an unknown. Whenever you go with the rookie kicker, that would be an unknown.”

The Ravens searched far and wide for Tucker’s potential successor this offseason. Jamie Kohl, the director of Kohl‘s Kicking Camps and a widely respected specialist trainer, joked in an interview last month that he’d talked to Ravens senior special teams coach Randy Brown “a couple of times in the last couple of months” during the predraft process, “and he’s been in a different ZIP code every time I’ve talked to him.”

Brown, who joined Harbaugh’s staff in 2008 as a kicking consultant and worked closely with Tucker as he developed into the NFL‘s best kicker, returned to Owings Mills coveting one prospect, according to Ravens officials. He wanted Loop.

“So I think for us, we kind of felt like we had to draft him,” DeCosta said after the Ravens took Loop No. 186 overall. “We think he’s got a really strong leg, and he’s got a lot of potential.”

There is no doubting that right leg’s strength. Kohl has worked with some of the top kickers in college football and the NFL. Loop, he said, “has as much leg talent as anyone we’ve had.” He’s trained at Kohl‘s camps since he was a sophomore in high school, Kohl said, and in that span, Loop’s hit multiple 70-plus-yard field goals in game-like settings.

“He can routinely hit field goals from 70 yards like [they’re] nothing,” Gonzales said. He often had to remind Wildcats head coach Brent Brennan of Loop’s range whenever the offense crossed midfield last season. “I would get on the headset and tell ‘B,’ ‘Hey, man, you’ve got the opportunity to kick this if we want it’ — which just sounds silly. But Tyler had that much of a leg that we always had that confidence.”

Scouts would come away from Loop’s pregame warmups in awe, Gonzales said. In an early-November loss at Central Florida, the wind before kickoff was something fierce, Gonzales recalled, whipping about “in a circle.” Loop’s field goals cut through the elements.

In Arizona’s next game, a win over Houston, Loop hit a school-record 62-yard field goal as time expired in the first half. The ball cleared the uprights with ease. It might’ve been good from 67 yards. Tucker’s NFL-record kick, set in a 2021 win over the Detroit Lions, was a mere 66 yards.

Tucker had to develop his power early in his Ravens career. Loop’s comes prepackaged. A high school soccer player and sprinter, Loop has “such a fast leg,” Kohl said. Gonzales marveled at Loop’s straight-line speed during Arizona’s practices, where he would match Wildcats wide receivers and defensive backs stride for stride during sprints, if not overtake them altogether.

Gonzales said he tried to convince Loop to run the 40-yard dash at the NFL scouting combine, “just for shits and giggles.” He estimates that Loop would’ve clocked a time in the “upper 4.4s.” Tetairoa McMillan, a former Wildcats teammate and the first wide receiver drafted last month, posted a 4.55-second 40 at Arizona’s pro day, according to The Athletic.

“It’s a special talent that they can use, because he can scoot,” Gonzales said. “He’s a good athlete, I’ll tell you that. He’s more than just a kicker. It’s awesome.”

Loop went 12-for-12 on field goals as a freshman at Arizona, but his accuracy over the next three years fell to 80.9% (55-for-68). Five of those misses came on 50-plus-yard attempts, and Kohl said Loop would need to prove his consistency to Ravens officials.

But the occasional operational shortcoming was also to blame. The Wildcats’ holder in 2024 was a true freshman who was also balancing punter duties. Loop, who Kohl said “took a pay cut” to stay at Arizona despite a coaching change and interest from other programs, kept his patience. Gonzales called his work with the team’s kicking battery “unbelievable.”

“A couple of his misses were undoubtedly failed operations between the deep snapper and the holder, and instead of losing his mind on those guys because of all the things that Tyler was playing for … he never wavered from trying to coach them up and trying to make them better,” Gonzales said. “Which is a veteran move, because for all the things that he had in play, to be screwed up by something that was completely out of his control and to not lose focus and not lose it on those guys, I mean, I think it shows what an opportunity as a professional he has.”

The tools are there. So is the support. Kohl praised Loop’s “great” snap-to-kick time and said the ball “jumped off his foot as good as anybody in this draft.” In Baltimore, where Harbaugh and Brown have helped establish one of the league’s best specialist infrastructures, Kohl said that “there is as good of an opportunity for someone to be successful as any place in the NFL.”

Whether Loop can withstand the psychological rigors of the job is the great unknown. Tucker’s accuracy was inextricable from his poise under fire. From 2016 to 2022, he made an NFL-record 65 straight field goals in the fourth quarter and overtime.

“No matter who got picked by the Ravens, that’s going to be part of the equation,” Kohl said. “And in my opinion, Justin Tucker’s the greatest kicker in NFL history. So whoever’s going to step foot into those shoes is going to have to weather the storm of, if you look at NFL statistics, rookie kickers generally do not have as good of a percentage as veterans, OK? Now if he can make it through, make it through the storm, and get into your second and third and fourth [season], now, all of a sudden, you see the reason why those guys got drafted. Because you’re drafting on talent. …

“But that’s not what’s going to keep you in the NFL. It’s going to be showing up every day and just being a consistent player, where the head coach, the special teams coach, his teammates, everybody believes in him. And I do think he’s welcoming that challenge.”

Loop endeared himself to the Ravens’ Brown along every step of his long march to the draft. At the combine, he hit 13 of 14 field goal attempts and finished by making a 60-yarder. At a private workout for the Ravens, Loop had what he told Gonzales was a “fantastic” performance — a surprisingly confident self-assessment for a perfectionist. After the draft, DeCosta called Loop the class’ best kicker.

During a video conference with local reporters, Loop already looked prepared for what was to come. Wearing a Ravens shirt he’d ordered a few days before the draft, Loop took questions with an easygoing smile and said the word “excited” five times over a span of 10 questions. Asked about the pressure of possibly competing with or replacing Tucker, he cracked a sly grin.

“I think it’s really exciting more than pressure, just because it gives you something to shoot for, right?” he said. “We always want to be improving. We always want to be chasing perfection and learning how to adjust well and make kicks. Getting to follow in the footsteps of a guy like him, who’s been so elite, and get to compete with him and maybe learn from him, that gets me fired up. I’m ready to get up there and start competing and finding ways to win games and make kicks.”