Ravens senior special teams coach Randy Brown has been collecting air miles, so much so that coach John Harbaugh compared him to Santa Claus, as he’s traveled all over the country to assess draft-eligible kickers.

After 13 seasons of relying on Justin Tucker, the Ravens might have a different kicker on the field when the team decides to line up for a field goal.

“You have to look. You always have to do your due diligence, so we will be prepared to do that on draft day if we feel like we need to and if the right guy is there.”

Ravens coach John Harbaugh

Although Tucker is just 36 (kickers can go into their 40s), he is coming off the worst year of his career. He is also being investigated by the NFL after 16 massage therapists accused him of inappropriate behavior during sessions. He denies any wrongdoing.

The Ravens said they will not make a decision about his status until the NFL investigation is over.

For now, they are assessing their internal rankings of who’s available in the draft, as they do for players at all positions.

“Obviously, there are a lot of layers to that whole conversation, but it’s something we would have to do no matter what,” Harbaugh said at the team’s predraft press conference.. “At this point in time, you have to look. You always have to do your due diligence, so we will be prepared to do that on draft day if we feel like we need to and if the right guy is there.”

General manager Eric DeCosta did not commit to adding a kicker through the draft. He pointed out that the Ravens have had success by finding undrafted free agents, which is how they signed Tucker in 2012.

But at least one kicker has been drafted every year since 2012, except in 2015. Three have been picked in each of the last two drafts. And the NFL combine has added a specialists workout, which Brown organized, the past two years.

It’s a workout that looks very different from the bench presses and 40-yard dashes the other players go through because it’s a position that is very different from any other on the field — making it hard to evaluate.

Luckily, the Ravens are one of the few teams with a coach like Brown who is dedicated to specialists, former Ravens special teams coordinator and longtime specialists coach Gary Zauner said. And Brown is one of the best, according to Zauner.

Just as every kicker is unique, each evaluator looks for different things. But Zauner and former NFL kicker-turned-coach John Carney took us behind the scenes of the evaluation of a kicker.

The physical

When a player attends the combine, he is looking to show his strength, power, explosion, speed, agility, flexibility and balance. Kickers need to show the same things, but they might present themselves differently, said Carney, who runs The Art of Kicking Academy in Carlsbad, California.

For example, kickers need strength and speed in their legs to kick the ball high and far. They need coordination, balance and agility to control where the ball goes.

But they will focus on strengthening different areas of the body. Carney said they need strong, fast hip flexors, which is not something that players who don’t play a kicking sport have. They also need to train their quads, groin and adductors.

Despite the importance of athleticism, Carney said some kickers have found success without it. That’s because they’ve figured out one specific skill and become very, very good at it. Which brings us to …

The technique

There are many philosophies and techniques in the kicking world. Sometimes coaches are scared away by unique approaches, although Carney said he believes Brown is the type of coach who can identify talent no matter what. Carney and Zauner agree that one thing trumps all: repeatability.

Zauner said you want to see that a kicker has a repetitive action, from “how to get to the ball, their plant and how they get their foot on the ball, just how nicely they kick the ball, and then that nice rotation you get on the ball.”

And then you want to see those things hold up no matter the situation, from weather to playing surface to levels of exhaustion, Carney added.

“If you’re a repetitive skill guy, we don’t like random,” Carney said.

And should something break down, and they miss, Zauner said the amount they miss by matters. Because good kickers miss only by a foot to a yard, despite the variables around them.

The mental

If the kicker misses a field goal, how does he respond?

This is perhaps the most important part of the evaluation: the mental aspect. As Zauner pointed out, the difference between college kickers who make it in the NFL and those who don’t comes down to the “six inches between their ears.”

There are a lot of aspects to the mental side of it: toughness, focus, intelligence, confidence and work habits, to name a few.

Carney said one of the most common things evaluators ask kickers is “Tell us when you had a kick that you missed that was an important kick, a kick that meant something to the game.” And the follow-up question is, “OK, how did you get yourself back on track? When did you get yourself back on track?”

The response reveals a player’s maturity, his ability to correct and his ability to move on. That’s also something coaches watch for when they see players in person.

Zauner is big on reading body language. He said he will play little “mental games,” like letting kickers warm up with one ball and switching the ball to see if it shakes them. He’ll start them out with the farthest kicks to see how they rebound if they miss. And he also watches their response to the rest of their team.

“The thing that sometimes people don’t think about is the snapper and the holder,” Zauner said. “And that also plays into the mind that, if you don’t have a real good snapper and you don’t have a great holder, then they don’t have confidence.”

Even if things go well and the kicker makes a field goal, there’s a lot to learn from watching him in person, Carney said. He likes to observe how the demeanor changes over the course of a workout.

“You can tell [by] about kick five or six or seven who can stay locked in and focus and the guys that start to lose it, and they start getting chatty, and they start getting a little distracted, and their process starts to vary a little bit,” Carney said.

In an NFL game, they’ve got to focus for three hours, whether they’re on the field or not, Carney said. Although they don’t need to stay 100% locked in because that could lead to mental burnout, they have to think about game situations and the changing environment to “see if wind’s changing, shadows are changing, temperatures are changing, the field conditions, if it’s a grass field, are changing.”

The experience

One of Zauner’s favorite questions when evaluating a kicker is “How many game-winners have you kicked?”

You’d be surprised by the answer, he said. Sometimes the kickers at the best programs have the least experience because their team is always up big. It’s not their fault, but it leaves a gap in their education.

“Coaches can practice — you see out at the field, ‘Oh, let’s go get around the guy. Let’s all scream at him,’” Zauner said. “Well, it’s not the same as being in the stadium and saying, ‘OK, you got to make this to win the Super Bowl.’”

Meanwhile, Carney noticed that one of the important experiences a kicker should have is kicking in adverse weather conditions. Back when the Pac-12 was a power conference, Carney saw a lot of exceptional college kickers fail at the NFL level. Why? On the West Coast, they had little experience with the rain, sleet and snow found in so many NFL stadiums.

And the AFC North has all kinds of weather.

Zauner and Carney agreed that many can be drawn to kickers with good legs, but in this situation, a touch kicker (“meaning they hit the ball really well; 99% of the time it just comes off the right part of the foot because they’re just that talented,” Carney said) will find the most success. And then they need to combine that with intelligence, knowing how to pick the right target lines and working with the elements instead of against them.

The prospects

Zauner was not as impressed with the draft pool as others. Although he said he hasn’t seen all of the kickers live, from what he’s evaluated, he feels there are some who deserve a look, but no one jumps off the page.

Only four kickers were invited to the combine, although the number is usually low. They all came from college football: Andres Borregales from Miami, Ryan Fitzgerald from Florida State, Ben Sauls from Pittsburgh and Tyler Loop from Arizona.

The specialists’ workout featured nine more kickers, according to ESPN, including international prospects.

Fitzgerald had the best field goal percentage last season (100%). Borregales has the highest career field goal percentage (86%). Loop has hit the longest field goal in a game (62 yards). He and Fitzgerald both hit 60-yard field goals at the combine.

But at the specialists’ workout, a player from the German football league, Lenny Krieg, had the most reliable performance (14-for-14), combined with a 55-yard field goal.

Although Sauls doesn’t top any of the categories, he has something the rest of them don’t: experience kicking at the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Acrisure Stadium, where Pitt plays its home games. It’s one of the most difficult places to kick in the NFL, Carney said. And the Ravens play there every year. They lost last year to a team that didn’t score a touchdown but made six field goals.

However, Sauls is unique in that he’s a left-footed kicker. That may scare teams away because of the work it will take to change the field goal operation.

The Ravens may look to add a young kicker whom they can develop, especially because they have a coach like Brown, but Zauner pointed out one other factor.

The Ravens are a playoff team.

And nothing beats experience. So should the Ravens need a new kicker this season, when they hope to take another shot at reaching the Super Bowl, they might look to available veterans who have proven they can make a kick with the season on the line.