Randy Brown stood next to Pat McAfee the first time he watched the young kicker put foot to ball.

“Wow!” he mouthed to the boisterous ESPN personality as they witnessed the force of impact.

“Though what I actually said were some words you probably can’t print,” Brown, the Ravens kicking coach, noted recently.

He’d already studied Tyler Loop, learned everything you can from watching tape and interviewing the people who’ve coached and raised a young man. (About 50% of the picture, Brown estimates.)

But even the most seasoned observer — Brown has been doing this for four decades, since he himself tried to make an NFL team out of tiny Catawba College — needs to see it with his own eyes.

And, on that late-February afternoon in Indianapolis, Brown was pretty sure he’d found Justin Tucker’s replacement.

Tucker, the most accurate kicker in NFL history, was still on the Ravens’ roster at that point, though his position was tenuous because of allegations that he had behaved inappropriately at spas and wellness centers around the Baltimore region. Tucker denied the allegations, but the Ravens would release him in May and the NFL would suspend him for 10 games in June.

Even if that ending was not certain as the Ravens mapped out plans to build their roster, Brown went into the offseason knowing that, after 13 years of peerless success with Tucker, it was time to scour the country for the team’s next kicker.

He came out of that process with his heart set on Loop. After the Ravens used a sixth-round pick on the kicker from Arizona, Brown’s job turned to preparing a 24-year-old to hold up under the boiling cauldron intensity of NFL Sundays.

The Ravens have long believed that they had not just the best kicker in the league but the best kicking operation, from coaching to snapping to holding to making furious contact with a quarter-size pinpoint on the football. Each step is timed to fractions of seconds, practiced and reviewed with forensic care. The Ravens do it hundreds of times over the course of a season on the theory that such precision will hold up when a frigid wind is blowing and 70,000 fans are bellowing at the critical juncture of a playoff game.

This operation and its creator face an existential test, with Tucker removed from the equation and replaced by a rookie. Talented as Loop is — he finished the preseason with a 61-yard make that would have tied for the second-longest of Tucker’s career — will the method prove just as potent with a different lead performer?

It’s one of the most significant questions facing a team that’s otherwise built to play deep into January.

If you ask Brown, he’ll tell you he’s not worried.

“I don’t feel that, just because of all the guys I’ve ever worked with, I always make sure they do everything they can to be the best image of themselves,” he said. “It’s always kind of been interchangeable. John [Harbaugh] and I are very confident in how we teach the field goal game. Regardless of who the piece is, we love our process of how we snap, how we hold and how we kick.”

Jamie Kohl, the private kicking coach who helped guide Loop’s evolution from high school novice to NFL prospect, sees an ideal match between player and team.

“The Ravens are obviously known for special teams,” Kohl said. “Tremendous, tremendous success. They thoroughly vetted Tyler, and that’s a real tip of the cap to him, really, for the performance he did in 2025.”

This story begins not with Loop or Tucker but with a relationship kindled 27 years ago when Brown met Harbaugh. He was working as a kicking consultant to the Chicago Bears, and Harbaugh was in his first year as special teams coordinator for the Philadelphia Eagles. Their kindred views on how to teach kicking flourished when they worked together on Andy Reid’s Eagles staff in 2004 and 2005. When Harbaugh took over the Ravens in 2008, he tabbed Brown to work under special teams coordinator Jerry Rosburg.

Brown decided the drives to Baltimore were worth it, even though he’d just been elected mayor of Evesham Township, New Jersey, (an office he held until 2018). He has turned out to be Harbaugh’s most enduring lieutenant.

Why?

“I would say [what] it boils down to for me is he knows what he’s doing,” Harbaugh said. “He’s a pro, and he knows what he’s looking for. He knows how to teach it. The fundamentals that he teaches — he taught me the fundamentals of kicking, way back in Philly in the early 2000s. So I think it’s very sound and he’s been proven. He’s brought the best out in kickers here. All the kickers that have come through the system here, even when they didn’t become the kicker here, they became the kicker somewhere else. It kind of shows you how good he is at what he does.”

That list includes Graham Gano, Stephen Hauschka, Wil Lutz, Billy Cundiff, Cameron Dicker and Kaare Vedvik, who didn’t make it in the NFL but did bring the Ravens a fifth-round pick in a trade.

Tucker was Brown’s (and Rosburg’s) greatest pupil, but even before misconduct allegations against him emerged in January, he had stumbled through his worst NFL season, making just 73.3% of his field goals. Brown might have been asked to scout young kickers as potential draft choices just based on that.

“What I didn’t want was someone slipping through the cracks,” he said. “And then I asked John and Eric [DeCosta], ‘Are you guys cool if I, literally, for a month just travel all over the country and see people?’ And they were great with it. They said, ‘We do not care. Go out and see as many people as you can, and then scour the free-agent market, of course.’ It wasn’t just the college guys.”

This wasn’t like past years, when he scouted unlikely-to-be-drafted kickers such as Lutz and Vedvik to develop behind Tucker in training camp. He had to be prepared to draft someone and perhaps bring in another free agent (which the Ravens did with John Hoyland) for a camp competition. That demanded a broader and deeper talent search.

Brown started with a pool of about 30 kickers and narrowed it to 10, including Loop. The NFL had put him in charge of inviting specialists to a showcase, held the day before the official start of the scouting combine in Indianapolis. That mission dovetailed with Brown’s intensive scouting work for the Ravens.

It was there, on Feb. 26, that he met Loop and watched him drill a 60-yard field goal to put his side up in a competition with other prospects.

“Smashes it,” Brown said. “And McAfee’s there, and we’re just like, ‘Holy s——!’”

By then, he’d drilled down enough to decide that Loop was one of perhaps five college kickers who could be developed into a top-notch pro capable of nailing clutch kicks in the weather conditions presented by AFC North cities.

“I’m a straight-ball guy,” Brown said. “You watch this film sometimes, and you see guys where it’s like they’re playing soccer. They’re aiming at the upright and hoping the ball curves in. John and I are straight-ball guys. If I bring a guy in here who hits a curve ball, Harbaugh is going to be like, ‘Are you serious? I don’t coach that.’ But it’s easier said than done, because there’s no guarantee that every year an elite, straight-ball kicker is going to come out.”

Loop showed him the goods.

The young kicker’s impression of his potential guru?

“A lot of personality,” Loop said, laughing. “But good.”

Brown then traveled to Tucson, Arizona, in early April to have dinner with Loop and complete his assessment.

Their chosen restaurant had fountain Pepsi, Brown’s favorite, so that was a good omen.

He liked that Loop had spurned a substantial name, image and likeness deal to stay at Arizona because he was mentoring several teammates in their exploration of Christian faith.

Then they spent the next two hours bonding as kicking nerds.

“He explained to me his process,” Brown said. “It was intricate to the point of … there’s a spot on your foot where you have to kick the football. He knew exactly where that spot was on your foot, and you do it by which lace you want to hit the football on. So what is that process? The process is how am I going to make sure that that spot on my foot hits one inch below the middle of the football, which is our sweet spot, depending on the different size of the football?”

They pushed a few tables aside, and Brown said, “Show me.”

Loop identified his strike point on the ball and demonstrated how he’d lean into it.

“And I texted John [Harbaugh] afterward,” Brown recalled. “I said, ‘I think we have our guy.’”

The dinner was a major reason for Loop’s excitement about becoming a Ravens draft target. “When you find a coach like that, where you kind of speak the same language in a sense of mechanics and process and what goes into being a successful kicker — we were sitting there talking, and a lot of the ideas that were in his head were the same ones in my head.”

He had become a true student of kicking going into his sophomore year at Lovejoy High School in Texas; he began working with Kohl’s Kicking, one of the nation’s top private instructional centers for specialists.

He compared the craft to golf, “something I can always get better at.” He had essentially been his own coach in college. But when he spent those two hours with Brown in Tucson, he recognized a mentor who could help him delve deeper.

Loop did not arrive at the Ravens’ training facility in Owings Mills as a finished product. Brown immediately brought him to the whiteboard in his office and listed six points Loop needed to work on — his distance from the football, for example, and lowering the trajectory of his kicks to counter the elements.

Brown also brought in Hoyland as a free agent, not because he thought Loop would lose the job but because he wanted him to feel the potential stakes of not kicking balls straight.

“Tyler’s got elite [leg strength], but we brought in John Hoyland for a reason,” Brown said. “We brought in John Hoyland because we knew John could kick the ball straight. That guy missed two kicks under 40 in 50-some [college] games, and we wanted a guy that could challenge Tyler and not just turn into a home run-hitting contest.”

Their competition ended before the Ravens’ first preseason game but produced the desired result. Loop’s focus on process never wavered.

“We still literally go through that checklist to make sure we’re hitting all the right things,” Brown said last week. “The plant, the swing, the target, the process. I feel confident that he’s dialing in on his process. When he goes out in Week 1 in Buffalo, he’s going to know what he’s got to do.”

The rookie also needed to fit in with a three-man unit filled out by Nick Moore (the “Lamar Jackson of long snappers,” Brown calls him) and holder Jordan Stout.

That might sound intimidating, given Moore’s and Stout’s success with Tucker. “It was so easy,” Loop said, grinning. “Jordan was like, ‘Hey, just tell me what you want with the lean, and we’ll take care of the rest.’ I held a ball for him how I want to kick it, and he was like, ‘All right, we’re good.’”

For a group used to treating Tucker’s specifications as a North Star, the last few months have represented a return to the lab. They’ve made tweaks, usually driven by Loop or Brown, every week. For example, Stout has shifted from leaning the ball forward to more straight up and down, making it a bit harder for Loop to hit the sweet spot but a little easier for him to keep his kicks straight.

“There’s been a lot of learning,” Stout said. “We couldn’t have gotten an easier guy to work with coming in here. But you know what? This is teaching me a lot about kicking. When Justin was here, we didn’t really talk about all the technical stuff, but now, every day, I’m hearing Randy talk about these technical things and then Tyler back to Randy. If I would’ve known these things in college, I probably would’ve been a lot better.”

Loop has made believers of his compatriots.

“We’ve prepared day in and day out more than I’ve ever seen us do,” Stout said. “I can see it in Tyler’s eyes. The first week he showed up, there was a little timidness. That’s shifted to confidence.”

Now it’s about making sure every kick meets the group standard on three key points.

“Is the plant towards its target at a good distance? How’s our foot position when it hits the ball? And does our swing stay inside the framework of our body?” Loop said. “If all three of those things are hit, the chances of that kick going in are really high.”

He’s not daunted by the idea of lining up for an important kick on opening night in Buffalo, because he has taught himself to zero in on those three points, no matter the context. In that respect, he sounds like Tucker, whose obsessive attention to detail never waned.

“I’m confident in that process,” Loop said. “That’s why we harp on it so much. Come November and December here in Baltimore, it’s a hard place to play. It gets down into the teens in temperature, and you’ve got wind, so you have to be able to trust your process. That’s what we’ve built.”