By releasing Justin Tucker on May 5, the Baltimore Ravens sent their longest-tenured player and arguably the greatest kicker of all time to the open market. Nearly one month after the news broke, head coach John Harbaugh gave his side of the internal discussions that led to Tucker's release.

Ravens general manager Eric DeCosta released an official statement on the move once it became public. Harbaugh echoed a similar sentiment on the process, calling it a “complex” and “multi-layered” decision after the Ravens' second day of OTAs.

“It was a complex decision-making process,” Harbaugh said to reporters. “It's multi-layered, it's complicated, but in the end, it all comes back to what you have to do to get your team ready to play your first game. If you step back and take a look at all the issues and all the ramifications, you can understand that you've got to get a football team ready, and we've got to have a kicker ready to go. That was the move everybody decided to make. In that sense, it's a football decision.”

By calling the move a “football decision,” Harbaugh used the exact term DeCosta did to describe the move. The expression bluntly references the 16 massage therapists who accused Tucker of sexual misconduct late in the 2024 season, cases that the NFL is still investigating.

The allegations directly led to Tucker's release, but the 13-year veteran was already struggling on the field. In his final season with the team, Tucker hit a career-low 73.3 percent of his field goal attempts, going just 11-of-19 on kicks longer than 40 yards.

Ravens hosting kicker competition to replace Justin Tucker

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The Ravens certainly held multiple meetings about Tucker's situation before, but the team waited to officially release him after finding his potential replacement. Baltimore took Arizona kicker Tyler Loop in the sixth round of the 2025 NFL Draft. They wound up releasing Tucker less than two weeks later.

By selecting Loop, Baltimore drafted a kicker for the first time in franchise history. As a fifth-year senior in 2024, Loop connected on 18 of his 23 field goal attempts, including 6-for-9 from beyond 50 yards.

Since the draft, the Ravens also added undrafted rookie John Hoyland. Harbaugh noted the two rookies will engage in an offseason positional battle, with one of the two likely succeeding Tucker.