It is especially heartbreaking when the decay affects both the mind and the body. We can accept the worst of times when we slow down, fail to push a pile, or miss a tackle. What’s less easy is watching Justin Tucker stare at a field goal that continually falls outside the intended parameters. a painter who can no longer feel the canvas, or a golfer who now anticipates all his shots with a warning to bystanders. Name your illness: whining, trembling, hiccuping…it is a terrible curse that deserves nothing but the deepest compassion.

Tucker is the greatest kicker in NFL history. He entered this season as the most accurate and successful player of all time and still holds the record for the longest kick in an NFL game. This year, he has a career-low field goal percentage of 73.9%, which will almost certainly end his streak of five consecutive Pro Bowl nods. He was asked to explain in every way how he went from the image of machine-like accuracy to a player who I saw just a few months ago talking to Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh after the game and being told: ” Just be.” I’m glad we won.” Another game in which his performance remained like fingerprints at the crime scene.

In fact, Baltimore won despite Tucker, and on Sunday he missed two more field goals and an extra point – more misses than in all of previous seasons. In 2024, he missed a field goal in each of the first three games to start the season and has now missed at least one kick in four of his last six games. The Ravens are the only team in the NFL with a former special teams coordinator as head coach and one of the few a kick-specific coach on the team Who can address more specific concerns more accurately than many coordinators (none of whom are kickers). Every week he’s buried in a sea of ​​microphones, talking about aiming points and launch angles, as if anyone in his orbit could understand how well he’s done his job for so long and how frustrating it is that – for now – he can’t do it longer.

But even Harbaugh must know that Sunday’s 24-19 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles was a breaking point. He is a coach who is wonderfully attuned to the mental game and manages a complex team full of very different personalities. Having been in the NFL for so long, there is a certainty that he can find a way to unceremoniously keep Tucker off the active roster for a while while he uses his craft privately.

Maybe what’s needed right now is privacy, not a conveyor belt of fears that, no matter how hard Tucker tries to contain them, come to the fore every time he approaches the ball to attempt a kick.

The problems are of course diverse. Harbaugh must choose between the heartbreak and absolute hysteria that a kicker tryout would cause in Baltimore and… inaction. The Ravens do not currently have a kicker on their practice squad, but one would assume that even that transaction would lead to difficult questions that he will have to answer publicly. Harbaugh would either have to bet that Tucker will figure it out, or that whoever is currently available on the street could come in and digest the enormity of replacing a popular mainstay on the team who might not want the break that Harbaugh does offers. He would have to assume that his team — which is 8-5 and also has to bear the burden of a home loss in last season’s AFC title game — wouldn’t fall under the wave of cynicism, knowing it’s about the same Offers opportunities to penetrate enemy territory by logging points like spinning a roulette wheel.

For a coach so capable of winning on the sidelines, his handling of Tucker was a lesson in humanity, unlike so many unceremonious departures that have occurred around the league. Unfortunately, Harbaugh has delayed the process long enough.

We are often unable to get answers to our most obvious questions. Last year, we constantly wondered why the Kansas City Chiefs wouldn’t sign another wide receiver when Patrick Mahomes’ best weapons seemed to just drop the ball or get sidelined. Perhaps Harbaugh’s calculations so far have been relatively simple, based on his own knowledge of the locker room and his innate belief in Tucker.

But the parameters have changed now that we can imagine the tangible effect — the literal difference between Baltimore and the NFL’s other best teams. Dealing with heartbreak is never easy, but letting Tucker continue like this will have far more catastrophic consequences.