Tyler Loop: Ravens Kicker Career Stats, Draft Story, and 2025 Season Breakdown

Tyler Loop – Baltimore Ravens Placekicker: From Arizona Walk-On to NFL Starter

The Kid From Lucas, Texas

Steven Tyler Loop was born August 4, 2001, in Lucas, Texas, a suburb northeast of Dallas. His parents, Steve and Linda Loop, raised him with two siblings – brother Andrew and sister Sarah – and at some point his father built a custom kicking wall in the backyard. That detail matters. You don’t build a wall for a kid who might be into this. You build it for a kid who won’t stop.

Loop was a multi-sport athlete at Lovejoy High School, lettering in football three years as a kicker and punter, two years in soccer as a forward, and one year in track and field. His first love was soccer – he wanted to play professionally in England – but by seventh grade he could already kick 55-yard field goals. Football won. He finished high school ranked No. 8 nationally among kickers by Kohl’s Kicking, won both the field goal and kickoff portions of the 2019 Texas Showcase, and earned a spot on the Whataburger Super Team. Two-star recruit. That rating never tracked what he actually showed on the field.

Five Seasons at Arizona – Punter to Program Record-Setter

Loop joined the Arizona Wildcats in 2020 as the team’s primary punter. Twenty-four punts, 1,033 yards, 43.0-yard average. A 64-yarder in the Territorial Cup. That was his whole first year. Then he switched positions.

The 2021 season was the clearest proof of concept he’d produce in college: 12 field goals, 12 makes, 12 extra points, 12 makes. Perfect. Not “really good” – perfect. Arizona ran him out there a dozen times and he didn’t miss once. That kind of year either sets a standard or becomes a ceiling. For Loop, it turned out to be a floor.

He went 18-for-21 in 2022, perfect again on 38 extra points. In 2023, he converted 19 of 24 field goals and went flawless on 53 PATs, including three field goals and three extra points in an Alamo Bowl win over Oklahoma. His 2024 senior season is the one that got him drafted. He earned Big 12 Special Teams Player of the Week against Texas Tech after going 5-for-6, was named Lou Groza Award semifinalist for the second straight year, and in Week 11 against Houston he hit a 62-yarder that still stands as the Arizona program record. He also led all of FBS in 2024 with touchbacks on 53 of 56 kickoffs.

Career totals from five seasons: 67-of-80 on field goals, an 83.75% conversion rate, and 126-of-128 on extra points. He left Tucson as Arizona’s all-time leader in field goal percentage. The last kicker Arizona sent to the NFL was Nick Folk in 2007 – also a sixth-round pick, also to an NFC or AFC team that had a serviceable kicker but needed insurance. Folk is still kicking at 40. That parallel didn’t go unnoticed when Loop’s name came up on draft boards.

2025 NFL Draft – The First Kicker Baltimore Ever Selected

Baltimore had Justin Tucker from 2012 through the 2024 season. Tucker – undrafted out of Texas in 2012 – became the most accurate kicker in NFL history and held 417 career field goals when his time with the franchise ended. The Ravens never needed to draft a kicker. Then the NFL opened an investigation into Tucker over accusations of inappropriate conduct involving massage therapists at a spa near the team facility. The Ravens released him less than two weeks after the 2025 draft.

Loop was selected 186th overall on April 26, 2025. Sixth round. He didn’t just fill a roster spot – he walked into a situation where a franchise icon was leaving under a cloud, the fan base was raw about it, and a rookie was being handed the keys with essentially no veteran competition. The Ravens released undrafted free agent John Hoyland before the season to make it official. Loop was it.

In Baltimore’s preseason win over Dallas on August 16, Loop went 5-for-6 on field goals – makes from 29, 36, 42, 51, and 53 yards – and both PATs. He also put a 61-yarder through in the final preseason game against Washington. Head coach John Harbaugh announced him as the starter that night in Arlington, Texas. Loop grew up in the Dallas suburbs; he had family in the stands.

Rookie Season Stats and What They Actually Mean

The raw line: 29-of-32 on field goals, 90.6%, over 17 games. Thirty made field goals is a specific number worth context. Since 2015, only three rookie kickers kicked in at least 10 games and made more field goals than Loop: Rodrigo Blankenship for the Colts (32), Brandon Aubrey for the Cowboys (36), and Harrison Butker for the Chiefs (38). That’s the class Loop joined. Butker went on to a Super Bowl ring. Aubrey became arguably the best kicker in the league. That’s not a prediction – just the company.

His range by distance broke down like this: he was reliable under 40 yards all season and went 7-for-7 between 40 and 49 yards through Week 17. He made a 56-yarder. He made a 40-yarder in cold weather. He handled the early schedule – Chiefs, Bengals, multiple Steelers games – without the kind of shaky run that ends rookie kicker careers in October.

The problems showed up later. He attempted just four kicks from 50-plus yards all season and made only one. The Ravens stopped sending him out on those attempts as the weather changed, which either reflects good game management or something the staff saw in practice that they didn’t want to test in games. Hard to know. What’s clear is that from Week 12 on, he went 1-for-3 from 40-plus, and his kickoff placement inside the new NFL kickoff rules was inconsistent enough to become a talking point.

On extra points, he was 37-of-38. The one PAT miss came against the Browns in Week 11, the same game he hit a 44-yarder to tie it late. That week was its own chapter.

Games That Defined His Year – Good and Bad

Week 4, Baltimore vs. Cincinnati. Loop hit a 27-yarder to extend a Ravens lead to 17-0. Routine, clean, no drama. But kicking in the AFC North with a comfortable lead in the first half is still the job, and he did it every time.

Week 11 against Cleveland was the strangest game of his season. He missed a PAT – the one blemish on his extra point record – but then made a 44-yarder late to tie the game at 16. The Browns had been moving the ball freely, the Ravens were down two scores at one point, and Loop’s field goal was the moment Baltimore stopped the bleeding. He didn’t win the game that day. He kept it alive.

The 56-yarder in the regular season is worth mentioning because it disappeared from the conversation after Week 18. He hit it cleanly. That’s a kick a lot of NFL starters don’t make, and he made it in a regular-season game, not a training camp demo. His arm strength was never the issue – the question was always whether he could place the ball where it needed to land under pressure.

Week 18, Pittsburgh: What Happened and Why It Follows Him

January 4, 2026. Acrisure Stadium. The Ravens needed a win over Pittsburgh to claim the AFC North and reach the playoffs. With 55 seconds left and the Ravens trailing 26-24, Aaron Rodgers – 31-for-47 on the night, without DK Metcalf, mostly working against a defense that had been gradually folding all second half – found Calvin Austin on a 26-yard touchdown pass. Chris Boswell missed the extra point. The Steelers led by two. Baltimore had the ball back with enough time for a short field position drive.

Lamar Jackson moved the Ravens down the field. The team set up Loop for a 44-yard attempt. He was 7-for-7 from that distance range all season. He’d made longer kicks in worse conditions. The kick went wide right. He explained afterward that he hit it too low on his foot – a mechanical error, not a mental collapse, though the distinction feels academic when the season ends on it.

The aftermath was rough. Harbaugh was fired, in part because this was Baltimore’s third consecutive year of high expectations collapsing in December or January. The defense had allowed Pittsburgh to score on four of five second-half possessions behind a quarterback widely considered washed at this stage of his career. The 2025 Ravens had structural problems that had nothing to do with their kicker. Loop’s miss didn’t build those problems – it just happened to be the last frame in the film.

What makes it genuinely hard to write off, though, is this: the kick wasn’t from 60 yards in a blizzard. It was 44 yards. He’d made that exact distance range with his eyes closed all season. The miss wasn’t a failure of ability – it was one bad swing at the worst possible moment. Whether that’s bad luck or something about how he handles pressure at the end of seasons is the actual question, and one season isn’t enough data to answer it.

Replacing Justin Tucker – What That Actually Requires

Tucker’s career field goal percentage is 90.4% over 13 NFL seasons. Loop’s rookie percentage was 90.6%. That number is going to mislead people. Tucker did it for over a decade, in postseason games, with championships on the line, including a 66-yarder against Detroit in 2021 that is still the longest field goal in NFL history. One season at 90.6% doesn’t make you Justin Tucker. It means you had a good rookie year.

Tucker arrived in Baltimore undrafted in 2012 and spent years building the mental database of game situations, weather adjustments, and pressure kicks that made him elite. Loop is 24. He has one NFL season. The reasonable framing is that Loop showed enough in 17 games to believe he can develop into a reliable starter, not that he’s already the player Tucker was at his peak. Those are two different claims and it’s worth keeping them separate.

One structural difference worth noting: Tucker never had to win a starting job under a microscope in training camp with the entire market watching to see if the franchise had made a catastrophic mistake releasing its legend. Loop did. He handled it.

Tyler Loop Career Statistics

College career at the University of Arizona, 2020–2024:

NFL career with the Baltimore Ravens:

What 2026 Looks Like – and the Veterans Question

After the season, Sports Illustrated’s Ravens coverage raised a question that’s hard to dismiss: should the Ravens bring in a veteran to compete with Loop in 2026? The argument isn’t that Loop failed. It’s that he never had any real pressure in training camp, and that the one truly high-stakes kick he faced all year was the one he missed. That’s a reasonable concern, not a condemnation.

Nick Novak – a former NFL kicker turned coach who has worked with numerous specialists at the pro level – has spoken on the mental component of kicking after missed attempts, and the consensus among kicking coaches is that how a young kicker responds to his first high-profile miss matters more than the miss itself. Loop was public about the mechanical error, not evasive. That’s a decent sign, though it’s not conclusive about anything until he kicks in a similar moment and makes it.

The Ravens’ roster situation heading into 2026 is in flux. Harbaugh is gone. New staff, new offensive coordinator, rookie head coach. In that context, Loop’s biggest challenge might not be the memory of the Steelers game – it might be proving himself to a coaching staff that didn’t draft him and has no institutional attachment to his development. That’s a different kind of pressure than a 44-yarder with 30 seconds left, and it’s one that starts in spring practices, not in January.

He’s 24. He’s made 56-yard field goals in NFL regular-season games. He replaced the most accurate kicker in league history and put up a 90.6% field goal rate as a rookie without a veteran presence in camp to learn from. The missed kick in Pittsburgh was real and it cost the franchise a playoff berth. Both of those things are true simultaneously, and neither one cancels the other out.