ExtremeRavens Posted Thursday at 10:19 PM Posted Thursday at 10:19 PM The evening before the Ravens open their season against the Buffalo Bills on Sunday night at Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park, New York, rookie kicker Tyler Loop will do what he always does: Have a cookies and cream milkshake. It’s a habit, Loop told The Baltimore Sun, that started during his freshman year of college at Arizona. The dining hall features an ice cream bar, so during team dinners on the eve of the next day’s game he would mix together ice cream, Oreos and milk. “It just kind of stuck,” he said with a boyish smile. The 24-year-old Texas native is confident that he will do the same in Baltimore, though it won’t be easy. M&T Bank Stadium is one of the windiest and therefore toughest venues to kick in across the NFL, long snapper Nick Moore told The Sun. Loop is also replacing the most accurate kicker in league history, Justin Tucker. The Ravens released Tucker, 35, after 13 seasons on May 5 after he made just 73% of his field goal attempts last season and more notably following accusations of sexual misconduct from more than 15 massage therapists. Just under two months later, the NFL suspended Tucker without pay for the first 10 weeks of the season following a months-long investigation. If Loop is feeling any pressure filling the shoes of one of the best to ever put foot to leather in the league, he isn’t showing it. At least not at the moment. Asked how he is feeling with his NFL debut looming, he said that he’s “excited.” He added that he also feels like he has already crossed that mental bridge. “It’s kind of the same; first regular-season game but it really felt like the Colts [game] was the same,” he said of the Ravens’ preseason opener last month. In many ways it is. Like the famous scene from the movie “Hoosiers,” Loop pointed out that the dimensions of the Bills’ field — 120 yards long, 53 1/2 wide — and its uprights — 18 feet, 6 inches wide — are the same as every stadium he has kicked in since college. “That’s the same thing it’s gonna be on Sunday,” he said. “Having that mindset of I’ve been kicking a football on a big stage since college and now in the NFL. It’s fun. “It’s the same game and it’s the same operation.” That operation is perhaps why Loop, a sixth-round pick and the first kicker to be drafted in Ravens history, has an added layer of confidence. Ravens kicker Tyler Loop watches the ball clear the uprights during training camp. Loop is the team's starting kicker after a stellar training camp and preseason. He says he's "excited" but not nervous about making his NFL debut against the Bills. (Karl Merton Ferron/Staff) From Moore to holder and punter Jordan Stout to the mechanics of the ball being snapped, Loop says that he has been able to develop a much more consistent process than he had during his college days. It has shown. During training camp, Loop beat out undrafted free agent John Hoyland and unofficially made 78 of his 84 field goal attempts before being named the starter Aug. 16. Across three preseason games, he made nine of 11 field goal attempts, including a 61-yarder against the Commanders in the preseason finale. The games will count from here forward, but the process doesn’t change. Though Loop said he isn’t much of a golfer, he does see the similarities between the two endeavors, including the need for a repeatable motion and honing in on the apex of his kicks. The Ravens even use Trackman, a popular ball-tracking device originally developed from military missile tracking systems, that uses Doppler radar and cameras to capture ball speed, launch angle and several other metrics. The farthest distance Stout has seen the Trackman record for one of Loop’s kicks, he said, is 78 yards. To unleash such power and accuracy, Loop, Moore and Stout have to be as rhythmic and precise as a three-man orchestra. It also took time — until about early in training camp — to dial into a process that was much different from Tucker’s. Moore told The Sun that the biggest difference between the two is that Tucker got his timing mechanism — the moment he started his kick — from watching the snap, which is unusual for most kickers, Moore said. Loop, he added, is more traditional, watching for when Stout’s back hand comes off the ground to catch the snap. There are other, nuanced differences as well. For example, once Moore, who likes to wait for the last second to grab the ball, gets set, he has to wait for Loop to move all the way over to his final spot. Once Loop is there, Moore knows he has “about five-ish seconds” before he has to snap the ball. “He takes more time at the back end of it,” Moore said. “Whereas Tuck, by the time he got to his last step, he was ready to go. With [Loop], once he’s all the way over and turns his body, then I’ll go.” Stout then gets the nod from Loop, turns his head toward Moore, flashes his right hand at Moore, who then spins the ball to Stout, who puts it down with a slight lean. All of it happening in a few seconds and with marksmanship accuracy. “Overall I’ve been very happy with what we’ve done the last six weeks,” Moore said. “I’m confident going into Sunday.” And when successful, as it often has been so far, signs and chants of “Loop there it is” usually proliferate through the crowd in homage to the 1993 Tag Team hit song. “Oh gosh,” Loop says with a laugh. “It’s hilarious. “Sometimes if I get recognized in public, I’ll hear [it]. It’s fun. It’s something that my family likes to adopt and make jokes about. It’s been really cool to see Baltimore embrace me like that and made me feel very supported here.” Now all that’s left to see is if Loop will become a hit, too. Have a news tip? Contact Brian Wacker at bwacker@baltsun.com, 410-332-6200 and x.com/brianwacker1. View the full article Quote
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