Kyle Goon: Ravens kicker Jake Moody has felt the pressure Tyler Loop is feeling

It wouldn’t have been a terribly long drive from Ashburn, Virginia, to Owings Mills. Not if Jake Moody had done it direct.

Shortly after being cut by the Washington Commanders in August, the 26-year-old placekicker packed up his D.C.-area apartment and headed back home to Michigan. It wasn’t long before he got a call: He’d been signed to Baltimore’s practice squad. It felt like he had just put down his bags — but it’s hard to complain when you have to pick them again because you’re getting a job.

“I would have hoped for it to have lined up a little quicker so I didn’t have to drive eight hours home first,” Moody said. “But that’s just how the position goes. It’s what I signed up for.”

There are few jobs in sports in which you can lose your gig, then be signed a few weeks later by a team just an hour up the road, where folks in your new town are clamoring for you to take over.

Second-year kicker Tyler Loop spent the offseason feeling heat for his season-ending miss in Pittsburgh. A 5-for-8 showing in the preseason has not smoothed over concerns about his composure in high-pressure moments, and the Ravens responded by signing Moody last week.

Being an NFL kicker is a lonely profession. Though Moody certainly would love another shot in the league — the Ravens are his fourth team in the last two years — he doesn’t view his circumstance as a competition with Loop, but rather a competition with himself to be as close to perfect as he can.

He has been in Loop’s cleats before, too. Once a 2023 third-round pick of the San Francisco 49ers, Moody has twice lost a starting job, most recently to undrafted rookie Drew Stevens.

Dealing with someone else nipping at your heels is just part of the job.

“I could have tried to be a quarterback or something else — but no, I chose to be a kicker,” he said with a dry laugh. “So I guess you get used to it. It’s not my first rodeo now, and you just kind of take it one day at a time.”

Though the Ravens acknowledged that signing Moody was a response to Loop’s inconsistency (“It is a performance business,” general manager Eric DeCosta said), saying the two kickers are “battling” for a job is probably premature. Coach Jesse Minter is still effusively expressing confidence in Loop as his Week 1 starter.

“If you bring a guy in at their position, normally it brings out the best when you’ve got the right type of guy,” Minter said. “I don’t think he’s [Loop] missed a kick since we brought Jake in.”

That’s probably the outcome the Ravens organization prefers given the investment it has poured into Loop since taking him with a sixth-round pick. Loop was 30-for-34 last season, but just 1-for-4 from beyond 50 yards. Baltimore has generally enjoyed extraordinary kicking stability with Matt Stover and Justin Tucker, each of whom had 13 seasons with the Ravens.

But in a discipline that has seen a dramatic rise in the standard for excellence, the “franchise kicker” is an increasingly rare curiosity in the NFL. Only Pittsburgh’s Chris Boswell has an active streak of consecutive seasons with the same franchise of 11 years or more.

“You have the expectation that every time you step on a field, you’re going to execute your job and be perfect and make every single kick,” long snapper Nick Moore said. “The reality of the situation is it’s really hard to do. Kicking at this level, there have been countless guys — some of the best players in the history of the sport at that position — who have had their fair share of struggles. And that’s just the nature of it.”

Moody’s journey through last season illustrates the churn at one of the league’s most scrutinized positions. He was cut from the 49ers after a shaky Week 1 performance and signed to the Bears practice squad. Weeks later, he was elevated to the active roster and went 4-for-5 including a game-winning 38-yard field goal.

The team Moody beat in that game was Washington — which picked him up off Chicago’s practice squad weeks later to be their kicker for the rest of the season.

Moody went 19-for-23 for his three teams. Now, he’s on another practice squad, hoping for another opportunity — if not in Baltimore, anywhere.

“Obviously it would be nice to play on the same team for 10-plus years and just make your whole career out of it,” he said. “But that’s not the case for most guys at our position.”

Moody had met Loop just once before coming to Baltimore, last year when the Bears played the Ravens at M&T Bank Stadium. While there is inherent tension whenever a team has two kickers, the competition is more with oneself than with each other. When Moody competed with Stevens earlier this summer, he tended not to watch Stevens’ kicks or worry about his results. His focus was on his own routine.

When he has struggled, more often than not, Moody turns to another kicker for advice.

“Everybody’s kind of understanding, so everybody’s trying to help each other out,” he said. “It’s not necessarily like, ‘I don’t want to give away my secrets because you’ll take my job.’ No, it’s a good little community of guys, and it’s cool to be a part of it.”

The Ravens are hopeful that Moody will be ready, but not needed if Loop responds the way they hope. Moore said he noticed that Loop has looked a lot more confident and detail-oriented all throughout training camp. Special teamers had fewer opportunities to use the stadium than they otherwise might in camp, given M&T Bank Stadium’s concert schedule and coming non-football sporting events, so the preseason games (and dealing with specific wind conditions in the stadiums) have been more of a trial by fire than in other years.

Moving past mistakes quickly is a hard thing to learn, Moore said, but eventually the great ones learn it. The Ravens have brought in Moody as a backup plan, but they still hope that Loop finds his path this year to being great.

“It takes going through adversity and going through struggles and dealing with that kind of stuff in order to learn and grow and really figure out what your process is, on how you handle failure,” Moore said. “Tyler’s done a great job so far. Him and I have had a lot of conversations over the last few weeks, and I have very high expectations for him moving into 2026. So I’m excited to see what he can do this week.”