Despite many roster battles at the bottom of the depth chart, the kicking battle proved to be the focal point of Ravens fans throughout August. Field goals are so immediate – good or no good. You don’t have to wait long for the report card. The Ravens have always had consistency with both kickers and punters over the years. Matt Stover took virtually every kick from 1996 until his departure in 2009, and Cundiff was the next man up. Cundiff, an NFL veteran who had played in eight uniforms before coming to the Ravens, repeatedly said that he believed he was getting a fair chance to kick his way back onto the 2012 squad despite missing the biggest kick in franchise history and all of the weight of that burden.
In the end, Tucker simply won the job. “He just didn’t miss kicks,” Harbaugh said. “I never thought about not bringing Billy back. We weren’t scapegoating or blaming Billy for anything from New England. Justin [Tucker] just went out and won the job. He deserved to be the kicker on merit.”
As the team was assembled in the preseason, questions lingered, but Harbaugh felt great that the team had survived an offseason without arrests, without incidents, without any member of a veteran team blaming Evans or Cundiff for the New England loss. He inherited a fractured team in 2008, and by the summer of 2012 he was feeling good about the unity of the players and their maturity.
But the obvious questions for fans, media, and The Castle staff were all the same:
Is this the last chance for Ray Lewis, Ed Reed, and Matt Birk?
Will the offensive line hold up?
Can the Ravens win the big one?
Can Joe Flacco win the big one?
As Bisciotti knew on draft day in 2008, and as Newsome, Harbaugh, and everyone else in the organization had experienced the hard way — it always comes back to the quarterback. Was Joe Flacco going to be the franchise quarterback who would win a Super Bowl for the Baltimore Ravens?
Flacco, who played perhaps the best game of his career and threw what would’ve been the pass that took the Ravens to the Super Bowl on his last drive in January, somehow went into the 2012 season as the man on the hot seat who had not only turned down a $90-million offer for more than six months, but who had gone on WNST.net & AM 1570 in April and said he thought he was the best quarterback in the NFL. As much as Tim Tebow was the darling of ESPN with a seemingly non-stop Jets theme on SportsCenter, Flacco became something of a punch line for a quarterback who could get a team to the playoffs, but somehow was perceived as “not Super Bowl caliber.”
Short of catching his own pass in Foxborough, he literally had done everything he could do to get his team into the Super Bowl and yet the abuse was seemingly endless.
But the game is won on the X’s and O’s and the execution, and Flacco knew this. Cameron and Flacco had talked about more passing, more shotgun formations, and more pressure on defenses, but over the summer of 2012 it became clear the Ravens would become more of a personalized offense for No. 5. If the Ravens were offering Flacco $90 million dollars, they’d need to trust him to earn that money. He loved the tempo of the no-huddle offense and loved that it allowed him to dictate to the defense both personnel and pace.
