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Justin Tucker‘s game-winning field goal on Sunday night couldn’t have been more perfect.
Tucker, the Ravens’ kicker who nailed a 43-yard field goal as time expired to beat the Bengals, kicked the ball so dead-center that at the time it went over the crossbar, it was almost perfectly between the two uprights.
According to Michael Lopez of the NFL’s Data & Analytics department, the league’s Next Gen Stats ball tracking data shows that the kick would have still been good if the uprights were only 18 inches apart.
This is nothing new for Tucker: The league’s ball-tracking technology has long shown that he kicks his field goals closer to the center of the uprights than any other kicker in the NFL. Tucker owns the all-time NFL record for field goal accuracy, having made 91.3 percent of his career field goal attempts, and the advanced stats show that he doesn’t just make his kicks, he makes them perfect.
