Lightning in a Bottle, Part II?

Jake Moody and the Ghost of Billy Cundiff

There’s a scene that plays on a loop in my head (pun intended), and if you bleed purple, it probably plays in yours too. Week 18. Acrisure Stadium. Forty-four yards between the Ravens and a playoff berth. Tyler Loop‘s kick sails wide right, the Steelers sideline erupts, and a season dies on the leg of a rookie sixth-round pick.

So, when the Ravens announced Monday that they’d signed veteran kicker Jake Moody to the practice squad, nobody in Owings Mills needed to explain why. Loop missed three field goals this preseason — from 49, 51 and 58 yards — and Jesse Minter, while publicly backing Loop as his Week 1 kicker in Indianapolis, admitted the team wanted every scenario covered. Translation: the leash got shorter, and there’s now a guy on the premises who has made kicks that mattered.

And if you’ve been around this team long enough, this move should feel awfully familiar. We’ve seen this movie before. It starred Billy Cundiff.

Moody’s 2025: From Roadkill to Redemption

Let’s be honest about what Jake Moody was a year ago at this time: a punchline. The 49ers spent a third-round pick on him in 2023 — third-round picks on kickers get GMs fired — and after a promising rookie year (21-of-25 on field goals, per Pro Football Reference), he cratered in 2024, hitting just 24-of-34, a ghastly 70.6 percent. When he missed two of three attempts in San Francisco’s 2025 opener, Kyle Shanahan pulled the plug. Waived on September 9. Career on life support.

Moody then landed on the Bears’ practice squad, got elevated twice while Cairo Santos was banged up, and went 8-of-9 — including a walk-off 38-yarder on Monday Night Football in Washington to beat the Commanders, hours after being elevated and while he was still learning his teammates’ names. Washington liked what it saw enough to sign him off Chicago’s practice squad in November, and Moody went 10-of-11 on field goals and 10-of-11 on extra points over six games.

Add it up: 19-of-23 across nine games with three teams. And after that Week 1 disaster in Santa Clara, he was 18-of-20 the rest of the way. That’s not a guy who’s finished. That’s a guy who got knocked down, changed area codes twice, and kept making kicks.

He lost the Commanders’ job this summer to undrafted rookie Drew Stevens and was cut on August 17. Two weeks later, he’s a Raven — reunited, not incidentally, with Minter, who was Michigan’s defensive coordinator while Moody was winning hardware in Ann Arbor.

The Cundiff Blueprint

Now rewind to 2009. The Ravens let Matt Stover walk and handed the job to a young leg named Steve Hauschka. It went badly — four misses in nine games — and by mid-November Baltimore was holding kicker tryouts. Enter Billy Cundiff, an undrafted journeyman out of Drake who had washed out of Dallas and then bounced through the offseason rosters of Tampa Bay, Green Bay, New Orleans, Atlanta, Kansas City and Detroit. Now that’s a journeyman! In September of 2009, Cleveland signed him off the street when Phil Dawson got hurt; he went a perfect 6-for-6 in five games, and the Browns waived him anyway.

The Ravens signed him on November 18, 2009, and let’s not romanticize the regular season: per Pro Football Reference, Cundiff went 12-of-17 in seven games for Baltimore — 70.6 percent, 0-for-2 from 50-plus, long of 46. Combined with the Cleveland stint, his 2009 line was 18-of-23. Serviceable. Unspectacular. A Band-Aid, not a cure. (Though he was a perfect 3-for-3 in that postseason, including the wild-card beatdown in Foxborough.)

Sound familiar? A former team’s castoff, a mid-season lifeline, a modest but steady audition. Moody’s 2025 (19-of-23, three teams) and Cundiff’s 2009 (18-of-23, two teams) are practically the same season separated by sixteen years. Right down to the percentage — 82.6 for Moody, 78.3 for Cundiff.

Enter 2010

Here’s where the story gets good. The Ravens brought Cundiff back in 2010 as the incumbent nobody was excited about, and he delivered one of the best kicking seasons in franchise history: 26-of-29 (89.7 percent), a perfect 39-of-39 on extra points, 117 points — and the part people forget, a league-leading 40 touchbacks, which tied the NFL record at the time, from a guy kicking outdoors at M&T Bank Stadium. First-team All-Pro. Pro Bowl. The Golden Toe Award. That January, the Ravens gave him a five-year deal.

An undrafted kicker from Drake, cut by half the league, became an All-Pro at age 30 in Baltimore. It’s one of the great specialist reclamation stories the NFL has produced. And it’s the exact arc GM Eric DeCosta is quietly hoping he might have just stashed on the practice squad — with one caveat. I’ll get back to this.

Moody vs. Loop: The Tale of the Tape

Before we start fitting Moody for the job, let’s be fair to the kid who has it. Tyler Loop’s rookie season was, by the raw numbers, better than anything Moody has done in the NFL: 30-of-34 on field goals (88.2 percent) and 44-of-46 on extra points. Inside 50 yards, he missed exactly once all season. The problem is which one — the 44-yarder in Pittsburgh with the season on the line. And the other problem lives beyond 50, where Loop went just 1-of-4.

Which is genuinely strange, because the leg is not the issue. This is a kicker who owns a 62-yard field goal at Arizona — a school record — who bombed a 61-yarder in last year’s preseason finale against Washington, and who drilled kicks from 56 and 60 in front of a packed practice at M&T Bank Stadium last summer. The Ravens made Loop the first drafted kicker in franchise history because of that leg. The raw power is elite; the in-game conversion of it, so far, is not.

Moody is the inverse. Nobody would call his leg elite — but it’s plenty. Per Pro Football Reference, his career long is 57, and he’s 8-of-14 from 50-plus for his career, and as a rookie he calmly drilled to go ahead 53-yarder with under 2 minutes left in a Super Bowl LVIII. He also opened the scoring in that Super Bowl game against the Chiefs with a 55 yard FG. That’s a rookie staring down pressure.

A ROOKIE KICKER just hit a 53-yard field goal to take the lead in the final two minutes of the Super Bowl.

Absolutely clutch by Jake Moody. There have only been five field goals of 53 yards or more in Super Bowl history, Moody has TWO of them. #49erspic.twitter.com/OlbYxMMQe6

— John Breech (@johnbreech) February 12, 2024

Moody’s problem was never distance; it was the mid-range yips of 2024, which he appears to have exorcised across his 2025 walkabout. If Loop is a howitzer with a scope problem, Moody is a rifle that jammed once and has been firing clean since.

The Michigan Pedigree

And don’t sleep on what Moody was before the NFL chewed him up. At Michigan, he won the 2021 Lou Groza Award as the nation’s best kicker, earned consensus All-American honors that season while hitting 22-of-24 field goals with a perfect 56-of-56 on extra points, added second-team All-American honors in 2022, and was named Big Ten Kicker of the Year twice. San Francisco taking him at pick 99 wasn’t charity — it was a bet on one of the most decorated college kickers of his era. The talent that made him a third-rounder didn’t evaporate; it got buried under a bad 2024 and a trigger-happy head coach.

Can He Make the Cundiff Leap?

The ingredients are there, but the recipe is different.

The parallels are real. Like Cundiff in November 2009, Moody arrives in Baltimore at his lowest market value, with a modest-but-encouraging bounce-back season in his pocket, joining an organization that has historically been very, very good to kickers — Stover, Cundiff’s 2010, and a decade-plus of Justin Tucker say hello. Moody is 26. Cundiff didn’t have his All-Pro year until 30. If the Ravens’ kicking infrastructure — the operation, the coaching, the outdoor reps at M&T — could turn Cundiff into an All-Pro, it’s not crazy to think it could restore a former Groza winner.

But there’s one nuance that makes the comparison a little disjointed. Cundiff walked into a vacancy. Hauschka was gone; the job was his to keep. Moody walks down a hallway and into a room occupied by the “operation”. He isn’t welcomed by all in the room. Loop is still the starter, the draft pick, the investment, and Minter says he still believes in him. Somewhat.

Was There a Better Option Than Moody?

Let’s run the alternatives, because I can smell the wheels turning.

The elephant in the room wears No. 9. Justin Tucker was reinstated last November after his 10-game suspension, worked out for the Saints and the Colts, and both teams signed other kickers instead. He remained unsigned through 2025, he turns 37 in November, and his last full season in Baltimore (2024) was the worst of his career at 73.3 percent. Set aside the football — and the football case is now shaky — the idea of this organization re-opening that chapter after a “football decision” release is a non-starter. It’s not happening, and it shouldn’t.

The cut-down wire? It coughed up some intriguing young legs — Tampa Bay waived BT Potter after a perfect 4-for-4 preseason, and the Giants let go of Jude Sauls, who made every field goal he tried this summer. But those are lottery tickets with zero regular-season resume. If Loop falters in October, do you want to hand December kicks in the AFC North to a kicker who has never attempted one that counted?

That’s the whole argument for Moody in one sentence: among realistically available kickers, he’s the only one who combines youth (26), pedigree (Groza, consensus All-American, third-round pick), recent production (18-of-20 after Week 1 last year), proven late-game nerve (a Super Bowl 53-yarder, a Monday-night walk-off), and a built-in relationship with the head coach. There wasn’t a better free option. There may not have been a close second.

The Bottom Line

The Ravens didn’t sign Jake Moody to bury Tyler Loop. They signed him because last January taught them what one wide-right costs, and because the franchise’s own history — November 18, 2009, to be exact — taught them what a discarded kicker can become with a little help from One Winning Drive.

Loop still holds the job, and with that leg, he should get every chance to keep it. But for the first time since Tucker left, there’s real pressure in that kicking room. And somewhere, Billy Cundiff is nodding. He knows exactly how this story can end — both the All-Pro version, and the other one.

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Stats via Pro Football Reference and NFL.com.

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