Ravens kicker Justin Tucker had his chance to talk about his pre-AFC Championship Game interaction with Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes and tight end Travis Kelce on Monday and it was Mahomes’ turn on Tuesday.
Tucker said that the issue, which revolved around the Chiefs players forcibly removing Tucker’s helmet, practice footballs, and kicking tripod from an area where Mahomes was warming up, was “kind of silly” and Mahomes agreed that a “bigger deal” has been made of it that it actually was. Tucker said that he and other kickers around the league follow the same routine each week, however, and Mahomes seemed to take issue with that while on 610 Sports Radio.
Mahomes said he can recall “three occasions” when an opposing kicker didn’t move when asked to do so and that all three of them came in Baltimore.
“He does that little stuff, I think to try to get under our skin,” Mahomes said. “I asked him to move his stuff. He got up and moved it, I think, two inches but didn’t move it out of the way. I was gonna let it slide, but Travis got in and moved it for me. And after that, I wasn’t gonna let him put it back down. I have a lot of respect for him as a player, one of the best kickers of all time, probably the best kicker of all time. But at the same time, you’ve got to have respect for each team, and we all share the field, and we try to do that in a respectful way.”
If Tucker was trying to elicit a reaction from the Chiefs players, he accomplished his mission in the moment but it’s fair to wonder what good it did for the Ravens’ larger effort to advance to the Super Bowl.
