Ravens' Justin Tucker Beefing Up for Kickoff Changes

Baltimore Ravens kicker Justin Tucker is widely seen as the greatest to ever play his position, but even the greats have to adapt their games to keep up with the times.

This offseason, the NFL radically overhauled its kickoff rules with the intention of creating far more return opportunities than before. Tucker, who had 79.2 percent of his kickoffs go for touchbacks last season, knows that he'll have to change his game plan with more returns being inevitable.

"Just like a pitcher tries to develop his stuff, I'm doing the same thing out here. [I'm] trying to figure out whichever we can in our minds gain an advantage, gain an edge, whether that means putting the ball in different spots, making it challenging for a returner to scoop up the ball easily – all of those things we're looking at right now," Tucker told reporters on Thursday.

With the new rule change, kickers may have to come up with tackles far more often than in the past. While other teams have tossed out the ideas of using defensive players on kickoffs to avoid injuries, Tucker wants to be out there getting physical. He's already added nearly four pounds of muscle this offseason, and will likely add more before the season kicks off.

"Like you said, we are in the lab, and, more recently, my lab has actually been the weight room," Tucker said. "This might be really surprising to a lot of you guys and a lot of my teammates because I don't [tend] to hang out in the weight room too frequently. But after watching a lot of these XFL plays, over the last couple years, the kicker seems to be involved in 20-25 percent of the tackles, so I've mixed it up a couple of times, I've gotten in there. But now I've got to get some more shrugs, get the traps going a little but you know just to make sure I'm prepared for a little more contact."

Kickoffs are one of the most iconic plays in football, but they seemingly became less and less relevant with each passing year. Now that the new rules have brought it back into the spotlight, Tucker and other kickers around the league will have a chance to show off another aspect of their games.

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