That’s what Brown is looking for. During his distinguished career as a kicking specialist, Brown has scouted and developed a lengthy list of kickers that includes Matt Stover, Graham Gano, Stephen Hauschka, Wil Lutz, Tucker, Billy Cundiff, Cameron Dicker, and Kaare Vedvik.
Brown is a stickler for details, not only when he works with kickers, but when he scouts them.
“When I interview a guy, I want to know, what is your process?” Brown said. “Meaning, how do you practice? How many kicks a day do you take during practice? What’s your lifting schedule? What’s your sleeping schedule? What’s your eating schedule? Come gameday, well, what’s your warmup schedule? How many kicks do you practice? How many ‘no steps’? How many one steps? How many two steps? At each end, what do we do?”
The Ravens trust Brown implicitly when it comes to assessing kicking talent.
“He knows what he’s looking for,” Harbaugh said. “He knows how to teach it. The fundamentals that he teaches – he taught me the fundamentals of kicking, way back in Philly in the early 2000s. I learned from him about the kicking technique.
“He’s brought the best out in kickers here. All the kickers that have come through the system here – even when they didn’t become the kicker here, they became the kicker somewhere else. It kind of shows you how good he is at what he does.”
However, everyone knew there would be intense scrutiny on the successor to Tucker, the most accurate kicker in NFL history who the Ravens released in May. Brown said he initially had about 30 kickers on his list and he narrowed it to 10 that he believed had a chance to become a Raven.
“The difference between kicking in Baltimore, which is arguably one of the hardest places to kick in the National Football League, to kicking at New Orleans or kicking in Dallas … I had to find who could actually kick a ball the way that we need it kicked,” Brown said. “There’s not a lot. There’s got to be probably five [or] six guys that came out of this class that could kick, but I think only about two of them could kick outdoors, in my opinion.”