September 1, 1996

Although the Baltimore Ravens enter league history in 1996, they were not a true expansion team. Art Modell was moving the Browns out of Cleveland after a series of setbacks and fights with the city government, but it wouldn’t do for them to become the Baltimore Browns. For one thing, the City of Cleveland was suing for the breaking of the lease of Cleveland Stadium, and were joined in their suit by a few scattered fans who had the retainer and filing fee to spare. The NFL eventually settled the dispute in the fashion of Solomon. Baltimore would get the team, with its roster and front office personnel continuing on their existing contracts, under a new name. The city of Cleveland would keep all records, trademarks, and history related to the Browns.

This arrangement suited Baltimore better than the Baltimore Browns would have. Many fans still had bad memories of when the Baltimore Colts moved out of town to Indianapolis in a Mayflower moving truck, and were leery of benefitting from another team doing the same thing. They were thought to be the leading candidate in the 1995 round of expansion, and were shocked when they were passed over for Jacksonville. Baltimore still had a passionate fanbase, demonstrated by their managing to draw over 30,000 fans a week to see the Baltimore Stallions, part of the inaccurately named Canadian Football League. They still had league legend Johnny Unitas, so enraged by the Colts’ departure that he refused to give his memorabilia to the NFL Hall of Fame in Canton, donating it instead to local concern The Babe Ruth Museum. They even still had the marching band, a local volunteer group whose uniforms were at the dry cleaners the night the team moved. They continued to play local events, in defiance, as the Baltimore Colts Marching Band, and served as an offbeat political action committee to bring the NFL back.

Art Modell was still an outsider, and still had to prove himself to fans of the newly christened Ravens. With that in mind, the first head coach of the Ravens was a familiar face, Ted Marchibroda, coach of the Colts from 1975 to 1979. Before being undercut by owner Bob Irsay’s stinginess, unpleasant manners, and public drunkenness, Marchibroda led the Colts to three straight AFC East titles. In the time between then and his homecoming, he was the architect of the Buffalo Bills K-Gun offense, and in a new head coaching stint, got the Indianapolis Colts within a Hail Mary of reaching the Super Bowl in 1995, but had been let go anyway. Another, smaller, homecoming was also announced. Asked on a local talk show whether he planned to have a marching band in the stadium, Modell replied, “I thought we already had one.”

For all the bridge-burning and bridge-building Modell had to do for this move, he still needed a vote from the other owners to approve everything. The vote was won easily, 25-2, with an abstention from Al Davis, who did not believe in league votes. He had left Oakland in 1981 without a vote, and when he slinked back to Oakland in 1995, he also did not bring that up to a vote from the other owners. He did, however, sue the NFL, claiming they had sabotaged his stay in Los Angeles by not pushing hard enough for the city to build the Raiders a new stadium in Hollywood. It’s hard to picture Davis, a man monastically devoted to football who was never seen in anything fancier than a tracksuit, living and working in Hollywood. Aside from any question of league support, outside sabotage, or self-sabotage, the Raiders, the ultimate outlaws, were always an awkward fit in the city where everyone is trying to be on the inside.

The Raiders were welcomed back to the bay with open arms and no hard feelings, and rode the good cheer to a great start, but crashed badly, turning an 8-2 record into 8-8. One could turn to an injury to quarterback Jeff Hostetler as the culprit, but one could also turn to the coaching of Mike White, as meek and nondescript a man as was ever associated with the Oakland Raiders. White’s west coast scheme of short patterns was a philosophical departure from the vertical game Davis loved, but White was often cowed, bullied and humiliated by Davis in practice and the locker room. That made it hard for him to enforce any kind of discipline on the team, so White stopped trying, even letting a player attacking his position coach pass without remark or even a token benching. It was a shock that White was even back for 1996. Some Raiders talked with jealousy about the defending champion Dallas Cowboys, a team they thought had successfully bucked off its coaches and ran itself, not realizing that their coach was already powerless; they just hadn’t replaced him with anything.

The NFL returned to Memorial Stadium for the first time in thirteen years on September 1, 1996. The Baltimore Colts marching band played again, and Colt old-timers Art Donovan, Johnny Unitas, Gino Marchetti, Lenny Moore and others from the great title-winning Colts teams took the field, and dramatically revealed new Ravens jackets to the crowd, the largest crowd recorded in the stadium sometimes called The World’s Largest Outdoor Insane Asylum. The pomp and nods to Baltimore football’s past was savvy politicking on Art Modell’s end, but it also added a new pressure to the game. As Ted Marchibroda commented afterward, “It would have ruined everything if we had lost.”

That is the kind of the sucker punch the football gods like to throw just to make sure you’re paying attention, but on this Sunday, they were content to let the narrative play out. The Ravens scored first when Vinny Testaverde scrambled in from nine yards out to become the first Baltimore Raven to score a touchdown. Vinny had flamed out in Tampa Bay and was resented in Cleveland for replacing the popular Bernie Kosar. In Baltimore he had a fresh start in the tenth year of his inexplicably long career. The Raiders took control through two touchdown grabs by Tim Brown, but the Ravens chipped away slowly at the 14-7 lead with two field goals. The Raiders offense was ground to a halt, and ill-thought-out gimmicks to get the ball back to Brown, like a reverse, backfired immediately. On the winning drive, Testaverde hit a deep sideline route to Michael Jackson, scrambled again to get the ball inside the five, and then handed the ball to Earnest Byner for the winning touchdown. Byner was able to celebrate and slap hands with Ravens fans in the front row, just as he had in Cleveland with the Dawg Pound.

Not everyone was happy with the ceremony for the Colts that began the day. Art Donovan said he felt used, and wondered, “Why can’t they make their own history?” Donovan is famous for his malaprops, and this is definitely one of them. History is grown, not made, and if Art Modell had shunned the old Baltimore Colts the way Al Davis tried to engineer a hostile takeover of the entire city of Los Angeles, he would have needed to quickly find a third city to move to. Twenty-five years later, the Ravens have made plenty of history, including two championships, with Ray Lewis and Johnathan Ogden, two rookies who started against the Raiders this day, enshrined in the Hall of Fame. Only grandfathers talk of the Baltimore Colts now. History is made, day by day, hour by hour, with subtle recombinants of familiar elements constantly being called new. And for the 102nd year, we will watch thirty-two teams play football, all recognizable enough to be easily loved, all different enough for that love to be spiced with risk, danger, and hope. We are all new. We are all undefeated. Let’s go.