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Colts - Ravens Football Game

I took an interest in the Indianapolis Colts - Baltimore Ravens match-up in the National Football League sub-conference championship game or whatever the NFL lexical determinator calls it [You see, there's this person, identity unknown, who makes up the names of all things football-related. In the off-season, that same person is hired as a consultant by Major League Baseball; hence, we have names for the various playoff series and all the steroids the players never use. I digressed, and I apologize.].

Shortly after the first computer hard drive was made and way back before the Super Bowl when Roman numerals were used only by motion picture studios, in 1958 (MCMLVIII), the Baltimore Colts played the New York Giants in the NFL championship game, when the game was actually played in the year the season started, and beat the Giants in an overtime game that was televised nationally by NBC, the first football championship game to be televised across the United States. It is the football game that most assert was the seminal game in the NFL's rise to spectator sports supremacy in this country and the death of any chance soccer may have had to succeed as a major sport.

On the first day of Spring in 1961, before Roger Maris began his pursuit of the single-season home run record in the only sport that mattered, a 36-year-old advertising executive from New York City named Art Modell bought controlling interest of the Cleveland Browns, putting up very little of his own money. Modell made his mark by becoming the chairman of the NFL's Television Committee and, for three decades, shaped the television-viewing habits of football and non-football fans, while filling the team owners' vaults with gold from the ever-increasing revenue packages (including Monday Night Football, which opened with the Browns against the Jets from old Municipal Stadium in Cleveland) he would sell to the television networks.

The Baltimore Colts, along with the Wellington Mara's New York Football Giants, ushered the NFL into the living rooms of the American television-viewing public; and the Cleveland Browns, which broke the stalemate in merger negotiations with the American Football League and agreed to move to the AFL, and its young owner Art Modell were integral cogs in turning the television into a money-dispensing machine for the NFL.

In 1964, the Baltimore Colts dominated its opposition during the season and met the Cleveland Browns in the NFL championship game on a date indelibly etched in the mind of every Browns' fan -- December 27, 1964. The underdog Browns decimated the highly favored, Johnny Unitas - led Colts 27 -- 0 to win the last major sports league championship for the City of Cleveland.

The Baltimore Colts moved during the early morning hours on March 29, 1984, as a snowstorm hit Baltimore, to Indianapolis. Browns' owner Art Modell criticized the Colts' owner, Robert Irsay, for his greed and blatant disregard for the fans and the rich history of professional football in the City of Baltimore. Modell changed his mind ten years later about moving teams around the U.S. and took the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore after his own financial mismanagement of the Browns drove him to search for his pot of gold and abandon the City's rabid fans; and he was forced by those same fans to relinquish the proud heritage of the Cleveland football franchise to the fans and start anew with the Baltimore Ravens, stealing the Ravens' logo from a security guard in the process, some would say in typical Modell fashion.

The Colts, the Ravens, and the Browns are woven together in NFL history, and there was no fucking way I was rooting for the Baltimore Ravens yesterday.

Posted by Bill at January 14, 2007 11:10 PM