I do not hate Willie as a person. I wish him the best, I just wish he did not go to the Ravens. And perhaps I exagerrated my opinions of Willie’s decision – I don’t blame him, I blame MIke Brown. I cannot cheer for the Ravens, however, because I live in Northern Virginia and am exposed to Ravens fans on a regular basis (many of them are in my extended in-law family). If you lived behind enemy lines, wouldn’t you hate the enemy that much more? If you lived in an environment where you had idiots showing up for work wearing a Ray Lewis or Ed Reed jersey, I think you’d understand. For the record, however, I find the Redskins even more detestable.

In sum, however, even if Jesus, Buddha, and Albert Schweitzer played for the Ravens, I could still not bring myself to cheer for any team that has Ray Lewis on it.

I really dislike the Ravens because their fans complained for years about having the Colts stolen from them only to turn around and steal the Browns from Cleveland. I understand it’s a different game now and perhaps Irsay ushered in that era with his disgusting, shameless, and cowardly actions, but two wrongs don’t make a right.

For the record, most Ravens fans and Baltimore residents weren’t thrilled with getting our team that way, we just had no choice. Consider this, the Ravens had tried to lure the Saints (who were completely falling apart in New Orleans at the time) to move and had also applied for two expansion teams (the ones that went to Carolina and Jacksonville. Despite having a much larger fan base than either of those two cities, and a fan base historically significant in the NFL, we lost out on the expansion deal. Why? Because Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke wanted to control the Baltimore sports scene and felt that with enough years he’d have expanded his fanbase. AKA he wanted more money. Now, the vast majority of Baltimore residents (and suburbans) were never going to root for the Redskins. It’s essentially equivalent to the Brown family moving the Bengals and Randy Lerner deciding that Cincinatti should be Cleveland Browns territory, and thus blocking any team from moving to Cincinatti to restore a franchise there. Now, I realize that Cincinatti and Cleveland are much further apart geograhically than Washington and Baltimore, but the population density of the mid-Atlantic region means that DC and Baltimore have different cultures and populations. I identify myself as a Baltimorean, and proudly so. I have no affiliation with DC. Unfortunately, Paul Tagliabue was close friends with Jack Kent Cooke and thus was not going to go against him, famously telling Baltimore to “build a museum.”

The Baltimore citizens and government were furious. We actually lured a CFL team and joined the Canadian Football League for several years, winning one Grey Cup, figuring we were never going to be able to get an NFL franchise, but the government had other ideas. They basically proposed to give 50 million dollars to any owner who decided to move their team to Baltimore. Art Modell was close friends with Jack Kent Cooke and so Cooke would not stop him from moving his team to Baltimore, and that’s what he did.

Baltimore has the 20th largest metro area in the US and a passionate football fanbase. We’re larger than both the Charlotte metro area and Jacksonville, and clearly large enough to support an NFL team. My family wasn’t thrilled with the way Baltimore acquired it’s team, but we knew that if we wanted an NFL team to call our own, that this was our choice. In other words, we didn’t write the rules, but we did play by them, and the NFL was embarassed by the Cleveland move because Baltimore was willing to do what it took to lure a team, which it wasn’t expecting.

I think the refusal to grant Baltimore an expansion franchise despite the city applying for one several times is what differentiates the Browns move from the Colts move. That, and the fact that there is still a team called the Cleveland Browns (as well there should be).