I remember way back in 1998, when I was just 10 years old, I went to one of my first professional football games. My uncle worked as an accountant for the Baltimore Ravens, and he was able to get me and a few family members tickets.
It wasn’t a particularly exciting game to watch; the Ravens ended up getting edged 12-8 by the mediocre Tennessee Oilers (yes, back then they were still the Oilers). Even so, I was hooked on Ravens football and am to this day.
You might wonder why, exactly, I’m telling you this. The reason is I have probably told this same story several hundred times.
That must have been repetitive, you may say. Yeah, well, there are a lot of Redskins fans around here.
The truth is, every time I mention I root for the Ravens, some Redskins fan or another has the audacity to accuse me of being a fair-weather fan. I don’t know how many times I’ve been told that the Redskins came first or that I live closer to Washington than Baltimore, and the only reason I root for B’more is their 2001 Super Bowl victory. Hence, my 1998 recollection/defense.
Of course, the 2000 season is when all this confrontation began. Back at the turn of the millennium, the Ravens had a roller-coaster season. They were led by the best defense in NFL history, despite a mediocre offense headed by the likes of Tony Banks and Trent Dilfer. Despite a rough patch in the middle of the season, when the squad went five games without scoring an offensive touchdown, the Ravens capitalized on their record-breaking defense to power through the playoffs and win Super Bowl XXXV, 34-7.
For a number of reasons, this ascension to the top peeved Redskins fans. First, it had happened far too quickly. The Ravens went from an expansion team in 1996 to a Super Bowl team in 2000; meanwhile, the Redskins had gone 54-73-1 in the eight seasons since Joe Gibbs left. They had only made the playoffs once in that time frame, and they were quickly eliminated.
The second reason the Redskins fans were fired up was that the Ravens had won what they considered a “freak Super Bowl victory.” They considered the team nothing more than damned lucky to have won the Super Bowl after being the playoff wild card and having a passing offense ranked number 22 out of 31 NFL teams.
As a result, many Redskins fans saw the surge in local support for the Baltimore Ravens as a migration of fair-weather fans to the current hot local team.
And at the time, they were largely correct. To be fair, purple No. 52 jerseys were quite the fad toward the end of the 2000 season (to the uninitiated, No. 52 belongs to Ray Lewis, one of the top ten linebackers of all time), and many of the people wearing those jerseys had probably been wearing burgundy and gold a season or two before.
However, I just don’t believe the same argument can be applied today. Two of the Ravens’ last three seasons have been losing ones, and in the one season with a winning record, the team lost its first playoff match. Last season, I had to hide for a few days after the Ravens gave the 1-15 Miami Dolphins their only win of the season en route to their own 5-11 record
The simple fact is it might be quite a few years before the Ravens see playoff action, and if you see somebody walking around in their Ravens purple, they’re almost certainly not a fair-weather or phony fan. While I’m all for a Ravens-Redskins rivalry (and a Super Bowl matching the two would be awesome, if unlikely), Redskins fans need to recognize that the Ravens have a loyal fan base of their own these days, and they need to get over Super Bowl XXXV.
And for those of you Redskins fans who don’t have beef with the Baltimore squad, you might be pleasantly surprised if you flipped the channel to a Ravens game every now and again. Though the team isn’t as exciting as it was a few years ago, Ray Lewis, Ed Reed and Co. still manage to put on a good show.
To the rest of you, I’ll see you in Baltimore on Dec. 7 for the Ravens-Redskins showdown. I’ll be the one wearing purple and screaming his lungs out.
John Silberholz is a junior mathematics and computer science major. He can be reached at silberholzdbk@gmail.com.
