Editorial: The Baltimore Ravens Are Not a Home Team and a Few More Thoughts on Fandom
Today is a pretty big day for football fans in our area. The Washington Football Team, who I consider our home team, is playing against the Baltimore Ravens.
Here are a few thoughts:
MoCo is a D.C. suburb, so D.C. sports teams are considered the home team.
- We watch DC news, we deal with DC traffic, we use the DC Metro, etc.
I don’t consider Baltimore a home team just because Baltimore is in Maryland.
- Folks in Miami don’t consider the Tampa Bay Buccaneers or Jacksonville Jaguars a home team. People in San Francisco don’t consider the Los Angeles Rams or Chargers a home team. Someone from Dallas doesn’t consider the Houston Texans a home team…and so on.
I’m a Baltimore Orioles fan because the Nats didn’t exist when I was growing up.
- To me, switching favorite teams is a big no-no. You can do it…but are you really a fan if you switched to a team that’s performing better than your old team?
- I don’t mind the Nats and I’m happy when they’re successful. That doesn’t mean I have two favorite teams, because that’s also against my personal rules.
Though I am an Orioles fan and I’m ok with the Nats, I’m a Washington Football fan and I despise the Ravens.
- I didn’t mind them in their first few years of existence. I remember buying Eric Zeier and Rod Woodson jerseys on sale for $9.99 a piece from Sports Authority priced so low because of how bad the Ravens were. What soured me on the Ravens was the way people embraced them as a home team AFTER their Super Bowl win. Bandwagon = Not for me.
- Who did you like before the Ravens existed? Did you just switch teams? That’s not right.
I consider liking the home team’s biggest rival the equivalent to something like being a student at Quince Orchard High School and walking around school with a Northwest High School t-shirt on (currently one of the biggest rivalry in MoCo sports).
- To me it seems attention seeking and the reasons behind it are usually bandwagon based, though most think up some pretty clever reasons as to why they like those teams from random cities.
You have to stick with your team through thick and thin. It’s very easy to like a team when they’re doing well, which is why the Ravens have been able to maintain the fans that came over to them due to their success.
- In my eyes there’s nothing that should make you abandon your team, including; disliking ownership, poor front office, lack of success, etc.
I get that sometimes we have roots that go beyond where we were born and raised, but is EVERYONE really from Pittsburgh or Boston?!
- If the Penguins, Steelers, Patriots, etc. weren’t as good as they’ve been, would everyone have been a little quicker to drop grandpa’s favorite team?
The feeling of celebrating a home team’s success is unmatched.
- The feeling of joy someone who chose a random team from a random area simply can’t match the feeling you get when a team that represents the area you’re from finds success.
Where do you all stand on these topics?
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10 comments
The Ravens are a home team for MoCo…for starters it is quicker and easier to get to M&T Stadium than FedEx field. If you can get to a stadium in under 45 minutes, you can consider them a home team.
Besides the two teams play once every four years. Nothing wrong with being a fan of both. One AFC and one NFC team
Being a fan of two teams is what casual fans say and that is a-okay, it just means you aren’t a true fan
Full disclaimer; I don’t care for American football period and especially detest the NFL. That said your San Francisco vs LA, Houston vs Dallas, Miami vs. Jacksonville etc argument is flawed. This is more like a San Francisco vs Oakland or even Bronx vs Queens issue… it takes like 40 minutes at most to get from DC to Baltimore on 95. As some have pointed out the commute to Baltimore can actually be quicker than to FedEx. Though like you I generally do prefer everything about the immediate DC area to the Baltimore area I think the one place where if you forced me to choose between something Baltimore and DC where I’d go with Baltimore would be Ravens. A huge part of that is the former name of Washington FT, Dan Snyder and a fan base that were largely complacent with that name vs team named after an Edgar Allen Poe poem (what can I say, I’m a football hating nerd; a football team named after a creepy poem is consequently almost appealing). I imagine there are others that feel this way too. For another out of state parallel, my Bronx raised grandfather was a Dodgers and later a Mets fan because he saw the Yankees as being “the evil empire” and the later two as scrappy underdogs. There can be a philosophical reason for choosing one team over another. I get your critique of bandwagoning or cheering for some random city you have no links to but for me anything Baltimore, DC, (or Arlington, Alexandria, Annapolis or Frederick for that matter) are all DMV and consequently local. You can be from MoCo and cheer for the Ravens as a local team.
The places you are mentioning in your examples all have the same television local networks and they are apart of the same metropolitan areas but Washington dc and Baltimore are apart of different metropolitan areas .
However if you get your TV via an antenna, you get the Baltimore Channels (granted that is almost nobody)…and I can get the Ravens radio as clear as I get the Redskins radio stations.
The teams are close enough geographically that the Orioles blocked DC Baseball for decades, even forcing the Nationals to have to pay media rights to the O’s.
Heck the Bullets (Wizards) used to play in Baltimore and it was not considered a market move.
The Ravens are local to MoCo.
I’m from cherry hill, New Jersey and we are fans of Philly teams because that’s our metropolitan area. We are not fans of Jersey teams or New York teams.
What if someone was born in the 1990’s or the turn of the century? They would know Ravens only because if the dominance
Remember when the Colts left? The Redskins made a hard push to be Baltimore’s team. Seems fair, and Montgomery County thanks to the ICC is closer to Ravens Stadium than FedEx…(well, quicker…not closer).
Henry P and Dave Ha (insert Spider-Man mirror meme)
Man you sound really bitter does the WFT even have a nickname yet?