The NFL is regarded by many to be the new America’s Pastime. Baseball had a nice run, but became a bit more global in recent years. The MLB picks up players from all over: Japan, South Korea, all over Central and South America, and even a few players from Canada. There’s even a World Baseball Classic championship series, like the World Cup but smaller.
The rest of the globe already has their own football, which we call soccer. So by default, football has become America’s Pastime because the rest of the world doesn’t want to touch it. Just ask Emmitt Smith. He lobbied, and failed, to make gridiron football an Olympic game.
But for some teams, even American cities weren’t always excited about keeping a football team around. These are those displaced teams.
Baltimore Ravens
When it comes to creating a rivalry in the NFL, few knew how to do it like Art Modell when he created the Baltimore Ravens out of the ashes of Cleveland Browns 1.0.
In 1996, Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell did what so many sports franchises have done before him: got the heck out of Dodge. Well, Cleveland, to be exact. Eventually “Cleveland” will replace “Dodge” in that idiom.
Modell didn’t have to go far. In fact, he didn’t even leave the AFC Central (the division at the time.) Two states and 376 miles later, the Cleveland Browns had moved into a football town that had been maligned since the Colts ran off in 1984: Baltimore. With what may be the most intellectually-inspiring name in the NFL, the team became The Ravens, named after Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven” due to the author being the most famous body in the graveyard.
Who knew that the raven concept would be so apt? With a team continuously built around a hard-hitting defense that caused fear anguish for many an NFL offense, the Ravens franchise went to the playoffs nine time and won two Super Bowls in the short time that it has been around. The Cleveland Browns? They haven’t even been to a Super Bowl. They were resurrected in 1999, and found themselves playing the Ravens twice a year in the AFC Central and then the AFC North. It’s gotten to the point that a Browns fan was caught literally pissing on the grave of Art Modell.
Indianapolis Colts
How did Baltimore become such an angry football town, with an angrily-playing football franchise? It ended like it began: with an angry owner.
The Baltimore Colts were one of the founding fathers of the NFL, back before the NFL merged with the AFL to become the ginormous NFL we know today. Since 1944, the Colts franchise had gone through many name and city changes that today would sound a bit paradoxical. For instance, the Boston Yanks. How this name possibly survived four years is anyone’s guess.
Besides their most well-known game, losing Super Bowl III to Broadway Joe and the New York Jets in 1969, the Colts had a fair amount of success right before the Super Bowl era. They had won the NFL Championship in 1958, 1959, and 1968, and looked to continue that winning tradition in the league merger. It didn’t quite happen. The Colts won their division quite a bit in the 70s, but began a streak of six consecutive losing seasons in 1978. This happened to be the same time that owner Robert Irsay was in negotiations for a new stadium.
Finally, the Colts moved out of Baltimore to Indianapolis in 1984, and left a mushroom cloud of franchise drama in their wake. The city of Baltimore was unable to come through with a new stadium for the team, prompting Irsay to speak to other cities, most frequently Phoenix and Indianapolis. With the loss of their beloved sports franchise looming, Maryland legislature pushed through a law that would allow the city of Baltimore to seize a sports franchise by eminent domain. The law was never able to be enacted, as Irsay came to an agreement with the city of Indianapolis before Baltimore could ever begin what was sure to be the most politically engaging fight of a sports franchise.
Tennessee Titans
You’d think it would be easier to get out of Alcatraz than to get a football team out of Texas, but it did happen once without any sort of controversy. The football team, I mean. An escape from Alcatraz hasn’t officially happened, although there is a possibility that the 1962 escape of John Anglin, Clarence Anglin, and Frank Morris was successful.
That football team, of course, was the Houston Oilers.
The Oilers began their odd travels when owner Bud Adams pushed them to become a member of the AFL in 1959. It was the first of many pushes by Adams, who was the owner of the franchise until the day he passed, October 21st, 2013. Eat your heart out, Zombie Al Davis. The Oilers cam out with a boom as big as Texas oil, winning the first two AFL championships. It was the only championships they would win, AFL or otherwise. The arrival of coach Bum Phillips and his obnoxiously Texan cowboy hat in 1975 brought a higher level of promise, but the same results: playoff appearances without the wins. This was a tradition that continued throughout the franchise’s history, until Bud Adams decided to move the team to Nashville, Tennessee in 1998 after the city of Houston failed to give the Oilers their own stadium after years of sharing space with the Houston Astros at the Astrodome.
In Tennessee, the team kept the name “Oilers” for a whole year until changing their name to Titans in 1999. This may be due to the fact that oil-rigging isn’t quite as lucrative in the Appalachian Mountains as it is in Texas, although not quite as mythical as titans.
New York Giants
The New York Giants have always been officially a New York team, but they haven’t always played or New York. They don’t even play in New York now. They play in New Jersey which, if you ask any New Yorker, is definitely not New York.
The Giants joined the original NFL in 1925, and shared the Polo Grounds in Washington Heights with the New York Giants of the MLB. Hence the term, “New York Football Giants,” to make sure fans knew which team they were talking about. They later moved even further north, to Yankees Stadium in the Bronx, when the New York Baseball Giants moved to San Francisco. The Giants entered began negotiations with the state of New Jersey in 1973 to get the Giants their own stadium in the Meadowlands. Unfortunately, it takes time to build a football stadium, so the Giants found themselves playing at Yale in Connecticut and Shea Stadium until their very own Giants Stadium was finished in 1976.
So is the story of how the New York Giants became only one of two NFL teams that don’t even play in the same state as their name portrays.
New York Jets
The only other NFL team that doesn’t play in the same state as their name portrays is the New York Jets. It’s as if New York decided to rent Northeastern New Jersey for the space to have two football teams.
The franchise of the New York Jets began just like the Giants: at the Polo Grounds. Back then the team was the Titans of New York, which began the teams trials of playing little brother to the more historical New York Giants. The Titans joined the AFL in 1959, and renamed themselves the New York Jets in 1963 when ownership changed hands and the team was moved to Shea Stadium, which just so happens to be down the block from LaGuardia Airport. The problem was that the New York Mets had first dibs on games, leading to scheduling that forced the Jets to play the first half of their season on the road. Ownership came into an agreement with the newly-opened Giants Stadium to play two home games a year there. Those two home games eventually became all home games in 1984.
Unfortunately, Giants Stadium never really felt like home. Besides the name on the front of the stadium, the seats were blue and red, and management did their best to cover Giants logos with what amounted to green-and-white bedsheets to make the stadium more Jet-friendly during their home games. When it came time for a new stadium in the Meadowlands, there was a major technological overhaul to make the stadium as interchangeable as possible, which is currently named MetLife Stadium
Washington Redskins
Thanks to the public relations department of the Washington Redskins, we are now aware that the team name has a long and storied past, a past that probably could have kept things going as far as a team name.
The Washington Redskins came to be in Boston, and weren’t even the Redskins then. They were the Braves. Like their New York brethren, the Braves had both a football team and baseball team with the same name. Well, for a whole year, anyway. In 1933, the team left the Baseball Boston Braves to play at Fenway Park, changed their name to the Boston Redskins, and hired William Henry Dietz as coach because he was supposedly part-Sioux, a heritage that has been marred in controversy and potential fraud to this day.
After a year to learn that Boston was a baseball town and didn’t care to see football take time and attention away from the city’s beloved Red Sox, the Washington Redskins moved to Griffin Stadium in Washington D.C. in 1937, hopped around in the D.C. vicinity, and eventually found itself at Landover, MD’s FedExField in 1997, just on the outskirts of D.C.
Arizona Cardinals
How does a football franchise find itself deep in the desert of Arizona? By trying too hard to fit in with previous cities.
The Cardinals helped create the NFL in 1920. That’s right, they were not an expansion team that was tossed to the Southwest corner of the United States because owners didn’t know where else to put them. Unfortunately, the Cardinals’ first home was Chicago, which was the stomping ground for another original NFL team, Da Bears. The Cardinals held their own for 39 years, but finally decided to join its baseball counterpart at St. Louis in 1960.
After only four years, management began crowing for a new stadium, and threatened to move to Atlanta. The city of St. Louis scraped together the funds to build Busch Memorial Stadium, which became the Cardinals’ home for 21 years until, once again, management wanted a new stadium. This time, the city of St. Louis decided that they really weren’t a football town (even though they would later be home to the Rams), and the gave the Cardinals their walking papers–papers that sent them to Phoenix, AZ, and later Glendale.
Oakland Raiders
When it comes to being indecisive about a home, no one does it better than the Raiders. For now, the Oakland Raiders, but who knows how long that will last.
The Raiders began their football tradition in Oakland as one of the teams of the AFL. Led by owner/manager/coach/potential player and towel boy Al Davis, The Raiders were part of the NFL merger in 1970 and proceeded to show up those old NFL teams by becoming a staple in the playoffs throughout the “70s and ’80s. After the season of 1980, Al Davis began lobbying for improvements to the Oakland Coliseum. When he was denied, he attempted to move the team to Los Angeles, and began a domino effect of owner voting, injunctions, and anti-trust lawsuits that eventually helped Davis get his way: his team to Los Angeles.
By 1986, Al Davis was already hard at work trying to move his team again when it was found that Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum wasn’t exactly in the safest neighborhood, and was so large (doubling as a USC stadium) that most Raiders games were blacked out due to a failure to fill all 95,000 seats. Where did the Raiders end up? Back in Oakland, of course, after the city spent close to $220 million on renovating the old stadium.
Now with Al’s son Mark leading the ship, there have been whispers that the Raiders may move again. Maybe to San Antonio. Maybe back to Los Angeles. Maybe the Raiders will rent out eight stadiums, one in a different state. With the Raiders, anything is possible.
St. Louis Rams
The Rams have to be one of the most disregarded football franchises in the history of the NFL. Even winning a Super Bowl hasn’t given the team much security in staying in one city for long.
In 1936, the Rams were formed as an AFL franchise for Cleveland, which in hindsight is never a good place to start an NFL franchise. They moved to the NFL the following year, and rotated around Cleveland Municipal Stadium, League Park, and Shaw Stadium. Then owner Dan Reeves, probably annoyed that the city of Cleveland didn’t really want to give the Rams a home of their own, was allowed to move the team to Los Angeles in 1946 where they had a stadium, Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, that could hold 105,000 people, which may have been far beyond even the number of people watching football at the time. They played there until 1979, and moved to Anaheim Stadium due to the Coliseum’s neighborhood becoming a little less friendly, but also because NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle had instigated the black-out rule which would not allow games to be broadcast locally if they had not sold out. 105,000 tickets is a lot of tickets, no matter what city you’re in.
In 1990, ownership asked for what any football franchise usually asks for when they’ve been playing in a stadium older than the team’s coaches: a new stadium. Unfortunately, neither Anaheim nor Los Angeles felt the need to help pay for a football stadium when they were more concerned with that ugly cloud of smog looming over their cities, so the Rams began looking to relocate. Baltimore was the first choice but, when that deal fell through, owner Georgia Frontiere decided to move the team to her birthplace, St. Louis.
The move worked out, as the Rams built a powerhouse team with Marshall Faulk and former arena football star Kurt Warner and won their first Super Bowl. Unfortunately, the Age of the Patriots followed right behind that win, keeping the Rams from becoming a dynasty. Instead, they became the exact opposite: a horrible football team.
Now the great stadium issue has come once again. The Rams want a new stadium. St. Louis doesn’t want to give them one. This may lead to a move, either to Los Angeles or maybe even London. It won’t be the first time that coach Jeff Fisher found himself and his team moving when he was just getting the team looking good.
Patrick Emmel is a die-hard sports fan, but you won’t find him rifling through athletes’ garbage cans. Unless he’s “lost his wallet.” You can see more of his work at Sports Jeer, The Inept Owl, or heckle him on Twitter @Patrick_AE.
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