The University of Maryland has always had a D.C. tone to its sports. Baltimoreans never embraced Georgetown basketball despite having several Dunbar High kids attend the school during the John Thompson era. And those Baltimore kids legendarily spurned head coach Lefty Driesell and Maryland for nearly two decades.
The Washington Wizards are Baltimore’s pilfered NBA franchise, having left the Civic Center for the plush, new Capital Centre in Landover in 1973 when Abe Pollin first deemed them the “Capital” Bullets at his sexy arena on I-495. The Washington Capitals took the ice there during the same year, and many Baltimoreans have adopted them as the one D.C. team they’ve followed and supported over the last 40 years, simply because hockey fans never had a local option other than the Caps.
It’s even more complicated for Baltimore football fans.
There’s been great disdain for the Washington Redskins ever since the Colts left town in 1984, when Baltimore’s NFL fans were fed a steady diet of Redskins games every week on the local television stations. Their games were on every week despite the fact that no one in the marketplace felt at all that Jack Kent Cooke’s team was “local.” Many times, big NFC games involving Dallas, New York and San Francisco were not broadcast locally so that the Redskins playing the Cardinals could be pumped into the Baltimore television market on a Sunday afternoon. For a dozen years, The Baltimore Sun felt compelled to cover the Redskins like a front page, “home” team.
It was an affront to anyone who lived anywhere near the Baltimore beltway, but they were trying to sell newspapers in Howard and southern Anne Arundel County where the more affluent Hogs fans were likely to live.
When Art Modell brought the Ravens to Baltimore, there was already a palpable anti-Redskins sentiment in town. Most Baltimore football fans adopted other NFL teams, rarely the Redskins. Most Baltimore fans rooted against them, simply because they were from Washington, D.C.
In recent years, the bad vibes have simmered simply because the teams never play each other and are almost incapable of playing a big game. Through a quirk in the schedule before the league had 32 teams, the Redskins have only visited Baltimore once in 17 seasons. Since the Ravens entrance into the NFL, the teams had played four times with Baltimore holding a 3-1 advantage. But there can only be so much bad blood when the teams will play five times every two decades even if the fan bases live, work, and play together in an overlapping community. It’s not unlike what New York has with the Giants and the Jets or the Bay area enjoys with the 49ers and the Raiders.
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This makes the game even more important when they do get together, especially when the playoffs are at stake on both sides of the field late in the season, as was the case in 2012.
The Redskins were in the midst of a rare good season under the stewardship of owner Dan Snyder, who is as reviled by D.C. football fans as Peter Angelos is on the baseball side in Baltimore. Snyder sues people, fires people, and for the longest time micromanaged all aspects of the team he bought in 1999. He overpaid a series of aging football players like Bruce Smith and Deion Sanders in the early part of his tenure and mismanaged the salary cap. The Redskins made the playoffs just twice in his first 12 years of ownership.
But it was a bit different for the Redskins in 2012 with the emergence of one of the game’s brightest young stars, Robert Griffin III – a.k.a RGIII or RG3, if you’re in need of extra characters on your Twitter.
Griffin was the first-round draft pick of the Redskins in April and had electrified the NFL with his dazzling skill set of speed, accuracy, and panache. Even with established sports stars like Alex Ovechkin, Stephen Strasburg, and John Wall in Washington, the District had fallen in love with the rookie from Baylor, who was the second player taken in the draft.
