Be prepared for a splash of sporting nostalgia over the next two months.
Banquets and reunions will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the "Greatest Game Ever Played," the 1958 overtime classic in which the Baltimore Colts beat the mighty New York Giants to claim the city's first National Football League championship.
It will be a chance to reminisce about how a town embraced a team, and a reminder of how frustrating it has become to find good football here, not just in Baltimore, but all of Maryland.
Where have you gone, John Unitas I and Roger Staubach (Navy), Willie Lanier (Morgan State) and Randy White (University of Maryland)?
Good football is played in the state. There are communities in which the high school team is placed on a pedestal. Western Maryland College expects to return to the NCAA Division III playoffs.
But at the higher levels of intercollegiate competition and in the professional ranks, the state is a mess.
Division II Bowie State could enjoy its first winning season in the 1990s, but every state team above it on the football ladder went into this weekend with a losing record. In the higher ranks, the state resembles football's Bermuda Triangle: a place where victories disappear.
The state's six most prominent teams entered this weekend with a combined record of 9-30, and the bigger the budget, the bleaker the prospects.
USA Today uses a computer program to rate the nation's 234 colleges which are classified Division I in football. They range from sprawling state universities with rich traditions to small private institutions with start-up programs. Last week "we" were No. 105 (Maryland), No. 118 (Navy), No. 209 (Towson University) and No. 210 (Morgan State).
Towson, with three of those nine wins, has spent much of its football history searching for a comfortable niche. It found a good home last year in the academically oriented Patriot League, but it has to get better, since the Tigers' two-season record there is 1-10.
One of Towson's wins this season came over Morgan State. While the Tigers are celebrating their 30th year of intercollegiate football, this will be the 19th straight season in which the Bears will have a losing record. In its glory days, Morgan State developed three NFL Hall of Famers in Lanier, Leroy Kelly and Roosevelt Brown. Last month, Coach Stump Mitchell threatened walk off the job.
The Bears played a team even weaker than they are on paper yesterday, when they met Delaware State in the first non-NFL event at the Ravens stadium to be named later. Both came in with 0-6 records, and no, it was not advertised as the Game of the Weak.
If you missed Morgan State's homecoming yesterday, the new stadium will get the old college try again next Saturday, when Maryland plays its first game in Baltimore since 1991.
The opponent will be Georgia Tech, and it will probably be another chance for the Terps to end their losing streak against nationally ranked teams, which encompasses 28 games and three coaches.
In 1974, Maryland had one of the best defensive linemen ever to play in White, who helped the Terps to two of the six Atlantic Coast Conference championships they won from 1974 to 1985. Since then, Maryland has been to one bowl, and it hasn't won more than six games.
Navy overachieved its way to Hawaii and the Aloha Bowl in 1996, when the Midshipmen ended a stretch of 13 consecutive losing seasons in Annapolis. Coach Charlie Weatherbie perked up Navy to the point where it won 16 games over the past two years, but the Mids were back in familiar territory in 1998 with a 2-4 start.
The Army-Navy game remains one of the nation's great sporting spectacles. Unfortunately, Navy's other longest continuous series is one of the most lop-sided rivalries in college football history. Navy has lost 34 straight games to Notre Dame. The Mids last beat the Fighting Irish in 1963, when Staubach won the Heisman Trophy.
As members of Division I-A, Maryland and Navy are classified as "major-college" teams. Both padded their win totals this fall against Division I-AA teams, and Navy needed a huge comeback to beat Colgate, which plays in the same league as Towson.
In the 1990s, not all of the news surrounding the state's college teams came on the field.
The administration at Towson wanted to drop the sport in 1990. Morgan State was rocked by a player walkout in 1992, when a female administrator sued the head coach over allegations of sexual harassment. A cheating scandal at Navy the same year included members of the football team. In 1995, Maryland's two best players were suspended because they violated NCAA rules against gambling.
The major events for Baltimore's pro football fans haven't changed the standings, either.
The city got an NFL franchise when Art Modell took his team and left Cleveland at the end of the 1995 season. Baltimore has a new stadium, but the Ravens' infuriating shortcomings are getting old. While most corporations are positioning themselves for the millennium, the 2-4 Ravens seem entrenched in 1975, when Ted Marchibroda was the coach in Baltimore.
Uh, he is again.
Modell bought the Browns in 1961. A year later, he fired Paul Brown, who merely invented pro football - year-round coaches, grading game films, sending in plays from the bench, etc. - as you know it. In 1964, with some of Brown's influence still in place, the Browns beat the Colts to win the NFL title. Modell's team was last in pro football's championship game in 1965.
And what of the laughingstock of the NFL, the 0-7 Redskins? It says Washington in the standings, but the Redskins play their home games in Prince George's County. Coach Norv Turner has dismantled a franchise that won Super Bowls in 1983, 1988 and 1992, but the Redskins didn't become truly horrible until their second season in downtown Raljon.
What gives?
The Redskins' late owner and the taxpayers of Maryland have spent nearly a half-billion dollars on stadium construction and renovations this decade. Are fans comforted to the point of distraction? Instead of passing along their energy to the teams, are fans too focused on the search for the right designer beer?
The Ravens and Redskins can alleviate their shortcomings with better decisions and drafts from the front office, but the challenge is deeper for the college teams.
"Normally, where your heart is, that's where your success is," said Weatherbie, who is in his fourth season as the Navy coach. "Maryland's heart is not on football."
Weatherbie was born in Kansas and played collegiately at Oklahoma State. He is familiar with "Friday Night Lights," the phenomenon where a small town's identity is linked to its high school team. He still finds it hard to believe that there isn't spring football practice in the high schools here, and feels that basketball is the sport of emphasis in the megalopolis.
Factor in everything from lacrosse to sailing to soccer. Are there too many other sporting diversions here?
"Look at Miami," Weatherbie said. "They've got water. They've got sailboats. They've got beaches, all that stuff. It's about where you put your money, where you put your heart, what you want to be known as as a state."
Maryland is the home of the "Star-Spangled Banner." It's the Free State, the Old Line State.
It's also a lousy place to find good football.
Paul McMullen is a sportswriter for The Sun.
Pub Date: 10/25/98