If Ravens fans want to make a trip to Indianapolis at the end of this season, they might want to stop in Cincinnati on the way.
The road to the Super Bowl goes through the Queen City this weekend, and it wouldn't hurt if an extra-large purple-and-black entourage went along to make sure the Ravens feel more at home at Paul Brown Stadium.
Tickets shouldn't be hard to find. I think they're giving them away in cereal boxes these days. The Bengals have had so much trouble filling their house that six of their seven home games this season had to be blacked out on local TV.
The game Saturday against the Arizona Cardinals drew just an announced 41,373 to a stadium that holds 65,535. The Bengals undoubtedly will draw more for a game against a division rival with playoff implications, but that doesn't mean there won't be plenty of tickets available on StubHub. In fact, the last time I looked, there were nearly 1,500 available on the NFL's official resale site, starting at $57. (Update: As of Monday morning, there were about 650 available, starting at $68.)
The Ravens' problems on the road are well-documented. They just completed their first perfect home season in franchise history with Saturday's 20-14 victory over the Cleveland Browns, but they are just 3-4 in the hinterlands. There are all sorts of explanations for that, but there's only one solution that fits all, and that is to turn the final divisional matchup of the regular season into a neutral-site game.
I didn't want to have to go here, but if the Bengals were hosting the Pittsburgh Steelers with so much on the line for both teams, you can bet there would be a lot of black jerseys in the stadium, even with Charlie Batch at quarterback. Steelers fans travel in droves, which makes them like Boston Red Sox fans, just without the irritating sense of entitlement. Plenty of rabid Ravens fans travel, too, but this week, they need to convince some their friends to come along.
"We love it when our fans show up everywhere, and we've had a lot of fans at different games this year, so it would be great," Ravens coach John Harbaugh said. "Are you trying to get me to start the campaign? It would be great to have as many of our fans wherever we play, but I don't want to give the Bengals bulletin board material here and get their fans all fired up."
There's no tangible explanation for the distinct home-field advantage in the NFL, but it's far from imaginary. The decided majority of teams that enter the final week of the regular season with a winning record have a better record at home than away. It's got to be a combination of crowd noise, familiar surroundings and a lack of travel-related logistics, though not necessarily in that order.
Harbaugh thinks the most important factor is the comfort zone each team settles into in its home city.
"It's familiarity with your surroundings," he said. "The fact that you're in a routine at home. You do it eight times a year. When you go play in somebody else's place, you do it one time a year. It's an all-new environment. It's not that you can't overcome it or anything like that. You try to create the same type of routine on the road as you have at home, but it's not the same."
Travel logistics and changing time zones also can have an impact, particularly when teams have to go coast-to-coast as the Ravens and Steelers did to no good result last week. The only component of home-field advantage the fans can affect is the decibel level in the stadium, but that was important enough to Harbaugh for him to make a point of awarding the game ball from Saturday's victory over the Browns to the 12th man.
Meanwhile, Bengals fans are having a lot of trouble pumping up the volume right now, even though their team remains in the playoff hunt, so it might be a good time to inject some purple passion into Paul Brown Stadium.
"I would love to see that, but the Ravens fans already do a great job of coming to the away games," cornerback Lardarius Webb said. "You can always tell when they do the national anthem and they go, 'OOOOOOH,' and we're thinking, 'Oh, we got some people here.' The fans do great to come and support us."
Of course, Ravens fans are among the most vocal in the league, which is partly because of the acoustics at M&T Bank Stadium and partly because Baltimoreans are just naturally louder than normal humans when they get into large groups. It also doesn't hurt that they are able to preserve their vocal cords during the baseball season.
Listen to Peter Schmuck when he hosts "The Week in Review" at noon Fridays on WBAL (1090 AM) and wbal.com.