Beads of sweat still dripping from his coarse black beard, Mark Andrews emerges from the Ravens training facility munching on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. After a mid-June practice under the stifling sun, one of the best tight ends in the NFL needs to get some food into his system. Not just because he’s hungry

“I just got an IV,” he says. “Didn’t eat like I should have last night. I had a huge lunch and didn’t eat too much for dinner. Glycogen storage was little bit depleted. I felt some cramping, so I wanted to get some fluids in me. And a little bit of complex carbs.”

Professional football players have a lot to worry about. Learning the playbook. Contracts. Injuries. Their Madden rating. But only a tiny percentage must constantly monitor their glucose levels while also punishing and pushing their bodies on the field. There are seven active NFL players with Type 1 diabetes according to the nonprofit JDRF (previously the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation).

Mark Andrews is one of them.

Andrews’ disease does not define him: He’s a devoted son and brother, a hard worker, and a loyal teammate first. Last season, his 107 catches and 1,361 receiving yards led all NFL tight ends. Both were franchise records. He established himself as quarterback Lamar Jackson’s go-to receiver, was named first-team All-Pro, and caught two touchdown passes in the Pro Bowl. What might come next for the 6-foot-5-inch, 256-pound star keeps defensive coordinators up at night. At 26 years old, he’s just entering his prime.

But whatever the future holds, Andrews will navigate it while wearing an insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor (CGM) on his hip. Most fans don’t realize the extent to which the disease must be managed on a daily basis. The Dexcom CGM is connected to Bluetooth, which goes to his parents’, brothers’, and trainers’ phones, enabling them to see his glucose levels in real time. (They say he usually handles it on his own—eating sugar if it’s too low and taking insulin if it’s too high—but if not, they text him.) It also connects with his Tandem pump, which automatically administers insulin to him if he needs it. “Almost like your own pancreas,” he says.

Andrews switches out the Dexcom every 10 days. The pump must be reset and its insulin replaced every three days. Since being diagnosed 17 years ago, diabetes has been an inescapable part of his life. Just because he’s reached such lofty athletic heights, that hasn’t changed.

“Being a diabetic, there’s more to think about than just being a regular person,” he says. “It takes more effort to be hydrated, to eat the right things. It’s no easy thing. You just gotta do what you gotta do. I’ve taken that motto and I’ve applied it to almost everything in life. Whatever life throws you, just go on and handle it.”

As he’s proven throughout his career, if someone throws something at Mark Andrews, he almost always catches it.

Growing up in Arizona, Andrews was the most athletic kid in a family full of athletes. The youngest of four, he had boundless energy, be it on the playground, the baseball diamond, or the soccer field. His mother, Martha, recalls dropping him off at school one day when he was in kindergarten or first grade. From there she went to the grocery store, where her cell phone rang.

“It was a call from my home phone,” she says, which was odd because no one was home. “I answered and Mark goes, ‘Mom, will you come take me to school?’ I said, ‘I already took you to school.’ He goes, ‘Yeah, but I left my library book, so I ran home because I didn’t want to get in trouble.’” The school was 2-and-a-half miles from their house.

When Andrews started playing soccer, he was a star from day one. The game came naturally to him, and on the field, he had a seemingly endless motor. If there was an injury timeout, his mom says, he’d drop to the ground and start doing push-ups. Which is why when his grandmother noticed him becoming lethargic and taking frequent bathroom breaks during a baseball game one day, she got worried.

“Mark would never leave a game to go to the bathroom,” Martha says. “We picked him up from that game and took him to a soccer game and he had to run off the field to go to the bathroom that time too.”

A few days later, his father, Paul, a urologist, took him to the doctor. When the diagnosis came in, his parents were devastated.

“I remember sitting in the waiting room, and the nurse and doctor coming up to us and letting us know that I had Type 1 diabetes,” Mark says. “Being that young, you don’t understand, but seeing my mom and dad cry, I knew something was going to change.”

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which the pancreas stops producing insulin—a hormone the body needs to get energy from food. People with the condition must artificially manipulate their blood sugar levels through insulin and food intake. It’s a never-ending dance that requires vigilant attention.

Andrews was just nine years old when his family began carefully monitoring everything that went into his body. “There are a lot of calculations that go on with diabetes. Figuring out what they’re eating, what they need to get through the day. I still don’t like to talk about what the long-term complications are,” Martha says, her voice wavering.

AS HE’S PROVEN THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER, IF SOMEONE THROWS SOMETHING AT MARK ANDREWS, HE ALMOST ALWAYS CATCHES IT.

In the years after his diagnosis, Andrews began giving himself shots. Because he lacked body fat, he would bend over, squeeze his belly, and insert the needle there.

“He never really said, ‘Why me?’” Martha says. “He didn’t ask a whole lot of questions. Bottom line was he understood that if he didn’t do it, he was going to die.”

There were hiccups along the way. Once, after eating too much buttered popcorn at a movie, he collapsed in the kitchen. Martha, who always kept sugary foods in the fridge, rubbed frosting on his gums and forced Gatorade down his throat.

As life settled into a new normal, Andrews’ athletic career continued to thrive. He started traveling around the country playing club soccer. Other teams took notice of the tall forward who was a prolific goal scorer.

“It got to a point where I’d have two or three kids shadowing me the whole game,” he says. “They’d hack at my ankles, and I’d get frustrated. I started getting red cards. My parents thought I needed to play something that was a little more physical.”

Following in the footsteps of his older brothers, Andrews joined the high school football team.

“He was skinny, but he had talent,” says Kelly Cook, his high school offensive coordinator. “His tenacity and grit are what I noticed right away.”

In his first game, Andrews caught a pass for a touchdown and returned a kick for another. By his sophomore year, he was being recruited by colleges. By his junior year, he was a star receiver catching bullets from teammate and future NFL quarterback Kyle Allen. Every college program wanted him. But while most coaches saw his future as a tight end, Andrews was determined to play wide receiver. He signed with Oklahoma—which promptly redshirted him (which allowed him to practice, but not play in games) and switched him to tight end.

It worked. The quiet but determined Andrews accepted the move and dove into learning the intricacies of the new position. By his third season, he was one of the best players in the country. He won the John Mackey Award, named for the late, legendary Baltimore Colt and awarded annually to college football’s most outstanding tight end. Feeling he had nothing left to prove, Andrews decided to forego his final season with the Sooners and enter the NFL draft.

Surprisingly—at least to him—Andrews’ name wasn’t called until the third round. Even crazier, the team that took him, Baltimore, had selected another tight end, Hayden Hurst, with its first-round pick. Andrews was angry—not at the Ravens, but at everyone who overlooked him.

“I think he was extremely honored that Baltimore selected him, but I think it was a chip for him,” says his brother Charlie. “It was, ‘I’m going to go there and prove them wrong.’ He’s done that his whole life. He’s always been doubted, but he always achieves more than people think.”

“HE’S ALWAYS BEEN DOUBTED, BUT HE ALWAYS ACHIEVES MORE THAN PEOPLE THINK.”

Before this June practice begins, Andrews warms up by casually snatching footballs moving very fast out of midair with an almost second-nature ease. For one of the best pass catchers in the game, that’s not exactly big news. However, on this day, three months before the 2022 season opener, the person throwing those balls is. Jackson, the quarterback with whom he’s developed intense chemistry, is not here. Still mired in ongoing contract negotiations with the team, the former MVP has chosen to skip this organized team activity (OTA). (Jackson did, however, attend the Ravens’ mandatory camp later that month.)

Andrews isn’t worried about Jackson, whose work ethic he praises effusively. Both were taken by the team in the 2018 draft, and their on-field bond was instantaneous.

“I remember rookie minicamp, we hit it off perfectly,” Andrews says. “The way that he sees the game is very unique. It feels like every time I was able to look back at the ball and cut a route short, he would see me. He’s been like that from the start. That connection you don’t have with everybody. That’s my quarterback. There’s a special place in my heart for him.”

Results came early. With the Ravens trailing the Chargers in the third quarter of a game that first year, Andrews streaked down the middle of the field. Jackson hit him for a 68-yard touchdown.

“He hit me perfectly in stride,” Andrews recalls. “We hadn’t been throwing the ball a bunch that game but being able to hit at the right time and the right place, that’s what football is all about.”

The respect between the two extends beyond the field. In the summer, the NFL tweeted a list of top five tight ends according to the Las Vegas Raiders’ Darren Waller. Andrews was listed as number five. Jackson apparently saw the tweet and responded by posting, “Mark @No. 5???” He added a laughing emoji for good measure.

Andrews routinely defends his quarterback against the loads of criticism that he describes as “nonsense.”

“If you know Lamar, if you’re around him every day, you see the way that he works and cares for the city and his teammates, this organization, you know that he’s all in,” Andrews says. “He’s said it from the beginning: ‘You’re going to get a Super Bowl out of me.’ And he means that. He’s hungry, he’s ready. To all the haters out there: Go away. Leave the man alone.”

Before these OTAs, Andrews spent most of his offseason at home in Scottsdale, where he lives with his brother Charlie in a four-bedroom home he bought prior to signing a four-year, $56-million extension in September 2021. After the season ends, the brothers have old friends from high school over to what their mom calls the “bachelor pad,” to swim in the pool, play Call of Duty, or grill out back.

“His personality is so humble,” says Cook, with whom he’s still close. “He has this big body and he’s a superstar, but he doesn’t flaunt it. That’s one of the things that makes all the moms of the girls he dates love him. My wife loves him.”

As the off-season progresses, Andrews becomes all business. He usually works out at his outdoor home gym six days a week, then runs routes and catches balls at the local high school. His excellence is no accident.

“When the ball’s thrown, you’ve got to get open and you’ve got to catch it,” says Ravens tight ends coach George Godsey. “I know it’s very simple to say that, but there’s a ‘route tree’ that he has that’s very diverse. Mark can run every route. He loves it and he works hard at it.”

Maybe that’s because he appreciates it just a little more than a guy who hasn’t been through what he’s been through.

In May, Andrews and his mom again put together a team for the JDRF One Walk. Since he began participating in 2019, his team has raised nearly $76,000 in support of Type 1 diabetes research. Andrews spent much of the day talking with fans, signing autographs, and posing for photos.

“Even with all of Mark’s incredible success, he shows such compassion and genuine happiness to connect with kids,” says Michael Simoni, executive director of the JDRF Desert West Chapter. “As his mother, Martha, affectionately says, ‘The kids are his peeps, and he just loves being around them.’”

A business administration major in college, Andrews isn’t sure what he wants to do after football. As last season demonstrated, he has plenty left to achieve in the game. What he does know is that he’s blessed to be part of a tight-knit family, a top-notch football organization, and to be in a position to help others with the disease he’s proven doesn’t have to slow you down.

“I want to make an impact in Type 1 diabetics’ lives,” he says. “The ultimate goal is being able to have that belief that one day we’ll be able to find a cure for Type 1 diabetes. I wholeheartedly believe that we will.”

He pauses for a moment, then adds: “It’s going to be a team effort.”

“With the 28th overall selection, the Baltimore Ravens select Patrick Queen, linebacker, Louisiana State University,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said, live from his basement.

Around 11:45 p.m. Thursday, with the pick finally in, Ravens coach John Harbaugh air high-fived in the direction of the computer screen on his home office desk.

It was late. “A long, long day,” said Ravens general manager Eric DeCosta, who was on the receiving end of Harbaugh’s video congratulations. And the nearly five previous hours were different from all of the other communal draft nights the Ravens’ braintrust has known. “We were together, sort of,” DeCosta said.

The Ravens and all NFL teams, popular as they are, are not immune pandemic-generated social-distancing rules, either. And so for the first-time ever, the league’s college draft—normally an in-person primetime spectacle held at some place like Radio City Music Hall and attended by thousands of passionate fans—went entirely virtual.

In essence, the traditional conference-style War Room at Ravens’ headquarters in Owings Mills was replaced by a home-office-themed internet-based Zoom Room. We saw Harbaugh sitting at his desk amid bright book-lined shelves, and DeCosta celebrating with his three children in his pink-ish wall-colored workspace.

It felt and looked like a fantasy football draft—where John Doe’s around the country analyze and choose players from their couches for fake teams and a little money—except this remote draft was real and the lifeblood of a billion-dollar pro football business.

Young twenty-somethings hearing their names called, like Charm City’s new (Patrick) Queen, have the potential to become household names and new millionaires. All the while, front-office guys such as DeCosta wore collared shirts and jackets, and ate good food (Jimmy’s Seafood, in his case) rather than gorging on cheap pizza and beer, while trusting encrypted league-mandated Microsoft Teams channels and their own custom team IT setups.

Thankfully, it all went off without a visible glitch—from the technology setup to the Ravens’ draft choice itself. DeCosta manned the Ravens’ battlestation from his cozy office, where a half dozen computer monitors displayed information, like the team’s draft board of names, arranged as if they were meetings on a Google calendar.

One by one, the blocks disappeared as the 27 other picks were made. But by the time it was the Ravens’ turn, they still nabbed one of their preferred targets. Queen, a 20-year-old, 6-foot, 230-pound quick and versatile linebacker—who’s a good tackler, blitzer, and pass coverage option—was defensive MVP of LSU’s national championship-winning team in January.

“He plays like a Raven,” DeCosta said. “When you watch the tape, you notice him. He’s a great fit for our defense and a great fit for Baltimore. He was a need, but also the very best player on the board for us. When that happens it’s a great win for the organization.”

Quarterback Lamar Jackson commented from his place on Instagram shortly after the selection and took the analysis further, saying simply, “Ray Lewis, Jr.” Harbaugh noted Queen’s potential after starting just one year at LSU: “His best football is in front of him.”

It was even later, close to 1 a.m., when Queen joined reporters live in a video chat from his family’s living room in the small town of Ventress, Louisiana, where his family was celebrating (his dad, Dwayne, is a former college football player) and a dog barked.

“It was a long, long, long, long night,” Queen said to start, one upping DeCosta’s claim by a few “longs.” And as a few people offered congratulations to the new Raven before asking a question, he responded with a sincere “Thank you,” before answering each query.

On the inevitable comparison to Ray Lewis, a linebacker who the Ravens also selected at the end of the first round back in the day, Queen smiled. “The bar is set high,” he said.

On critics who might say he’s undersized for the rough world of the NFL, he said, “I’m so tired of hearing that,” and added that he’s proven people wrong everywhere from his small Louisiana high school to the big-time world of college football at LSU. “The tape shows.”

On what fans can expect from him, he said, “Ya’ll going to get the most energetic player from this draft, the most passionate, the most dominant, the most studious person that you can get. I bring a lot to the table.”

Those are more than enough reasons for an air high-five.

For instance, Queen is the first player from LSU the Ravens have ever drafted, perhaps because longtime Ravens GM Ozzie Newsome—who was also part of the Zoom Room—played at the University of Alabama, one of LSU’s rivals.

“He kept saying something, but we muted him,” DeCosta said sarcastically of Newsome before the pick was made. “He kept waving his hands then his video went out. That’s the thing with technology sometimes, it can be manipulated. Maybe it was the Russians, I don’t really know.”

To that point, the GM indicated he would have preferred that ESPN didn’t have a camera in his office recording everything he did, one of more than 100 live video feeds coordinated for the broadcast. “It’s a bit unsettling,” DeCosta said.

But, for one night, the whole mere occurrence—from Queen’s authentic answers and apparent skills, to the awkward musings of Goodell from his basement as he announced picks, to the office backgrounds of Harbaugh and DeCosta, and light-hearted jokes—was a welcome respite for pandemic life.

Yet hopefully it’s not needed in the long run. “I don’t think I’ll ever experience another draft like this,” DeCosta said, noting he had tell his kids to be quiet at times. “But I’ll never forget it.”

The reported trade of Joe Flacco to the Denver Broncos—which won’t become official until next month, per NFL rules—shouldn’t come as a surprise. The Ravens made it clear they were moving on from the oft-maligned, Super Bowl-winning quarterback several times over the last few months.

But the news of Flacco’s impending departure does deliver a sense of finality for an era that started 11 years ago and saw ups, downs, the streakiest of flawless playoff performances in 2012 en route to a championship, followed by a much debated monster contract, and all the questions and discussion about Joe Cool’s unassuming demeanor along the way.

The last few years haven’t been great on the field for the now 34-year-old— he was 24-27 as a starter the last four seasons, and he faced several different injuries. The last of those, a hip injury suffered against the hated Steelers (it seems appropriate Flacco’s final game as a Raven came against Pittsburgh), coupled with rookie Lamar Jackson’s electric play in his place, put the strong-armed Flacco out of a job in Baltimore for good.

Maybe Flacco was never elite, as a nation of football fans and local sports-talk radio callers loved to publicly ponder, but Flacco sure does leave a lasting legacy behind that’s comparable to those of other heroes in Baltimore sports history.

Flacco, the New Jersey native and University of Delaware alum with a last name perfectly suited for the Baltimorese dialect, is the best quarterback to ever play for the Ravens franchise. Replicas of his No. 5 jersey hang in closets, restaurants, and bars everywhere. He might not have done things exactly the way you (or Ray Lewis) would have liked, but he gave years of Ravens teams what was needed, a steady presence and dose of understated class at arguably the most important position in pro sports, even as so much changed around him. It’s a career that, in all likelihood, will become more appreciated as the years go on.

Right now, it feels weird to imagine Flacco wearing an orange and blue Broncos uniform. (Though you don’t even have to imagine it; here’s a Photoshopped look.) But, pending a retirement or a catastrophic preseason injury, that’s what we’ll see for real next year. The Ravens, under new general manager Eric DeCosta, have agreed to trade Flacco to Denver for a fourth-round draft pick.

You won’t hear any public comments from Ravens coaches or players about the move until it becomes official on March 13. For now, we’re left with Flacco’s thoughts before he left the Ravens locker room for the final time — “I love the people of Baltimore,” he said. “I can’t imagine a better 11 years.” — and other reaction, like from safety Tony Jefferson, who acknowledged Flacco on Wednesday after the trade reports broke:

Ah, Denver. The site of the “Miracle at Mile High,” the beautiful, cathartic 70-yard touchdown heave from Flacco to wide receiver Jacoby Jones in the final minute of the 2012 divisional round playoff game that was the most astounding of all the moments of the Ravens’ Super Bowl XLVII winning season, and probably of Flacco’s entire Ravens career. It’s a “where were you when?” sort of thing.

There were plenty of other memories, like various rivalry games with the Steelers, and for every cool touchdown pass a seemingly comical scramble, or fumble, around a collapsing pocket. Or when he sauntered into the end zone with a rare touchdown run. Or wore an ugly fu man chu on his face. Or graciously paused to sign autographs or take photos around town (as he did one evening with my wife and dog after dinner; lineman Marshal Yanda was the photographer.)

But that was Joe Flacco. He was who he was, and is who he is. This isn’t an obituary, after all, but it is the end of Flacco’s football time here. (Well, at least Joe’s. His brother, Tom, still has one season of eligibility left as the quarterback at Towson.)

Onward the NFL goes. Flacco, a father of five, will relocate across the country, get paid $18.5 million, and become the source of polarizing debate for another city, while the Baltimore sports scene will move on to the Lamar Jackson era. Flacco himself officially ushered that in with his gracious acquiescence to the 21-year-old (“It’s out of my hands,” he said)—and with his part in the decision to stay on the bench of the Ravens’ wild-card playoff game against the Los Angeles Chargers.

Fans chanted for Flacco to enter the game then, and how could they not? This was a guy who gave this city a whole lot, including a championship and plenty of classic, quirky local commercials—featuring corny jokes and looks ranging from boyish crew cut in a Pizza Hut jersey (Flacco’s Favorite!) to manly makeover and talking to kids while hawking banking services.

We’ll miss those spots, of course, but Flacco will be back this way someday, when his name and number are affixed to a concrete façade at M&T Bank Stadium, alongside all the other Ravens greats like Lewis, Ed Reed, and Jonathan Ogden. Because that’s the company that Flacco keeps.

The drive of Joe Flacco’s life didn’t begin in hostile Heinz Field or even in a stadium. It
originated in the predawn hours of June 13 at his home in Owings Mills
following a phone call from his wife, Dana, and concluded 135 minutes
later in a hospital room in Voorhees, NJ.

“At a quarter to five in
the morning she called me and was like, ‘I haven’t gotten any sleep all
night, I’ve been debating calling you for two hours. I think it’s
time,’” he says six weeks later, at ease on a couch in an office at the
Ravens’ Under Armour Performance Center. “So I was like, ‘Call your mom
up, call your doctor, see what they say.’ They told her, ‘Take your time
but come in.’ She got in around 6:30 and they told her, ‘It’s time,
you’re staying.’”

Flacco was excused from practice, jumped into
his Ford F-150 and raced up I-95. “I left here at like 6:45 in the
morning and got up there around 9.”

The NFL’s most-successful-yet-still-curiously-maligned quarterback was determined to witness the birth of his first child.

“Everybody
was [asking] me, ‘Are you gonna look? You don’t want to do that,’” he
says. “I was like, ‘I’m definitely looking.’ I was right there on the
side of the bed, I watched the whole entire thing, from the time when
you could barely see his head to the time he was out. It was pretty cool
to see him come out.”

A slight smile creeps onto Flacco’s face as
he recounts the day, his most momentous one in a year filled with them.
Throughout a season that included a scintillating comeback in
Pittsburgh and a heartbreaking playoff loss in New England, criticism
from within the organization and a media-driven “controversy” fueled by
his candor—not to mention, contract negotiations that seemingly devolved
from complicated to contentious—Flacco’s public demeanor remained
unchanged.

It’s all white noise to the impossibly even-keeled QB,
who thrives on the steadiness that so maddens fans who mistake it for
stoicism.

“We taught him never let anybody see you sweat,” says
his father, Steve, for whom Joe and his high-school sweetheart Dana
named their son Stephen. It’s a lesson Flacco, 27, has leaned on
throughout his unlikely career, one that’s won him an unprecedented
number of football games but no popularity contests.

“My dad’s my
best friend,” he says. “The biggest thing he preached was being tough. I
think a tough guy doesn’t really show many emotions. Not to say that I
don’t have emotion, because that’s not true. But when things are going
bad, as a leader, you can’t act like anything is wrong. You go out there
and take each snap like it’s the same, no matter what the score is, no
matter what happened on the last play. It’s just the way I was brought
up, it’s the way my parents are. You definitely end up more like them
than you admit.”

“Until I got here, they hadn’t won a playoff game since the Super Bowl year. Every year we’ve won a playoff game. It’s not what we want to do overall, but we’ve had very good seasons.”

If that’s true—and most of us eventually concede
that it is—then, throughout his life, little Stephen Flacco, like his
daddy, will cherish two things above all others: family and football.

Of
the NFL’s 32 starting quarterbacks, Joe Flacco may be the only one
who’s been ribbed his entire life for having a big head—literally.

“His head was always humungous for his body,” says his brother, Mike, a baseball player in the Orioles minor-league system.

“They
call him the Kingdome, the Superdome,” his father says. “When he was a
sophomore in high school he was six-four, 165 pounds with a size 7 ½
head.”

The oldest of five boys and a girl, Joe seldom got into
trouble throughout his childhood in Audubon, NJ, a suburb of
Philadelphia.

“He was very responsible,” his mother, Karen, says. “He was known as Father Joe.”

Baseball
was Flacco’s sport of choice until seventh grade when Steve, a former
running back at the University of Pennsylvania, allowed him to try
football.

“Because I started so late, by the time I got there,
they already had kids who had been playing quarterback, so I played
running back, tight end, receiver,” Flacco says. “I always had a knack
for throwing the ball. I can’t remember a time when we didn’t go out and
mess around and play football as much as we could. I always had a
pretty good arm, so I knew I wanted to play quarterback.”

In high
school, Flacco shot up to over six feet, the first in the family to
eclipse the mark. His father is 5-feet-11-inches, his mother 5-feet-6.
Despite putting up gaudy numbers—he once threw for more than 450 yards
and three touchdowns and ran for two more in a 67-35 loss—Flacco
received only a smattering of scholarship offers. He accepted one to the
University of Pittsburgh.

After redshirting his freshman year and
serving as a backup his sophomore season, Flacco transferred to the
University of Delaware, much to Pitt’s chagrin, where he figured he’d
have a better chance to play, even if it wasn’t in the spotlight of
Division I-A. “Joe is a tremendously gifted athlete,” Delaware coach
K.C. Keeler says. “He’s just got a world of talent, and you could see
that very quickly when he got here.”

Because Pitt was upset that
Flacco transferred, the school chose not to release him, forcing him to
sit out a season. When he got a chance on the field, Flacco led Delaware
to the Division I-AA national title game his senior year, smashing
school records in the process. NFL scouts started showing up in droves.

“I
remember Joe calling me during the whole draft process, and he was a
little upset because [Ravens general manager] Ozzie Newsome had called
two or three times and had asked why he wasn’t a captain,” Keeler says.
“It was one of those strange years where we had a consensus All-American
tailback, who was a four-year starter for us, and we had an
All-American offensive lineman. Those two guys were voted the offensive
captains.

“But the team was Joe’s. He said, ‘Can someone tell
those guys with the Ravens that this was my team?’ The best thing I said
was this team took on Joe’s personality; it never ever panicked. It
played with a steady belief in itself. It never got too high or too
low.”
Apparently, Newsome was convinced.

Baltimore took Flacco
in the first round of the 2008 draft, making him only the second
Division I-AA quarterback in history drafted that high. When the season
started, Flacco was under center.

“Obviously I didn’t know as
much as I know now, but I think the biggest thing for me as a young kid
was to calm my mind down and say, ‘Hey, it’s football, go out and
play,’” he says. “When I was a rookie, I didn’t want to come in here and
step on people’s toes and act like I was some big deal. I felt like I
had to prove myself.”

Flacco and a fellow rookie, head coach John
Harbaugh, led the Ravens to the AFC Championship game, and both were
praised for exhibiting poise beyond their years. Yet, as the victories
kept coming—Flacco’s 44 regular season wins are the most by a starting
quarterback in his first four years in the NFL—his reputation morphed
from a stable leader to a “game manager” incapable of using his arm to
lead the defensively-strong and run-oriented Ravens to victory.

“I don’t think there’s any other quarterback besides Aaron Rodgers that can throw the ball the way that he can.”

“Sometimes
I think people perceive [the team] a certain way just because that’s
what we’ve been over the last 10 years,” he says. “Well, you know what?
Until I got here, until John Harbaugh got here, they hadn’t won a
playoff game since the Super Bowl year. Every year we’ve been here we’ve
won a playoff game. It’s not what we want to do overall, but we’ve had
very good seasons.”

None better than last, when Baltimore swept
the Steelers, won the AFC North division and came within one late
dropped pass of making it to the Super Bowl. Yet Flacco’s play still was
criticized. After a playoff win against Houston in which Flacco put up
pedestrian numbers, Ravens safety Ed Reed said it didn’t appear his
quarterback “had a hold on the offense.”

Flacco nonchalantly brushed aside the comment and proceeded to outplay Patriots legend Tom Brady the next week.

In April, Flacco appeared on local sports radio station WNST and was asked if he considered himself a top-five quarterback.

“Without
a doubt,” he responded. “What do you expect me to say? I assume
everybody thinks they’re a top-five quarterback. I mean, I think I’m the
best. I don’t think I’m top five, I think I’m the best. I don’t think
I’d be very successful at my job if I didn’t feel that way. I mean, come
on.”

Hardly a shocking answer, yet one that created a firestorm.
Anti-Flaccoites rolled their eyes, noting that his 2011 QB rating was
14th (out of 34 players). Of the more than 95,000 votes in a
SportsNation online poll, 61 percent indicated Flacco was not an “elite”
quarterback. Whatever that means.

“Joe doesn’t play games, he’s
going to tell you honestly how he feels,” Delaware coach Keeler says.
“It’s not like, ‘Okay, what would sound best in a sound bite?’ It’s not
that he’s not savvy—he is as smart as the day is long—but he’s not going
to compromise his belief system. [His attitude is] I know you’re going
to take the sound bite and use it however you want, but I’m not going to
change who I am. Like it or leave it, this is who I am.”

Perhaps
Flacco’s quiet disposition contributes to the way he is perceived. Fans
screaming at their TVs like to see similar outward emotion from their
heroes.

“Unless you are in the locker room or you know me, it’s
tough to get a read from me because I’m not a very outgoing person,” he
says. “I’m not really vocal in the way a rah-rah kind of guy is. I don’t
think [leadership] is when things are going bad let’s go yell at
somebody and get them fired up. I think we’re a bunch of professionals.
If we’re not fired up, something’s wrong. A pep talk ain’t gonna do
anything for anybody. Pregame speeches on Saturday night, I don’t think
they do anything, so I’m not gonna do them. When it all comes down to
it, we all have to have a little bit of self-motivation, and when Sunday
comes, we have to be able to turn the switch on. If we can’t do that,
we shouldn’t be professional football players.”

Matt Birk,
Flacco’s center for three years, sees Joe’s stoicism as an advantage.
“Joe’s always been Joe,” he says. “Joe might be a little bit quieter,
but, at the same time, when Joe does speak up, he’s doing it because he
has something to say. It’s kind of like the old E.F. Hutton ad: When Joe
talks, people listen.”

Flacco’s record speaks for itself. Since 2008, he has won more games than any quarterback in the league.

Phil
Simms knows a little something about winning. He earned two Super Bowl
rings quarterbacking the New York Giants, and is CBS Sports’ lead NFL
color commentator.

“If you put Joe Flacco in a quarterback-driven
offense with a franchise and a head coach and an owner . . . who’s
behind him, he would throw up numbers that are [impressive] just like
all these other guys,” he told SiriusXM NFL Radio in July. “But he’s not
on that type of team, he’s not [with] that type of head coach. What he
does with that organization for that football team, I think, is as good
as anybody else in the league.”

Rob Agnone played with Flacco at
both Pitt and Delaware. He spent a season with the Patriots, which makes
his analysis of Flacco that much more striking.

“He has more
natural God-given talent than any of the quarterbacks I’ve played with.
It’s not even close,” he says. “Tom Brady is by far the best quarterback
in the NFL, there’s no doubt about it, but just going off God-given
talent, arm strength, accuracy, I feel Joe has more ability than him. He
hasn’t proven it with [big] wins, and I think Joe would tell you the
same thing. He’s got to win the Super Bowl to be in that level, but he
has the talent to do it.”

Ravens wide receiver Anquan Boldin, who played with future Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner in Arizona, agrees.

“I
don’t think there’s any other quarterback besides Aaron Rodgers that
can throw the ball the way that he can,” he says. “He can make any throw
on the football field, from hash to sidelines, deep balls, you name it.
I definitely think he’s a top five quarterback. But he don’t care about
all that.”

Flacco is uninterested in the debate. His confidence
is iron-clad, his skin thick. He claims not to watch ESPN, instead
preferring to keep up with the Kardashians or other reality shows with
Dana.

“I don’t care how much respect I’m getting in the media, as
long as I feel like the people in this building respect me, then I’m
cool,” he says. “If it ever came to a point where I didn’t feel that
way, that’s when I’d feel a little bit hurt.”

“We all, at some point, started to play this game because it was fun. We lose track of that.”

Maybe 2012 will be
Flacco’s breakout year. The Ravens are using a more wide-open offense;
his first pass of the season was a beautiful 52-yard bomb to Torrey
Smith. Could that have been a harbinger of things to come, or is Flacco
destined to be remembered as Trent Dilfer is, a quarterback the Ravens
won in spite of?

“If that’s what people say, that’s what people
will say, it doesn’t mean it’s the truth,” he says defiantly yet not
angrily. “I hope we throw for 5,000 yards and win the Super Bowl. I
don’t want to be throwing for 150 yards a game and winning. I’ll take
it, but I feel that I give us the best chance of winning, doing what I
do best.”

Such is Flacco’s complicated relationship with Baltimore
that when he cancelled his annual appearance at the Special Olympics’
Polar Bear Plunge just a few days after the New England loss to spend
time with his pregnant wife, some actually ripped him apart.

Adam
Hays was not among them. A 28-year-old Special Olympian from Frederick,
Hays has met Flacco several times at events, including a casino-night
fundraiser a few weeks before the Ravens hosted him at training camp
this summer.

“When Joe came by what was really exciting for me was
to hear him say, ‘Nice to see you again.’” says Hays, who wears a
Flacco No. 5 jersey during Ravens games. “He’s very cool, and it seems
like he’s very relaxed. He seems like he’s very kind to everyone that he
comes in contact with. When I look around at my fellow athletes seeing
that Joe and the Ravens take their time out to help show us the skills
in football and just to be with us, it shows that they think of people
with intellectual disabilities as athletes out on the field. It really
means a lot that they see past those barriers.”

Flacco seems
unaware that his mere presence has such an impact on people’s lives. He
politely deflects a question about his work with the Special Olympics,
saying it’s something he enjoys immensely.

“It’s cool to see the
athletes out there having fun,” he says. “We all, at some point, started
to play this game because it was fun. We lose track of that.”

Throughout
his career, he has never lost track of who he is. He’s a father, a
husband, a son, a brother. He’s extremely confident in his athletic
abilities. He’s a winner.

What he’s not is an actor. His work for Pizza Hut makes Ray Rice’s commercial performances look downright De Niro-esque.

“I
feel completely awkward doing that stuff, but, sometimes, it’s too good
to turn down,” he says. “I turn off [my ads] as soon as I see them. If
I’m in the car and I hear my voice on the radio, I turn the station.”

Flacco
recently bought a house in New Jersey a mile from both his parents’ and
Dana’s. His folks attend every home game, and, before Stephen arrived,
the family used to hit a diner afterwards, win or lose. He’s so
comfortable in his own skin that he describes himself as a “pretty
boring person,” who likes to “play a little golf and hang out with the
family.” Not exactly Tom-and-Gisele tabloid fodder.

“He’s always
here after hours in the building, up by himself watching film, making
sure he knows the defensive looks, making sure he’s got a leg up on the
competition,” says tight end and close friend Dennis Pitta. “Every time I
get here, his car’s in the parking lot, and every time I leave, it’s
still here.”

When he climbs back into the driver’s seat after
another long day, Flacco heads to an ever-growing household. His younger
brother, Brian, and nephew, David, are living with him, Dana, and
Stephen, and it’s a safe bet that the family will expand soon.

“I
can’t imagine not having a good amount of people in the house,” he says,
his voice thick with a South Jersey drawl. “I’m not saying I need six
kids, but I wouldn’t complain if we get to that point.”

Is he a top-five quarterback? Let others waste their time with meaningless lists. Joe Flacco’s got work to do, games to win.

And a family to get home to.

A 13-time Pro Bowler, two-time defensive player of the year, Super Bowl 35 MVP, and the only player in NFL history to produce at least 40 sacks and 30 interceptions is none other than Baltimore Ravens’ Ray Lewis. He also holds a Ravens’ franchise-record of 2,643 career tackles, including a single-season best of 225 stops in 2003. With a resume like that, it’s only fitting to celebrate his induction into the 2018 NFL Hall of Fame with a parade through the city.

“For 17 years, we could point to No. 52 and tell the other players, ‘Follow his lead,” said Ravens general manager Ozzie Newsome, who drafted Lewis. “It was our privilege to have him as a Raven. We are all better for having him here. His play on game days speaks for itself. When you talk about the great players of all time, no matter the position, he is among the greatest of the great.”

On Saturday, September 22, Mayor Catherine Pugh will hold a parade to honor the Ravens’ latest inductee. Beginning at 10 a.m. on Key Highway near Rash Field, the parade will travel through downtown and end at City Hall where both Pugh and Lewis will speak.

The team that Lewis called home for nearly 20 years will honor him during Sunday’s game against the Denver Broncos. Prior to the game, too, fans will get the chance to snap a few pics with his Hall of Fame bust on RavensWalk. There’s also a giveaway of a commemorative Ray Lewis Hall of Fame coin upon entry.

Just before kickoff and after player intros, Lewis will take the field—perhaps we will get to see the squirrel dance at M&T Bank Stadium one last time? At halftime, Lewis will be presented with his Hall of Fame ring in an on-field ceremony. No long speeches this time though, the game must go on.

The only thing that would make this weekend better is if the Ravens get a win. After last week’s game—they struggled on both sides, especially defensively when linebacker C.J. Mosley was carted off the field—the fans could use a W. An iconic, inspirational locker room speech from Lewis might just do the trick.

There are a few things that define summer in the city: snowballs, swimming pools, and summer camps. For the third year in a row, Baltimore native and New York Jets linebacker Brandon Copeland is bringing his football camp back to Gilman this weekend.

The Beyond the Basics football camp is run by Copeland, his wife Taylor, and family and friends to give back to the community that helped shape him into the man he is today. With the support of the NFLPA, beginning at 8 a.m. on Saturday, July 7, more than 400 kids will flock to Gilman’s Roland Park campus to participate in a day of football drills, community service, and mentorship.

Copeland says that the camp goes beyond football. He wants to make this day more meaningful to the kids than just running routes, catching passes, and going over drills.

“For us, it’s not about football at all—I really could care less about the football part,” Copeland said. “We really have some messages and exposure to help kids activate and understand their potential for success in this world.”

Never having attended a football camp growing up, Copeland drew inspiration from helping out his teammates at theirs and wanting to create something he always wanted as a kid. Since its inception, the camp has seen a steady growth in attendance from every part of Baltimore City and County.

Last year, nearly 300 kids attended the camp and, this year, he’s expecting 100 more. Although the camp is free, it’s reserved for kids ages 11-17 who are excelling in school and Copeland actually requires registrants to bring copies of their reports cards and transcripts. Some students will receive laptops and Kindles to help them further excel academically.

“We want to make sure we’re equipping these kids with the necessary tools to be successful,” Copeland said. “If a laptop can help them study for the SATs or write that college essay, we’re more than happy to help.”

A big aspect of the camp also focuses on community service and the importance of giving back. For the first hour, kids will be split into two groups—the first group will be packing backpacks and the second will be packing toiletry kits. Each of the items will be donated to the Franciscan Center of Baltimore that provides emergency assistance to residents who are struggling economically.

“How cool is it for an 11-year-old that you just built a book bag that will benefit another kid in need,” he said. “We want to teach them that you can be a blessing to someone else even if you’re young and broke. Spending your time doing something meaningful can benefit someone else.”

Copeland also stresses the importance of having a backup plan while pursuing a professional sports career. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, the linebacker spent his time working as a part-time analyst for Weiss Multi Strategy Advisers during the NFL off-season. He and his wife have also ventured into the world of real estate, most recently flipping a home in Baltimore.

“I’m always sharing career options and goals outside of football with the kids,” he said. “Anything can happen. It’s not a crime to also enjoy law, and literature, and design. You have more time in your life not playing football than you do actually playing. You need to find something to do with the rest of your life.”

Although registration is officially closed, Copeland allows walk-ons because he says that he has a hard time turning kids away. His goal is to bring something to the kids that will help to shape them into successful athletes and, more importantly, well-rounded people.

“We don’t want to lose the reason we started doing this,” he said. “We want to positively affect these kids and expose them to other opportunities and professions and role models that look like them. If we can’t do that, we’ve ultimately failed as a camp.”

Draft day in the NFL is just as big an event as the Super Bowl. It’s where college athletes’ dreams come true and fans of all 32 teams wait anxiously—and oftentimes impatiently—to see how the team’s roster will shift for the upcoming season.

Last night, the Baltimore Ravens made two grade-A picks in the first round—according to sports analysts—after trading down twice for the first time in the first round since 2012. With the 25th overall pick, Baltimore selected South Carolina tight end Hayden Hurst and Louisville quarterback Lamar Jackson with the 32nd overall pick.

Like many die-hard Ravens fans, we immediately started our Google searches to find out about our newest recruits and we’ve compiled some facts for you here.

Lamar Jackson is the anti-Joe Flacco.
The 2016 Heisman Trophy-winner is known for his athleticism and ability to move in the pocket unlike Flacco, who is a traditional pocket passer with an insanely strong arm. Jackson has been compared to QB Michael Vick in his prime, but even the man himself thinks Jackson is “five times better” than he was in college.

John Harbaugh says that Flacco isn’t going anywhere.
Speculations have begun that this may be Flacco’s last year in Baltimore due to the recent signing of RGIII and now Lamar Jackson. The Ravens head coach wants to make it very clear that Joe isn’t going anywhere just yet.

“[Jackson’s] a great quarterback. But Joe Flacco is our quarterback,” he said in an interview. “That’s the thing we got to remember. Lamar is going to have a great chance to develop. When you get to this stage in a quarterback’s career, you’ve seen done in New England and you’ve seen done in a lot of places. This doesn’t really change things in a sense that we’re going to go with Joe and he’s going to roll.”

Hayden Hurst was the top tight end in the 2018 draft class.
At 6-foot-5, 250 pounds he has the athleticism to put up big stats in the NFL, Hurst is just the tight end the Ravens need. He’s a force on the field with his blocking and catching. In his last two seasons at South Carolina, he caught 92 passes for 1,175 yards and three touchdowns. Hurst will be able to fill the void the Ravens have with Nick Boyle and Maxx Williams, who are both better at blocking.

Hurst has a history in major league drafts.
He was selected in the 2012 MLB draft by the Pittsburgh Pirates and spent two years as a pitcher and one year as a first baseman in the Gulf Coast League. Hurst went back to football in the summer of 2015 and was an immediate starter. He credits his background in baseball for his exceptional hand-eye coordination and maturity playing professional sports.

“I feel like tracking a baseball is a little bit harder than tracking a football,” Hurst said. “I think that’s the biggest thing that I carry over from baseball is just the maturity. I’ve experienced some things that some guys haven’t with failure.”

Ozzie Newsome was able to work magic with those two trades.
First the Ravens traded out of the No. 16 pick, giving the Buffalo Bills its first- and fifth-round picks (No. 154). In return, the Ravens are getting the Bills’ first-rounder (No. 22) and third-rounder (No. 65).

Then, Baltimore traded back for the second time with Tennessee getting the Titans’ first-round (No. 25) and fourth-round picks (No. 125). Ravens gave Tennessee the No. 22 spot they just got from Buffalo and a sixth-rounder (No. 215).

Newsome called is “masterful” how he was able to trade down twice and still manage to get two great picks in the first round.

Season after season, the Ravens offense struggles to be a dominant force on the field. Whether its injuries sidelining half the squad or lack of communication between quarterback Joe Flacco and his receivers, the lackluster team had led to some frustrating fans.  

Besides the recent changes to the coaching staff and administration, the Ravens have been looking for a talented player that has the speed, hands, and aggression to bring Baltimore’s offensive record out of the dumps. An experienced, three-time Pro Bowler with 400 career receptions sounds like just the person to get the job done. Where can the Ravens find such a player? In Miami.

Wide receiver Jarvis Landry is in the prime of his career and the Ravens have their eye on him. The only problem is he won’t come cheap. Baltimore is known for going after veteran receivers in order to get them at a bargain rate, but Spotrac projects that Landry’s market value is somewhere around $13.8 million per season for five years—and $58 million overall. That doesn’t include giving up the third-round pick to Miami in order to get Landry from the Dolphins.

The last time the Ravens stepped out of their comfort zone and dished out a large sum for a wide receiver was in 2010 for Anquan Boldin, which was about $8.3 million per season. Since winning the last Super Bowl in 2012, Baltimore’s free-agency signings have been less than what Landry is expecting: Jacoby Jones (four years, $12 million), Brandon Stokley (one year, $940,000), Steve Smith Sr. (three years, $10.5 million), Mike Wallace (two years, $11.5 million), and Jeremy Maclin (two years, $11 million).

With the craziness of the NFL’s salary cap requirements, the Ravens do have some extra money to throw around in free-agency. The only way to pull off the Landry deal—or any, for that matter—is to make some tough cuts. Cutting wide receiver Maclin and veteran safety Ladarius Webb would save about $7 million. Restructuring some of the larger contracts like defensive tackle Brandon Williams ($11.5 million) and cornerback Jimmy Smith ($15.6 million) is another way to go if the Ravens want any chance of getting quality players in the off-season.

Another popular option for the Ravens is signing recently cut players. That list could include some big names like Green Bay’s Jordy Nelson, Baltimore native and Los Angeles Ram Tavon Austin, and former Raven and recent Super Bowl champ Torrey Smith. While it’s the least expensive route to go, it also seems like Baltimore’s safest bet.

Securing a top receiver like Landry would be great, but the question is one person really worth all the money?

On the first Thursday in January, Aaron Maybin emerges from a bitter, blustery afternoon into the calm and warmth of Teavolve, a spacious, low-key cafe in Harbor East. He settles into a corner table in the restaurant’s rear, the effect of his lean, but imposing, 6-foot-4-inch frame softened by his casual manner. A three-hour conversation over tea and sandwiches offers a respite from the Arctic blast, but not from the storm of attention that Maybin has recently helped create.

Barely 24 hours earlier, he had tweeted a 45-second video in which he’s seated in front of a gaggle of grade-school kids. What’s the day been like today? he asks the room. The answer is an immediate, echoing chorus of young voices: Cold. Cold! Very very very very very very cold.

The setting was the library at Matthew A. Henson Elementary School in West Baltimore, one of many rooms at Henson that had no heat on a day when temperatures in the city topped out at 30 degrees. “It’s the same school Freddie Gray went to,” Maybin says, “which gives some context to what the dynamics are.” Thanks to Maybin’s nearly 27,000 Twitter followers, the video—along with a GoFundMe page he promoted that raised more than $80,000 to purchase space heaters for the school and winter gear and other much-needed items for its students—quickly went viral. Over the coming days, similar heating issues were reported at as many as 60 city schools. “Baltimore teachers have been talking about these issues for years,” Maybin says, “but it took somebody that used to play in the NFL to put a video out there of kids sharing how they feel.”

Maybin’s perspective resonates because he is both—a former first-round NFL draft pick and a teacher, among a handful of other identifiers. Those kids at Matthew A. Henson were his kids, students in the art classes he teaches three days a week. He is unique in having the platform of a celebrity and the insight of an insider; on that frigid January day, he felt compelled to use both. “I don’t think he came to work that day to make a statement,” says G. Travis Miller, the school’s principal. “He’s from this area, so he has a connection to this school. He’s a guy that is successful, and he’s part of this community. It makes him much more of an asset.”

Maybin might not quibble with the word asset, but the self-described “art-activist” is generally leery of any title placed on him by others. The new year already figured to be a busy one for the 29 year old, whose book, Art-Activism, a self-published collection of his visual art and writing, was released in November.  “I’m not a politician, I’m not a preacher. I’m one of the people,” he says. “I don’t want to be a leader. I just want to be an example that we should all be doing something.”

It’s a fitting declaration for someone who has never been very good at sitting still.

As a child, Aaron Maybin was so active that “people didn’t like babysitting me.” His father says he can’t remember a photo in which his son is sitting still. “He was very busy,” Michael Maybin says—busy enough that by the time Aaron reached grade school, doctors wanted to prescribe him Ritalin. Michael decided against it.

“My argument, and resistance, was based on their argument that he [apparently] wasn’t able to concentrate on anything,” his father says. “That wasn’t the case with him.” Maybin grew up in West Baltimore, where his father worked as an inspector and spokesman for the Baltimore Fire Department, and his mother, Constance, worked in insurance. Before he excelled on the playing field, Aaron was drawing and sculpting, immersing himself in the act of creation. His parents would buy 500-sheet reams of oversize drawing paper from a neighborhood store that sold surplus school supplies. Aaron made short work of them. (He says his father’s longtime friend, acclaimed Baltimore artist Larry “Poncho” Brown, was one of the few babysitters he’d behave for because he had access to a treasure trove of art supplies.)

“We’d be sitting watching TV,” his father says, “and all of a sudden Aaron would just erupt—jump up, run someplace, and come back with pencil and paper. You couldn’t even keep aluminum foil in the house, because he would take it and make sculptures.”

Long a way to channel his energy, art for Maybin became therapy in 1995, when his mother, pregnant with his younger sister, died in childbirth. Aaron was six. Later that same year, Michael Maybin moved his young son and newborn daughter out of the city to Howard County, where they essentially integrated their neighborhood. Michael remembers Klan literature appearing in mailboxes on their street, and Aaron says there were certain houses where he quickly learned he wasn’t welcome. It was, Michael Maybin says, “a year of tremendous transition for us.”

Throughout, Aaron painted and sculpted and drew. When he was 11, he completed a 40-by-50-foot wall mural in Southwest Baltimore, a drawing of three hands of different hues placing bricks in a wall. He won a number of art competitions. But around that time, his size and athleticism began to set him apart: he excelled in baseball and basketball, ran track, and, when he was a high school sophomore, nearly made the state final in wrestling. But it was on the football field that he dominated, developing into one of the state’s best prep players as a defensive end at Mount Hebron High School. Coveted by many of the nation’s top college programs, he ended up at Penn State, the school his father had briefly attended years earlier.

He spent three years in State College, double majoring in communications and integrative arts and, by his junior year, developing into an All-American pass rusher. He left Penn State a year early, and in 2009 he was a first-round draft pick of the Buffalo Bills. But his pro career never blossomed as expected, and after just four NFL seasons (plus a single game in the Canadian Football League), Maybin announced his retirement in May 2014. He was 26 years old. Suddenly, he had the means and the time to turn his lifelong passion, the thing that had sustained him through childhood tumult and professional disappointment, into a career. The football player with the interesting hobby could finally be what he’d really been all along—an artist, with ample motivation, and without constraints.

Aaron Maybin never really left Baltimore. From his art to Project Mayhem, the nonprofit foundation he started during his playing days, he has always remained rooted in, and inspired by, his hometown. His interest in education, and in the inequity inherent in the system, stems from his own transition from the city to the suburbs. “When I got to Howard County, it was like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve been treated bad my whole life,’” he says. “To go from having 10-year-old textbooks, no computers, classes of 30, 40 kids. . . . When you actually see how other people grow up, what they have access to and what you were forced to endure, it’s like a slap in the face.”

And so, while he poured himself into his painting—creating bold, colorful portraits of black revolutionary leaders, memorializing the likes of Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland, or commemorating the 2015 Uprising—he ensured his impact would be more than symbolic. Today, he teaches those art classes at Henson Elementary; he also works part time at The Children’s Home, a juvenile facility in Catonsville, where he runs art therapy sessions with girls and young women, many of whom are survivors of abuse and trafficking.

Those are only the scheduled gigs. With Maybin, so much of his work seems to be in response to the challenges that arise within and around his community. He was on the streets during the riots that followed Gray’s death, documenting the anger with interviews and photos. He was in that classroom in January, using his social media platform to illuminate the struggle of his students as they shivered through a school day. And over the next two weeks, he helped coordinate and pick up donations, organized a packing event at the Downtown Cultural Arts Center, and ended up at Wal-Mart with those GoFundMe organizers buying carts full of supplies. (Given the surplus from the GoFundMe, which was initially set for $20,000, Maybin and the other organizers expanded their shopping list to address needs throughout the city school system. He tweeted videos from the shopping trip, including one in which his fellow organizers, both women, giggle as he loads a cart full of feminine pads.)

It’s the sort of work a guy who was making NFL millions just a few years ago could probably pawn off on others. But that’s not Maybin’s way. “To have staff members who go above and beyond, any principal loves to have that, so he was already a top-shelf guy to me,” says Miller, the principal at Henson Elementary. “This just puts an exclamation point on it.”

It’s worth noting that none of this—the pesky details of organizing, of loading up shopping carts, all the relentless “above and beyond” that his principal so appreciates—seems to bother Maybin. Which is not to say he’s unaffected: You can see and hear the frustration as he talks about the root causes, be they political or cultural, of the poverty, violence, and lack of resources endemic to so much of the city, its schools in particular. But while he is well-versed in the causes, he is more interested in solutions, in whatever form they might take: from collecting and distributing space heaters and winter coats to addressing issues through his art.

And his book: Art Activism mixes dozens of Maybin’s paintings and drawings with his poetry and prose, both reflections on injustice and exhortations for his brothers and sisters to lift themselves up. It’s years in the making, and he’s proud of it. 

“The hood loves this right now,” he says of his book. “The people that I see everyday, they’re not gonna read Ta-Nehisi Coates. They’re not gonna read Frantz Fanon or James Baldwin. But they’re gonna read that.”

There are certain playoff moments that will live on forever: A hobbled Kirk Gibson hitting a pinch hit home run to win the 1988 World Series, Michael Jordan’s buzzer beater in game one of the 1997 NBA finals, the Blue Jay’s Joe Carter’s walk-off homer in the 1993 World Series. You can now add Minnesota Vikings wide receiver Stefon Diggs’ improbable, amazing, mind-blowing touchdown catch against the Saints with 10 seconds on the clock to that list.

Of course, Terps fans, who were lucky enough to watch Diggs for three seasons at College Park, already knew how great he was. There was a sense that, as long as Diggs was on your side, you were never completely out of the game. Last night, he proved that. 

The game, in total, was bananas. The Vikings were up 17-0 at halftime and looked poised to go on to a comfortable win. Then, Drew Brees and the Saints came storming back. With 25 seconds on the clock, the Saints’ Will Lutz nailed a 43 yard field goal and the Saints went up 24-23. The Vikings had just one time out remaining. Game over, right?

Not so fast. 

With ten seconds—ten!—left in the game, Vikings QB Case Keenum (yes, I just had to look up the spelling of his name), hurled a corner route pass to Diggs. The idea was that if Diggs caught the ball, he’d run out of bounds, thus stopping the clock, and the Vikings would get their own chance for a game winning field goal. Except that’s not how it went down. Diggs leapt high in the air, caught the ball over a Saints defender, somehow managed to regain his balance, and found himself with a clear path to the end zone. Touchdown. Game (really) over now.

Here’s the catch, made all the more dramatic with the Titanic theme song:

And here’s Diggs’ perfect celebration (not counting the lame-o ref who threw a flag after Diggs excitedly tossed his helmet).

It’s always tough when the Ravens miss the playoffs, especially in the very bad, horrible, no good way with which they were ousted, but it’s nice to know that we can happily root for Diggs and the Vikings. Or, maybe you want to root for former Raven and Terp Torrey Smith, who’s still alive for the Philadelphia Eagles. For what it’s worth, Smith seemed as excited about Diggs’ catch as we were:

No matter what happens, Diggs has already cemented his status as a legend.

Some stood, some knelt, some sat, some stayed in the locker room, and one even stretched for the National Anthem during Sunday’s NFL games. Following comments made by President Donald Trump at a political rally in Alabama on Friday calling on NFL owners to fire any player who “disrespects our flag,” multiple teams in the organization came together on Sunday in one of the biggest displays of open protest.

The Ravens and Jaguars kicked off a long string of protests in London Sunday morning with 10 Ravens players—including Terrell Suggs, C.J. Mosley, and Lardarius Webb—either taking a knee or standing with locked arms in solidarity in response to the president’s remarks.

“That’s a total disrespect of our heritage,” President Trump told supporters on Friday in Huntsville, Alabama. “That’s a total disrespect of everything that we stand for. Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now.’”

This was the first time any Ravens player protested—just as quarterback Colin Kaepernick did back in 2016 in protest against the treatment of African Americans in the United States.

Following the Ravens early game, a number of other NFL players followed suit by staying in the locker room during the Anthem, including members of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Seattle Seahawks, and Tennessee Titans. Trump responded to the series of protest on Twitter Sunday.

Supporters of the protests insist the act is less about the American flag and National Anthem, and more about the right to exercise free speech and speak up about racial injustice. 

“In nearly 25 years as a sports executive, and a lifetime spent as an American citizen, I have never been so appalled by the abusive blood lust of my country’s highest governmental office, to defile my country’s constitutional guarantees,” president of MASN Sports, John P. Angelos, wrote on Twitter. “Anti-American and anti-citizen abuse of [the Trump administration’s] power should be repudiated, protested, and legally opposed on every front.” 

However, opponents of the athletic protests believe their actions are unpatriotic and disrespectful to those who have served or are serving in the military. Locally, Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey R. Gahler took to Facebook to express his anger with the Ravens franchise.

“The embarrassment that is the NFL continues and people wonder why I am on strike,” Gahler wrote. “Ravens join the nonsense of taking knee [sic] while on the soil of the country we gained our independence from. Will be doing a housecleaning of any Ravens merchandise later today and getting it all ready for the burn.”

There are many people in Baltimore that have mixed feelings about the protests that happened on the field Sunday, wondering if there is a way to simultaneously respect the right to free speech while also honoring the country and its veterans.

“Just a thought . . . what if every past, current, and future American military person chose to take a knee instead of fighting to keep our country safe and free?” Bar Liquorice owner Jeff Cahill posted on Facebook. “I do respect anyone’s right to peacefully protest, but it has to be tempered with the respect for those who fought and lost their lives [my family included] in service to this country, which is what our flag and National Anthem symbolizes.”

The protests have also gone beyond the NFL, with Golden State Warriors star Steph Curry declining an invitation to visit The White House. President Trump then rescinded the invitation and Lebron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers sounded off on Instagram. The ripple effect continued into the MLB when Oakland Athletics’ catcher Bruce Maxwell, who is from a military family, became the first baseball player in history to kneel during the National Anthem on Saturday.

The weekend of protesting has caused a firestorm on a local level with a mixed bag of protests, support, boycotting, and championing. For Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti himself, he sees all of the dialogue as a reflection of democracy.

“We recognize our players’ influence,” he said. “We respect their demonstration and support them 100 percent. All voices need to be heard. That’s democracy in its highest form.”

The NFL draft is May 8-10 and, at some point during those three days, Baltimore native and Towson University alum Terrance West will almost certainly hear his name called, and his boyhood dream will be a reality.

West will be one of 200-plus players drafted, but no one has had quite his path to the NFL.

Growing up fatherless in a tough West Baltimore neighborhood, Terrance West, nonetheless, became a star running back at Northwestern High School. He knew he had the talent to play after he graduated, but he needed to get his SAT scores up, so he attended prep school. But after a year without scholarship offers, West started working at Jimmy Jazz clothing store selling shoes and continued to dream of playing collegiate football.

After failed attempts to be a walk-on at Morgan State and University of Maryland, West decided to try Towson, which was seeking a fresh start for its football program. (The Tigers had only had one win the entire 2010 football season.)

“I came into the office at 4 a.m. for 5:45 practice and Terrance was already there, after taking two buses from Baltimore City,” says Towson coach Rob Ambrose. “It was that day I knew there was drive in him that you don’t see in most people these days.”

After three years, West became Towson’s all-time leading rusher with 4,854 yards and 84 touchdowns (he rushed for 2,509 yards and 41 touchdowns this past season), and he helped lead Towson to the FCS Championship game. “Where you went to school won’t save you,” says West. “If you want to play in the NFL, you have to earn it.”

The list of Towson University students who have played in the NFL can be counted on one hand, so it’s quite an accomplishment for West to be one of them.

Not bad for a guy who was selling shoes four years ago.

There’s a story everyone knows about Baltimore. That we’re still collectively bitter and depressed. That we’ve never gotten over the incident from the wee hours of March 29, 1984, at the Baltimore Colts Complex in Owings Mills, when fifteen Mayflower moving trucks—like a funeral procession—were loaded with the team’s equipment, books, and furniture and directed out of town to Indianapolis.

All told, it took a mere eight hours to move out a team that was here for 31 years. “I was out there all night and it really felt like a burial,” recalls John Ziemann, a veteran member of the team’s marching band. “We were there until morning when Walter Gutowski, the team’s PR director at the time, came out, closed the gate, and said, ‘Go home guys, they’re gone.’”

This month marks 30 years since that ominous night, which, it should be noted, is almost the exact amount of time the Colts were in Baltimore. And, though they say that time heals all wounds, this is a gaping one.

But, have the past three decades—with the passing of nefarious owner Bob Irsay, the welcoming of the Baltimore Ravens, two Super Bowl championships, and an entirely new generation of football fans—been enough for us to grieve? After all this, are we finally over it?

Of course, initially, the Colts moving left most everyone in Baltimore distraught.

“You just cried and cried and couldn’t believe it,” says Antoinette Duda, 63, owner of Duda’s Tavern in Fells Point and a diehard Colts—and now Ravens—fan. “It was very hard. You cuss out Irsay, and you go through all of that.”

Undoubtedly, the gut reaction when it comes to thinking about the Colts varies by age.

“If you’re in your 60s and 70s, there is part of your heart that is missing. You’ll always feel slighted, cheated, and robbed,” says WBAL-TV broadcaster Gerry Sandusky. “The Baltimore Colts are to you what the Brooklyn Dodgers are to someone in New York.”

While there were plenty of tears to go around 30 years ago, there was also a sense of “good riddance” from some, as Irsay had already tainted the team and its reputation long before that night, and the fans had made their disappointment felt at the turnstiles. In 1972, Irsay got rid of 27 players; Crowds went from sellouts to upwards of 29,000, if the team was lucky.

“Of course the change was dramatic,” says Tom Matte, running back for the Baltimore Colts for 12 years. “But, by that time, everyone was so disenchanted with Irsay. I was happy that he left because he dismantled our team.”

For the city of Baltimore, as a whole, the Colts leaving town represented something much larger than a few Sunday games.

“A population becomes invested emotionally in a team because it defines that city’s sense of self,” says professor David Andrews, who studies the sociology of sport at the University of Maryland. “And when a team goes, what happens to that?”

The city was surely invested in the Colts, as players were ingrained in the community, hanging out at the same bars as fans and interacting often with the Colts Corrals, which were local fan clubs. Suffice it to say, it was more than just a game.

“Let me put it this way—I was 25 minutes late for my own wedding because a Colts game went into overtime,” says Duda. “I knew the players personally because they would come down to your bull roast, and they did a lot for small businesses.”

“When people remember the Colts, they remember them in the community,” says Marco Romanell, 29, a Ravens blogger for SouthBmore.com. “That’s why it was probably such a shock when the team left. Not only is the team leaving, but so are the people you conversed with or people you’d see every weekend. I think young fans relate by imagining what it would be like if the Ravens left tomorrow.”

Ziemann, who is now the deputy director of the Sports Legends and Babe Ruth Birthplace museums, uses this tactic a lot—especially when kids ask him why there’s an exhibit at the museum about the “Indianapolis” Colts.

“The only way I can relate it to the younger generation is to have them imagine they wake up one day and the Ravens are the Portland, Oregon Ravens,” he says. “Then they start to realize how sad it was.”

Like any mourning process, there are stages of grief. And the bleak 12 years without a team—the CFL didn’t cut it—finally ended in 1996, when Art Modell and the Ravens arrived from Cleveland.

“When we came to town, we had to overcome the fact that, in some fans’ minds, we had just ‘Irsayed’ Cleveland,” says Kevin Byrne, Ravens senior VP of public and community relations. “We knew that everyone here still loved their Baltimore Colts, so we reached out to the old players. The keys were getting Johnny Unitas and Lenny Moore out on the field for that first game. That kind of told the fans, ‘It’s okay to root for the Ravens.’”

Almost seamlessly blending the old guard and the new appeared to change the minds of a lot of skeptical Colts fans.

“Every game you go to, you see Johnny’s statue. Every time a Raven is inducted in the Ring of Honor, Lenny Moore is on the field,” says Sandusky. “That the Ravens were inclusive helped to close some of those wounds. They made a story that wasn’t two chapters, but softly blurred the lines—making it Baltimore football history instead.”

Of course, the concept of keeping the same marching band—one that was profiled in Barry Levinson’s ESPN 30 for 30 documentary The Band That Wouldn’t Die—was another way to bridge the gap.

“The Modells came in and said, ‘We’re not here to erase your history, we’re here to add to it,’” Ziemann says. “They had the statue built, adopted the band, recognized the Colt Corrals. That made it 100-percent easier to move on.”

Something else that has made it easier over the years? Well, that’s where the game comes in. Many close to the organization—and fans alike—are quick to point out that we beat Indy to the Super Bowl.

“The city was ecstatic and the fans were ecstatic,” says Duda. “Us oldsters will remember the way it was, and we’re going to compare it, of course. But it was so great for the city, and it certainly proved a point.”

Members of the younger generation, who admit that they have no personal attachment to the Colts, have grown up with the Ravens franchise, which turns 18 this season. They feel that winning Super Bowls in both 2000 and 2012 forged the team’s symbiotic relationship with the city of Baltimore.

“Winning one championship was okay, since we stuck it to the Colts before they did,” says blogger Romanell. “But winning that second championship, having a Raven in the Hall of Fame, and the fact that we now have a franchise quarterback, there is no reason to be bitter still.”

Clearly, younger fans seem to be over it, but where does that age divide fall?

“Every year, I try to figure out what the age line is,” says Sandusky. “There’s a line at which point the Colts are not your issue. Right now it’s around 55 years old.”

This generational rift is unique to Baltimore. With most sports teams, you are loyal to whomever your parents (or grandparents) rooted for. Because that can’t happen here, another interesting phenomenon is starting.

“I think now families are connecting again,” says Byrne at the Ravens. “Normally in sports, the generational love moves downward. Here it’s moving upward. Old Colts fans are being persuaded by their grandchildren to give the Ravens a chance.”

Judging by citywide purple Fridays and fans of all ages filling the stands at M&T Bank Stadium every Sunday, the transition seems to be working.

“Kids take their parents to the game now. It used to be that parents bought the tickets, but now that’s reversed,” says Duda. “To me, if you like football, you like football. And the Ravens are my team now.”

In essence, being a Baltimore Colts fan and being a Baltimore Ravens fan are not mutually exclusive concepts.

“These fans have a dual identity now,” professor Andrews says. “They have memories of their parents, Unitas, Memorial Stadium. But they are now wedded to a new team, which has become the new definer of Baltimore.”

The old Colts themselves have helped to bridge the 12-year gap between teams.

“Lenny Moore is a regular at our practices and has lunch at our cafeteria,” Byrne says. “Ray Rice and Lenny are friends. Stan White is on our radio broadcast. Kids rub the foot on Johnny U’s statue outside the stadium. All these things help our players and fans understand how meaningful the Colts were.”

One thing that has remained constant throughout the past 30 years (besides the band, of course) is the city of Baltimore. Byrne and others agreed that last year’s overwhelming Super Bowl parade underscored what we already knew—we are a great football town.

“If you put it all together, we’d be the winningest franchise,” says former Colt Matte. “Between the Colts, [CFL] Stallions, [USFL] Stars, and Ravens, every team we’ve had has been successful, and that’s because we have the greatest fans in the world.”

When it’s fall in Baltimore—no matter if it’s 1964 or 2014—the exuberance and passion for the game of football is obvious to this day.

“I’d say 99-percent of the people I know are diehard Ravens fans,” Romanell says. “It’s kind of hard not to get wrapped up in it, the energy, the purple Fridays, it’s hard not to embrace.”

But, have these great and loyal fans moved on and let go?

Truth be told, emotions still remain raw when talking about the Colts, but some of that anger and bitterness seems to have mellowed.

“The edge is definitely gone,” Sandusky says. “I don’t think people feel as compelled to drive a Mayflower truck off the road as they used to.”

Credit the Modells, the Ravens franchise, the Super Bowl rings, or the fans, but this much is certain: Our cynicism from 30 years ago now feels a lot more like optimism.

“I’ll never forget the good times, the pride I had in that horseshoe logo, and the name Baltimore Colts,” Ziemann says. “But my heart and soul now belong to the black helmet with the purple bird head.”

How The Deal Went Down

For
11 long years, Baltimore got the cold shoulder from the National
Football League. But when the Cleveland Browns called, suddenly
Baltimore was the belle of the ball.

January 1996

Behind The Battles Over Baltimore’s Sports Future

With
or without the Stars, the city’s chances of rejoining the NFL – and
keeping the Orioles – are in serious doubt. Here’s the inside story of
local big shots working to save our big-league sports status.

November 1984

The Annotated Greatest Quarterback of All Time

He passed away on September 11, 2002, the victim of a heart attack. John Constantine Unitas, we will miss you.

During week five’s game against the Dallas Cowboys, Ray Lewis
suffered torn triceps and ESPN commentators began using those dreaded
three words: “season-ending injury.”

In Lewis’s case, those words were even worse than usual because
“season ending” meant “career ending.” Several weeks later, the veteran
linebacker—the marquee star of the Ravens roster since the team’s 1996
inception—announced he would be retiring from the game. But never doubt
the will of a champion.

Lewis battled back from his injury and played in his final home game
against the Indianapolis Colts—a 24-9 win—and Coach John Harbaugh sent
Lewis onto the field to be the last line of defense in the victory
formation.

After Joe Flacco took a knee to end the game, Lewis got one last
opportunity to do his signature pre-game “squirrel dance” in the middle
of the field at M&T Bank Stadium.

Of course, as it turned out, this wouldn’t be Lewis’s last hoorah
moment, as he helped lead his team to a Super Bowl victory and was able
to parade through the streets of Baltimore, Lombardi Trophy held high.

“And now, I get to ride off into the sunset with my second ring.”—Ray Lewis

When Baltimore lost football great Art Donovan in August at the age
of 89, he was remembered not just as a feisty defensive tackle for the
Baltimore Colts—helping the team to world championships in 1958 and
1959—but as a self-effacing funnyman whose popularity far outlived his
NFL career.

For years after hanging up his cleats, the beefy Pro Football Hall of
Famer, who also spent single seasons with the New York Yanks and Dallas
Texans in an 11-year career, appeared on the talk-show circuit, telling
humorous tales of the NFL’s good old days, as he put it, “When men
were, well, men.”

Donovan’s father was famous fight referee Arthur J. Donovan Sr., who
was in the ring at 19 of Joe Louis’s title fights. When the younger
Donovan left the tough New York neighborhood of his youth, he fought in
World War II and played college football at Notre Dame and Boston
College.

“Baltimore is now without one of its best.” —Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti.