Why Your Team Sucks 2013: Baltimore Ravens

Some people are fans of the Baltimore Ravens. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Baltimore Ravens. This 2013 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the 2013 NFL previews so far right here.

Your team: Baltimore Ravens

Your 2012 record: 10-6, Super Bowl champions. And the fun thing about being a hater is that I can concoct any number of completely stupid ways to discredit your title. You won only because Jimmy Smith held! You just got hot at the right time! If Rahim Moore weren't a fuckup and John Fox weren't a gutless coward, you'd be divisional round chum! Fluuuuuuuuke. The refs fucked the Niners over! RAY LEWIS IS STILL A MURDERER STABBY STAB STAB. Stupid Ravens fans. Winning a Super Bowl doesn't actually mean you're any good.

Your coach: John Harbaugh, who will stop at nothing to make sure that every TV camera in the stadium is tight on him screaming at an official while he stands two feet away from the hash marks. It's like he studied film of college basketball coaches and created the perfect amalgam of Coach K's, Rick Pitino's, and Gary Williams's histrionics. There should be a sign language interpreter or a Navy signalman in the corner of every Ravens broadcast, explaining why Harbaugh keeps flapping his arms like that.

Your quarterback: Joe Flacco. Now that the postseason is over, ol' Boring Joe (his family calls him Boring Joe because he's boring!) can go back to completing less than 60 percent of his passes, barely throwing 20 touchdowns, and being the AFC's answer to Eli Manning. He simply isn't the same passer without Ray Lewis's MAGIC JESUS HANDS guiding his passes. Also, Flacco got paid this offseason ($52 million guaranteed). With the remaining cap space, the Ravens have signed this velcro catch paddle to play wideout.

I'm told it has better hands than Ed Dickson.

Your one fantasy player everyone will hate: Bernard Pierce, who will steal enough touchdowns from Ray Rice to devalue him, but not get enough carries of his own to be a worthwhile flex player. I hate players like this. They should be murdered. BY RAY LEWIS.

Why your team sucks: No Lewis. No Ed Reed. No Matt Birk. No Anquan Boldin. No Dennis Pitta (out for the year). No Paul Kruger. No Cary Williams. No Vonta Leach. Oh, but the team DID sign Rolando McClain to pick up some slack in the Get Arrested And Then Retire Department. This team was gutted in record time. And the worst part is that, even though they're destined to go 8-8, I'm still gonna get more Ray Lewis than I ever wanted because ESPN is gonna put him in front of a camera for 23 hours every day. Just one constant live stream of Lewis praising Jesus and fake-smiling as if he's never been complicit in the stabbing death of another human being. PUKE.

By the way, whenever you take a shot at Ray Lewis for the Atlanta stabbings, Ravens fans get all dismissive. You're still bringing that up? We're over it, you guys. NOW LET'S CRANK UP SOME DAUGHTRY AT THIS BARBECUE. Ravens fans are the sole reason that the Greene Turtle stays in business.

Their fans are posers: jorts-wearing crab-billies who love playing up their city's toughness but would never dare step foot inside Baltimore city limits. If you've been to Baltimore proper, you know that it's a third-world deathscape, dotted with hobos selling copper scrap and crazy-eyed meth zombies staring at you from atop abandoned railcars. I'm shocked that the Elysium space station can't be seen hovering over it. Billy from Glen Burnie is just as scared shitless of that town as any other American is, but that's not gonna stop him from rocking a pair of purple camo pants and pretending he's the leader of some kind of battalion of unarmed Grimaces. YOU'RE SO FUCKING HARD. If Ray Lewis showed up on some Ravens fans' doorstep, they'd spend the night hiding in the carport.

Why your team doesn't suck: They're maybe the best-run team in football, which means they can pick up a player like Elvis Dumervil and seamlessly integrate him into their defense without missing a beat. So annoying. If my team signed Elvis Dumervil, they'd overpay him and then try him out at free safety for the first three weeks.

The seven worst Ravens ever:

1. Kyle Boller. Still opposite-married to Carrie Prejean. I bet he's asked her to make a sex tape with him two dozen times only to get rejected. Poor bastard.

2. Tony Banks

3. Elvis Grbac

4. Stoney Case. You can see why the Ravens decided to heap 4,000 metric tons of gold bricks onto Joe Flacco after running through this progression of sorry-ass quarterbacks.

5. Roth (NOTE: Picture makes me kinda tingly)

6. Travis Taylor

7. Mark Clayton. There's something uniquely infuriating about a wideout who can consistently get separation from defensive backs but can NEVER catch the ball. You're a world-class athlete. How can it be hard for you to catch the fucking ball? You make me sick.

Emails from Ravens fans:

Doug:

I've lived in the city my entire life. Basically, the city is like living in some Russian novel. The weather is always obnoxiously hot, or freezing cold, but whatever the forecast, it always looks gray and miserable. The murder rate is fucking terrible, the politicians are corrupt, and I've been stuck in the same traffic for the last fifteen years. Everybody is just a rotten and miserable cocksucker. Last Sunday, somebody on the bus tried to sell me lump crab meat out of his lunch bag. You can see it on people's faces, everybody walks around like they just returned from Vietnam.

The worst part about the Ravens, which really has nothing to do with the team itself, is the fans. They are awful. Now everybody's fanbase is terrible, but each in their own unique way. Ours is due to an eternal chip on our shoulder masking a terrible self-loathing and jealousy. We yearn to shove our superiority in other city's faces, then get angry when someone dares talk shit about Ray Lewis. We're the first people to turn the game off when Flacco throws a ball into the stratosphere, and the first to jump on the message boards if we make a historic comeback.

And we're never satisfied. Last year we had a magnificent and arduous run through the playoffs, and it literally took thirty minutes for 'Mike from Glen Burnie' to start talking shit on talk radio (When I say talking shit, I fucking mean it, every Ravens fan sounds like they gargle poop). "Oh our defense was terrible, we should never have given up so many points." Dude, relax. You just fucking won a Super Bowl. Chill out until the draft, sir.

And finally, I should mention, that we had the worst helmet in modern NFL history for three of the longest years ever. The Flying B was an eyesore. The worst part? The only reason we dumped it was because the Ravens graphic department apparently stole it from some dude's trapper keeper.

Jon:

Joe Flacco is a boring oaf who knows how to throw jump balls, yet he weaseled this franchise out of $120 million dollars. Flacco owes half that money to Jacoby Jones for fielding those punts that were thrown in Denver and at the Super Bowl.

Alvin:

There are no real Ravens fans, there are only Redskins fans who have drunkenly stumbled their way into a Ravens jersey because the Skins sucked for so long, and the Ravens ("the local team!") somehow got themselves another Super Bowl win.

And don't get me started on the Ray Lewis case. Ravens fans would defend Lewis to the very end, but are calling for Hernandez's blood. Where's the sense in that?

Nobody in the state of Maryland knows how to drive, which makes leaving M&T's parking lot probably one of the scariest experiences I've ever dealt with. And I was walking.

In short, fuck the Ravens, fuck Baltimore, fuck Maryland, and fuck football.

Jeremy:

Fans here decried Ed Reed's lack of ''loyalty'' when he left for the Texans. The guy damn near paralyzed himself once a week, but sure when he's a free agent and tries to get his last big payday he'll ever get, fuck him.

George:

Terrell Suggs looks like Louis Gosett jr in the movie Enemy Mine.

Brad:

We have a group of Ravens fans who travel to a road game every year and we have a very simple rule - no game gear until game day or you are never invited back. Why? Because the last thing we want to do when traveling to another NFL city is get into some G-d awful conversation with Donnie from Dundalk, about how bad Joe Flacco is and why Tyrod Taylor should be starting. Nothing is ever good enough for Ravens fans.

Scott:

Purple Camo, the constant inferiority complex with the Steelers, the endless bitching about a quarterback that's been to the playoffs for 5 STRAIGHT YEARS.

Keep in mind some of the previous starting quarterbacks for the franchise (Stoney Case, Chris Redman, Kyle Fucking Boller, Anthony Wright, Scott Mitchell, Vinny Testaverde) and you would think Joe Flacco would be treated like a goddamn king in this town. He most certainly is not.

These are the same mouth-breathing idiots that called the local sports radio shows, crying that we traded Anquan Boldin (old as shit, not that productive sans the playoff run) because "Joe Flacco is too greedy."

I understand it's ignorant to believe that Duane from Dundalk has a grasp on the basic economics of the NFL, but this shit is unreal. Wait until Flacco has a meh game against the Browns and every mesothelioma-afflicted asshat still waiting to call Peter Angelos' law office will demand we trade him.

Oh and Joe will have some meh games. Have you seen these receivers? Torrey Smith only runs deep routes and the current number two is a kick return specialist.

Ryan:

Half the Flacco jerseys in Baltimore are actually dark blue, not purple. Some brilliant Chinese knock-off manufacturer realized years ago that you could just manufacture Giants jerseys and stick Ravens decals on them and our fanbase would be too stupid to figure it out. It seems like every game I hear, “Hey check out my new Flack-oh jersey, I got a good deal on the intranet” only to look over and see something that was clearly meant to have Eli Manning printed on the back of it. To make matters worse, it’s usually tucked into their pants like it’s some sort of formal attire.

David:

I can't wait to see Ray Lewis avoid commenting on the Aaron Hernandez situation in his new role at TWWL. But die-hard Ravens fan will gush all over Ray Ray's greatness and how much of a leader he is and much he loves his brother and it's God's Time and on and on.

Which leads me to the fans. What is the opposite of a Mensa meeting? Because that's Baltimore pregame, postgame and any time during football season.

Joe:

I’m from Maryland, have lived in Baltimore for the past 2 years, and absolutely despise this purple camo-wearing collection of should-be inmates. This fucktard organization is putting up a statue of Ray Lewis, the father of six kids with four women, the 6^th best player on his own defense for at least the past five years, and the luckiest bastard in this state’s history, as he was just ass hairs away from being convicted of a double homicide, and then (AND THEN) somehow got the rest of the league and country in general to completely forget about all this in a relatively quick manner so he could go on to still be the face of the organization, grace the cover of Madden 2005, and do shitty Old Spice commercials. I would love to know what the rest of the country thinks of this. They couldn’t be prouder here.

Morgan:

I've never seen a group of people complain more about a victory then this pack of idiots flooding the local radio phone lines talking about how much Flacco sucks & how it's his fault they'll never win. The same will happen this year even though he won the fucking Super Bowl just last season. Mark My Words.

"WHY ISN'T RAY RICE RUNNING THE BALL MORE" is another favorite complaint of the Baltimore fan. It's not because every Ravens fan his him on their fantasy team (though when they do get him every one of them has a 40 minute orgasm), It's because that's our identity! Tough hard nosed defense & running the football. I've never seen a group of people want to be the Kansas City Chiefs more in my life. If Ravens fans had their way, Ray Rice would run the ball up the middle 75 times a game, die by week 4 and then they would complain that Cam Cameron was calling the wrong plays.

Also, this.

Patrick:

I was in NOLA for Super Bowl XLVII. We were in a bar on Bourbon Street "celebrating" and all I heard was the conspiracy theory about the lights going out and it's the NFL trying to let Colin Kaepernick win. Bitching and moaning about this blown call and bad play execution. It's not week 7 assholes! We just won the effing Super Bowl. Enjoy it!

Ben:

Oh my God, we are the fucking worst. We gave a dead giraffe $120,000,000, and told the next few generation of fans to go fuck themselves. We gave our best player away to the team who almost beat us in the Super Bowl for a 6th round pick. Why not? Doesn't matter anyways since they gave Flacco controlling interest in the team. We pretend that Ray isn't a murdering weirdo shit head, but swear the Roethlisberger is a serial rapist.

During halftime they have 8 year olds representing their favorite team compete in a throwing contest. We boo the little Steeler kid every time. FML.

And by the way, Natty Boh tastes like piss, and believe it or not, there are good crab cakes in other places.

Fucking retards.

Jerry:

The stereotype of rednecks in purple camo pounding Natty Bohs is pretty spot on. The tailgates have way too many assholes ready to fight. They curse out kids in visitors jerseys for chrissakes. The worst part, though, is the constant defensiveness. They are sooooooo easy to troll. Just look at all the Flacco eliteness bullshit.

Alex:

Flacco, still being Joe Flacco, will assuredly have an absolutely wretched game, leading to a week of radio hosts and newspaper columnists calling for a return to BALTIMORE RAVENS FOOTBALL, which generally consisted of two straight runs, and then another run even though it was third-and-7, and fans complaining that Flacco's overpaid and his salary prevented us from signing other players. As a Ravens fan who watched Anthony Wright start a fucking playoff game in the prime of Ray Lewis' and Ed Reed's careers, I'd just like to issue a pre-preemptive fuck you to those people.

Ryan:

Ray Rice sprays his hands with WD-40 before every playoff game.

Justin:

I am beyond sick and tired of every fucking fan bitching that the Colts left town. Get the fuck over it. It’s bad enough I have to hear it all day, every day on talk radio from 50 year old men who can’t get over the past, but to hear it from little scum bags that are 18-22 is worse. Phony anger over something that happened when these said trailer park assholes were still stored in their fathers nutsacks makes me want to punch children.

Get off the whole idea that the league is against you. When Michael Oher holds, it's not Roger Goddell being paged from Tagliabue to fuck you once more. It's because he got straight up smoked & Bryant McKinnie was entering a hot dog eating contest & Harbs lost his mind & sat his fat ass down. You’re a lamer version of the 70’s Raiders for Christ sake, without nearly the cool cast of characters. The QB is a uni-browed mime with zero personality that went on one of the luckiest runs of all fucking time to cash in (thanks to an old ass Champ Bailey sucking wind & Rahim fucking Moore who has two left club feet that had one goal but couldn‘t do it).

But “he’s elite”!! Ya, hitting Ray Rice on dump off passes for the whole season puts you in Rodgers, Manning, Brees & Rodgers level. Take that bullshit back to somebody that will buy it. I’m psyched to see Flacco have to drop back, throw a bomb & have to catch it himself since they ditched Boldin. I'm going to be pumped when he once again can't throw for 4000 yards & put up pedestrian numbers & listen to all the bitching & moaning (once again I'll go back to 105.7 amd hear that whore Brian from Owings Mills cry how they need to tank the season & draft Johnny Football).

The fans need to thank the heavens that the NFL has a piss poor drug testing system too because if Suggs pissed in a cup it would melt. I can now bank on this cocky, ugly shitbag who beats up women & throws bleach on them while they hold infants to be the Raven that I can root against for the next several years. He was #2 on this list, but good ol uncle Ray Ray quit because he was old & had to go burn a white suit or something like that. I can now say that I won’t have to watch ESPN pre-game shows for Lewis on it either. I’d rather be strapped to the wing of the Challenger space shuttle then watch this phony butcher the English language.

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