Ravens Football Quotes

There definitely isn’t a girl like this Embers chick anywhere in Ohio, he playfully thought to himself. It didn't take long before his phone was exploding with text replies, but the grin on his face disappeared as he began to read them. The consensus (to put it in a much more polite way than a group of college football players normally would) was to ask him: ”Are you coming out of the closet, dude?” Taken aback by the bombardment of texts questioning his sexuality, rather than the expected congratulatory replies and requests for more, Zane scrolled through the pictures on his phone, and then his camera –shocked to find these were not the pictures of a stunning raven-haired beauty that he'd taken, but instead image after image of hairy, balding, middle-aged men, wearing Speedos. Confusion turned to horror as he went through dozens, and then hundreds of pictures on his phone. From work, from parties, from Spring Break in Panama City Beach, in every picture, without exception, all girls had been replaced by an assortment of increasingly repulsive men, some with their arms draped across Zane Holt’s broad, well-muscled shoulders, just as the women he’d been partying with had been. Across the pool, the hint of a wicked smile crossed the lips of Calista Embers.

A local director had teamed up with ESPN to tell a story about the Baltimore Colts Marching Band, and the film came out in October of 2009. The 30 for 30 documentary entitled The Band That Wouldn’t Die was about how the band stayed in existence for 12 years after the team’s painful midnight exodus to Indianapolis and how they eventually became the Marching Ravens.

Ten months after Jamie’s death, the 2006 football season began. The Colts played peerless football, winning their first nine games, and finishing the year 12–4. They won their first play-off game, and then beat the Baltimore Ravens for the divisional title. At that point, they were one step away from the Super Bowl, playing for the conference championship—the game that Dungy had lost eight times before. The matchup occurred on January 21, 2007, against the New England Patriots, the same team that had snuffed out the Colts’ Super Bowl aspirations twice. The Colts started the game strong, but before the first half ended, they began falling apart. Players were afraid of making mistakes or so eager to get past the final Super Bowl hurdle that they lost track of where they were supposed to be focusing. They stopped relying on their habits and started thinking too much. Sloppy tackling led to turnovers. One of Peyton Manning’s passes was intercepted and returned for a touchdown. Their opponents, the Patriots, pulled ahead 21 to 3. No team in the history of the NFL had ever overcome so big a deficit in a conference championship. Dungy’s team, once again, was going to lose.3.36 At halftime, the team filed into the locker room, and Dungy asked everyone to gather around. The noise from the stadium filtered through the closed doors, but inside everyone was quiet. Dungy looked at his players. They had to believe, he said. “We faced this same situation—against this same team—in 2003,” Dungy told them. In that game, they had come within one yard of winning. One yard. “Get your sword ready because this time we’re going to win. This is our game. It’s our time.”3.37 The Colts came out in the second half and started playing as they had in every preceding game. They stayed focused on their cues and habits. They carefully executed the plays they had spent the past five years practicing until they had become automatic. Their offense, on the opening drive, ground out seventy-six yards over fourteen plays and scored a touchdown. Then, three minutes after taking the next possession, they scored again. As the fourth quarter wound down, the teams traded points. Dungy’s Colts tied the game, but never managed to pull ahead. With 3:49 left in the game, the Patriots scored, putting Dungy’s players at a three-point disadvantage, 34 to 31. The Colts got the ball and began driving down the field. They moved seventy yards in nineteen seconds, and crossed into the end zone. For the first time, the Colts had the lead, 38 to 34. There were now sixty seconds left on the clock. If Dungy’s team could stop the Patriots from scoring a touchdown, the Colts would win. Sixty seconds is an eternity in football.

As I walk Sienna to her car, she squeals. “Holy crap, is that Rider Kingston?” Without my permission, my gaze slides across the street to the oversized man-child, who has the gall to be moving furniture shirtless while flexing his stupid abs. Judging by the other sweaty minions pouring out of the two-story, Rider’s getting new roommates too. My eye twitches again, and my focus snaps back to Sienna. “I thought you said you weren’t a fan of football.” “Oh, I’m not. I can’t sit through an entire game. But I am a fan of football players.” Her gaze turns ravenous as she scans my neighbor’s front lawn. Or, likely, the glistening eight-pack Rider’s put on display. “All that testosterone. Those bulging muscles. That deep, masculine grunting. Oh, yeah. Get me one of those!” She cackles, and Rider hears it. Of course he does. Shockingly, he deigns to speak to me. “Hey, Gabby,” he shouts. “How was your summer?” I’m not sure when he decided to stop ignoring me, but that’s better than pretending we’re friends, which we’ll never be. I close my eyes because I don’t need any reminders of his masculine beauty. And I definitely don’t need to see that sexy smirk, the one more powerful than his cannon that took the team to the playoffs last year. No, I’m not interested in the star quarterback. Not anymore.

Ravens have been observed “surfing” the wind by holding flat pieces of bark in their claws and riding mountain updrafts. They use bits of plastic to sled down snowy roofs, ride rotating sprinklers, and slide on their breasts down the onion-domed cupolas of Russian Orthodox churches (helpfully polishing them in the process). Angell and Marzluff once spotted an airborne group of crows playing with a ball of paper above a University of Washington football game. One crow would carry the ball a few wing lengths and then drop it, at which point the others would dive in, the fastest one snatching it from the air. They repeated rounds of this corvid quidditch over and over again, causing attention in the stands to stray from the earthbound athletes. And at the University of Montana, a crow learned to gather up small packs of dogs by whistling and calling what for all the world sounded like “Here, boy!” The bird would lead the dogs on frenzied chases across campus for no apparent reason.

Art Modell, who pitted Cleveland and Baltimore against each other in a bidding war for his football team, was asked in 1996 about tax money going into his pocket at a time when libraries were being closed. It was a well-framed question. His Baltimore Ravens is the only major sports team whose name is a literary allusion, to the haunting poem by Edgar Allan Poe for his lost love Lenore. “The pride and the presence of a professional football team is far more important than 30 libraries,” Modell said. He spoke without a hint of irony or any indication that he had ever upon a midnight dreary, pondered weak and weary the effect of his greed on the human condition.

a country with no bejeweled crowns or royal thrones, the black Football briefcase is perhaps the only physical manifestation of our nation’s sovereign, the outward sign of presidential power. And on that day it had already abandoned Richard Nixon.

The supreme quality of leadership is unquestionably integrity; without it no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.” —DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER