Baltimore Stallions
The Baltimore Stallions were a Canadian Football League team based in Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States, which played the 1994 and 1995 seasons. They were the most successful American team in the CFL's southern expansion into the United States, and by at least one account, the most successful expansion team in North American professional sports history at the time. They had winning records in each season, and in both years advanced to the Grey Cup Final. In 1995, they became the only American franchise to win the Grey Cup.
In the final weeks of the Stallions' second season, it became public knowledge that the Maryland Stadium Authority and City of Baltimore were in serious negotiations with Art Modell, the long-time owner of the Cleveland Browns of the National Football League, to move his franchise to Baltimore for the 1996 season. Stallions owner Jim Speros knew his team could not begin to directly compete with the overwhelmingly more popular NFL brand. Even before the agreement with Modell became official within a month of the Stallions' Grey Cup triumph, he was actively seeking to re-locate his team elsewhere. Speros ultimately chose to move his football organization to Montreal and reconstitute it as the third and current iteration of the Montreal Alouettes. The Stallions franchise was dissolved, thus becoming one of three Grey Cup champions in the modern era to subsequently fold. The CFL considers the Stallions to be a separate franchise from the Alouettes.
History
For some 30 years, Baltimore had been home to the Baltimore Colts, a popular NFL team that suddenly moved overnight to Indianapolis in 1984. The former Philadelphia Stars of the United States Football League nominally represented Baltimore in spring 1985. However, after being blocked from Memorial Stadium, the Colts' old home, due to objections from the Major League Baseball Baltimore Orioles, they were forced to play well outside the city bounds in College Park. The Stars had planned to move to Memorial Stadium in fall 1986, but the league failed before this could happen.In the years after the Colts left, Baltimore made two serious bids to get another NFL team. It heavily wooed the St. Louis Cardinals football team owned by the Bidwill family, but they ultimately moved to Phoenix, Arizona as the Phoenix Cardinals. In 1993, an ownership group failed to win an NFL expansion franchise, the Baltimore Bombers.
Soon after the expansion effort failed, entrepreneur and former Washington Redskins assistant Jim Speros was granted a CFL expansion franchise for Baltimore that would play in Memorial Stadium. Attempting to trade on the city's love for the Colts, he invited the old Baltimore Colts Marching Band, which had stayed together along with the old team's uniformed cheerleaders for over a decade, to play at his games. He recruited the remaining Baltimore Colts football fan clubs to follow and support the new CFL franchise.
Speros initially called the team the "Baltimore CFL Colts". Although the CFL club had adopted a color scheme that added silver to the Baltimore Colts' traditional colors of blue and white, as well as a stylized horse's head logo that bore no resemblance to the Baltimore/Indianapolis Colts' established horseshoe logo, the NFL nevertheless went to court and successfully obtained a legal injunction against the franchise's use of any iteration of "Colts" in their name just hours before the team was to play its first game. Speros not only had to discard tons of purchased merchandise and souvenirs along with an advertising campaign, but also had to quickly change the franchise's official name to the "Baltimore Football Club," which some just called the "Baltimore CFL's." While this was the first occasion in the modern era that a North American professional sports team operated without an official nickname, it has been repeated by several franchises since, including the aforementioned NFL team in nearby Washington, D.C. when they dropped their original nickname and became the "Washington Football Team" for a time after decades of complaints and pressure from Indigenous American advocates.
Speros kept the team's distinctive horse's head logo with the expectation that local fans, long disillusioned with the NFL, would be disinclined to stop referring to the team as the "Baltimore Colts." The team tacitly encouraged this sentiment to the extent they were legally permitted to do so. For example, for most of the 1994 season, Memorial Stadium's public address announcer, Jack Taylor, would announce the team as "your Baltimore CFL..." – followed by a pause, during which time the crowd shouted "COLTS!" – after which he would conclude, "...football team."
Number 19 was never issued out of respect to the Baltimore Colts' great Johnny Unitas.
1994 season
Speros's approach to building the team was simple. He knew Canadian football was very different from the American game, so he made a point of hiring personnel and players with CFL experience. In contrast, the other American CFL teams stocked their rosters with former NFL players, former college football players, and locally-known players. Speros hired career CFL assistant Jim Popp as general manager, and named longtime CFL coach Don Matthews as head coach. Popp and Matthews, in turn, brought in experienced CFL players like QB Tracy Ham, RB Mike Pringle, LB O. J. Brigance, DT Jearld Baylis, DE Elfrid Payton. One of the more prominent NFL castoffs was K Donald Igwebuike; the team also offered a tryout to former Super Bowl XXII champion, Timmy Smith, who had been out of football several years by that point, but Smith failed to make the regular season roster. It also helped that Memorial Stadium had been originally built to accommodate baseball as well as football. Using Memorial Stadium's baseball seating configuration gave it a field large enough to accommodate the full 150-yard length and 65-yard width of a regulation CFL field.Even though they lacked an official name, the team finished second in the CFL East Division, with a 12–6 regular season record – more wins than any CFL expansion team before or since. In addition, the team was ranked third in the entire CFL in team scoring, and second in team defense.
Mike Pringle was the team's offensive standout. Among other accomplishments, he earned the league's leading rushing title with a record 1,972 yards and thirteen touchdowns. Pringle also returned 38 kicks for 814 yards, which made him a CFL All-Star, Eastern All-Star, and a Terry Evanshen Trophy winner.
In the playoffs, Baltimore hosted the Toronto Argonauts in the East semifinals at Memorial Stadium and won the game, 34–15. After the semifinal game, Baltimore ended up defeating the favored Winnipeg Blue Bombers at Winnipeg Stadium 14–12 to become the first American and expansion team to make it to the Grey Cup.
In the Grey Cup game, Baltimore was up against the B.C. Lions at BC Place Stadium in what amounted to a road game. Baltimore had the upper hand against the Lions, leading 17–10 at halftime and silencing the Lions' faithful; however, the Lions came back in the second half, winning by a score of 26–23 on a last-second Lui Passaglia field goal.
In the Homicide: Life on the Street episode, “Every Mother’s Son,” the team honors detectives from the show’s fictional homicide unit. Mayor Kurt Schmoke also appears in the scene.
1995 season
After the 1994 season, the CFL announced that the League's five U.S. teams—Baltimore, the San Antonio Texans, the Shreveport Pirates and the expansion Memphis Mad Dogs and Birmingham Barracudas—would be placed in a new South Division, while the Canadian teams would reside in the North Division. Just before the start of the 1995 season, a name-the-team fan poll was held to decide a new team name. After the team finished the first week of its second season still calling itself "the Baltimore Football Club", the fan poll ended; Speros publicly announced that Baltimore's team would be known as the "Baltimore Stallions". The name change was a convenient one in that it allowed Baltimore's logo and colors to remain unchanged from the 1994 season. Notably, the Stallions nickname had previously been used by a United States Football League team in Birmingham, nevertheless it was still available for Speros' team. Barracudas owner Art Williams had previously rejected reviving the moniker for his club, apparently because he considered it too timid.Despite the changes to their name and team re-alignment, the Stallions returned with virtually the same roster for their next season. The exception was the signing of former Posse kicker Carlos Huerta to replace Igwebuike, who moved on to play with Memphis. With essentially the same team from the 1994 season, optimism and Grey Cup expectations were high for the Stallions. Optimism became reality as Baltimore continued their on-field dominance from the previous season. They started the season 2–3, but did not lose another game for the rest of the season. They ultimately finished with a 15–3 regular season record – first place in the South Division, and tying the Calgary Stampeders for the best record in the CFL.
Quarterback Tracy Ham with Mike Pringle and Robert Drummond were the most potent backfield in the CFL. Chris Armstrong became the team's top receiver and the defense continued dominating opponents by allowing only 369 points-against, ranking the squad third in team defense. Mike Pringle had a slight drop-off from his 1994 numbers by rushing for 1,791 yards, being named the CFL's Most Outstanding Player.
After defeating Winnipeg 36–21 in the divisional semifinals, the Stallions defeated the Texans 21–11 in the South final in what is the last meaningful CFL game played in the United States. This vaulted them to the Grey Cup final for the second straight season. They traveled to Regina's Taylor Field to face the 15–3 North Division champion Stampeders, who were led by coach Wally Buono, QB Doug Flutie, and his two top receivers, Allen Pitts and Dave Sapunjis. During the game, the winds at Taylor Field were particularly strong and gusted up to 85 km/h. That did not slow down the Stallions, as they defeated the Stampeders, 37–20 to become the first American team to win the Grey Cup, with Tracy Ham becoming the Grey Cup's Most Valuable Player. Counting the playoffs, the Stallions ended the season on a 16-game winning streak.