The Baltimore Colts NFL franchise moved to Indianapolis under the cover of night in 1984. This sounds bad, but the owner had a good reason. He had been trying to get the city of Baltimore to build him a better stadium for 10+ years, without success. Amid rumors of the move, the Maryland legislature had passed legislation authorizing the city of Baltimore to acquire ownership of the team through eminent domain. With the governor poised to sign this absurd legislation the next day, the Colts' owner moved all assets to Indianapolis that night.
The city of Indianapolis had been trying to attract a major league sports team for years, to the extent that they had built a new domed stadium, called the "Hoosier Dome" (later known as the RCA Dome before it was demolished in 2008). The Indianapolis mayor sent 15 moving vans to Baltimore to facilitate the move of the Colts, and offered various financial incentives for the Colts to move. This was in line with the tenacity which characterized Indiana towns at the time for convincing businesses to move to the state. A "60 Minutes" story at the time covered this.
After the move, the city of Baltimore tried for a decade to acquire another NFL team, either through a franchise move or an expansion franchise. Failing this, they finally, in 1994, settled for a franchise in the Canadian Football League. The team was to be called the "Baltimore CFL Colts", which is what is on my sweatshirt. But hours before the team's first game, the NFL obtained a court injunction prohibiting any use of the "Colts" name.
This resulted in the owner being stuck with tons of merchandise which now could not be sold. My then-wife's friend Bill, a one-armed carpenter who was from Baltimore, had a brother back in Baltimore who was in the sports memorabilia business. I now surmise that his brother got stuck with a bunch of these sweatshirts and was giving them away, leading to Bill giving us one. (1994 must have been a horrible year for Bill's brother. Not only did he get stuck wth CFL Colts merchandise which could not be sold, but he was also victimized by the baseball strike in 1994. He had paid a pretty penny for the right to sell Baltimore Orioles merchandise outside of the new Camden Yards ballpark, only to have the last part of the seaosn cancelled, along with the entire postseason.)
After the Court injunction took effect, the new CFL team became known as the "Baltimore CFL Club" for the 1994 season, and then was known as the "Baltimore Stallions" for the 1995 season, a season in which they won the Grey Cup. In 1996 the Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore, and the CFL team went out of business. Again there was a court injunction which prohibited the new team from calling itself the Browns, and so they chose the name Ravens, the only major league team in any sport to be named for a poem. (Edgar Alan Poe was a Baltimore native.) In 1999 Cleveland obtained an expansion franchise, which was called the Browns even though it had no connection to the previous Browns franchise.
This story illustrates the problem of franchise moves in major league sports. What you get is cities competing against each other for the "privilege" of hosting a major league franchise. The result is that the taxpayers lose, and the franchise owners win.
Major League Baseball had ten franchise moves in the 20-year period of 1953-1972, while the NFL had only one during this period (the Cardinals moving from Chicago to St.Louis in 1960). Faced with relentless criticism from Howard Cosell and others, baseball got its act together and since 1972 has had only one franchise move (the Montreal Expos to Washingotn in 2005). Meanwhile, the NFL "took up where baseball left off", to quote Cosell, and had nine moves duirng the period of 1982-2000.
The floodgates for the NFL opened with the landmark anti-trust case which it lost to the Oakland Raiders in 1982. At issue was the NFL By-Law 4.3, which required that any move required approval from 3/4 of the owners. Al Davis wanted to move his Raiders to Los Angeles, but the other owners voted 22-0 againat him, with five abstentions. (Davis was notoriously unpopular among the owners, seen as a renegade.) When litigation arose between Davis and the NFL, teamed with the city of Oakland in opposing the move, Davis took it to a jury trial and got a favorable verdict. The Court of Appeals affirmed the verdict, and the Supreme Court declined to consider the case.
Although Cosell opposed the shameless moving of franchises to greener pastures, as a former lawyer he understood that Rule 4.3, which allowed the owners to block a move without giving any reason whatsoever, was an illegal restraint of trade in violation of anti-trust laws. This resulted in a serious rift between Cosell and NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle, who was too dim-witted to understand that you can argue that someone had a right to do something, while still disagreeing that doing that thing was a good idea.
Oddly, the NFL has never amended Rule 4.3. But what has happened is that the owners have been giving approval routinely in recognition that litigation would go against them if they arbitrarily withheld their approval for proposed moves. So, when the issue came up with the Colts in 1984, the owners gave the Colts' owner blanket permission to move to any city of his choosing! He chose Indianapolis, which the Colts still call home.
