As Ravens explore new frontiers in Maryland, the Commanders now have company

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The Ravens did not need a map to find Prince George’s County. They’d played the Washington Commanders at their stadium in Landover (now Northwest Stadium) a dozen times over the past three decades, including the preseason. But never before an Aug. 1 trip to College Park had the Ravens brought commemorative towels.

“STADIUM PRACTICE AT UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND 2026” read the branded souvenirs. The towels doubled as historical markers, celebrating not only the Ravens’ inaugural fan engagement event in Prince George’s County but also the first NFL practice held at Maryland’s SECU Stadium.

Thirty miles southwest of M&T Bank Stadium, the Ravens were welcomed with open arms. An announced 20,185 attended the free, two-hour session early in training camp. Afterward, quarterback Lamar Jackson posed for photos with former Terps men’s basketball standout Derik Queen and rising-star quarterback Malik Washington. Young fans ringed the field as Ravens players lingered after practice to sign autographs and take selfies.

“We have the best fanbase in the world,” Ravens coach Jesse Minter said before a crowd of Washington- and Baltimore-area reporters. “For us to be able to take the show on the road and still have all these people show up, it’s really cool.”

As of April, though, Prince George’s County is no longer technically the road. Neither is Montgomery County. The two counties, the most populous in Maryland and longtime bastions for fans of Washington’s NFL franchise, are now home for the Ravens. Kind of.

Under a change to the NFL’s designated “home marketing areas,” the Ravens now share commercial rights with the Commanders in the two counties, where they can sell corporate sponsorships, promote the team and hold fan events.

The Ravens and Commanders have always jostled along the Baltimore-Washington corridor for hearts and minds, at once linked by their proximity and separated by the 30 miles between their stadiums. But Friday’s preseason finale at M&T Bank Stadium will mark the teams’ first game since the Ravens’ foray into what the NFL once considered Washington’s territory, a densely populated and relatively wealthy region that will soon lose Commanders home games to their ancestral D.C. home.

In Maryland, the line between Ravens Country and Commanders Country is increasingly blurry.

“Fans, in this case, get the final vote,” said Marty Conway, a sports industry management professor at Georgetown and former vice president of marketing with the Orioles. “And they’re going to determine what they want to turn on, what they want to see.”

‘Contested’ counties

The Ravens owe their expanded footprint in part to owner Steve Bisciotti, according to the Sports Business Journal, which reported last year that he’d proposed changes to the franchise’s designated sphere of influence. Bisciotti reportedly argued that the NFL’s marketing limitations — the northernmost parts of Prince George’s County are only 20 miles from M&T Bank Stadium, yet were off limits to the Ravens — were stunting the franchise’s business growth during a period of booming popularity. North of the Mason-Dixon Line, the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers were already boxing the Ravens in.

Commanders owner Josh Harris, who’d acquired the team in 2023 for over $6 billion, reportedly pushed back on the proposal, arguing that his valuation of the franchise reflected its exclusive rights in Washington’s neighboring Maryland suburbs. Harris also reportedly balked at a proposal from commissioner Roger Goodell’s staff that would’ve implemented a “shared market,” akin to the fully overlapping territories that the league’s two New York and Los Angeles franchises operate under.

The NFL owners’ vote this spring on the revised HMAs came just seven months after the D.C. Council signed off on the Commanders’ RFK Stadium project. Their new 65,000-seat domed stadium, located along the Anacostia River and resembling the venue where the franchise played from 1961 to 1996, is expected to be completed in time for the 2030 season.

Because of their proximity to Washington and Baltimore, Prince George’s and Montgomery counties have “always been contested,” Conway said. The counties have a combined 2 million residents, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Conway likened the area’s overlapping loyalties to those in New York and Los Angeles and called the HMA changes “a natural occurrence.”

“Growing the game beyond any individual team’s home city is a league-wide priority, both domestically and internationally,” Brad Downs, the Ravens’ senior vice president of marketing, wrote in an email provided by a team spokesperson. “For the Ravens, that means strengthening existing relationships with our fans while welcoming new members of the flock throughout Maryland. We have thousands of fans in these counties, and they are a short drive from our stadium, typically less than an hour. Our ability to directly reach and build relationships with fans in Prince George’s and Montgomery counties is an important part of that effort.”

Turf wars have unfolded along the Baltimore-Washington corridor before. When the Nationals arrived in D.C. in 2005, giving Washington its first Major League Baseball team since 1971, the Orioles were not especially welcoming. A dispute over how much the Nationals should receive in rights fees from the Orioles-controlled Mid-Atlantic Sports Network raged for over a decade.

And, because MLB did not delineate where the Orioles and Nationals could promote themselves in their shared marketing territory, some outreach efforts were perhaps guilty of overreach. In 2015, for example, the Orioles purchased a billboard about 7 miles from Nationals Park that featured the team’s star players and advertised an “O’MAZING TIME.”

“It doesn’t do you any good, even if the territory is quote-unquote shared or expanded, to really be running things that are not going to appeal to people who are your regular customers,” Conway, a Howard County resident who works at M&T Bank, said in an interview. “You want that affiliation to be authentic and not to be like, ‘This is like a land grab here.’ Because those things just tend not to work.”

Ravens’ rise

The Ravens’ growth in the D.C. suburbs has been more subtle. As Washington’s NFL franchise withered under the control of Dan Snyder, the Ravens established themselves as one of the region’s premier sports teams. Over Snyder’s 24 years as owner, from 1999 to 2023, Washington won as many playoff games as the Ravens won Super Bowls (two). Washington’s waitlist for season tickets ended, and attendance plummeted during lean years.

The Ravens, meanwhile, minted superstars with crossover appeal. Inside linebacker Ray Lewis graced the cover of “Madden,” the video game franchise’s first defensive player. Ed Reed became one of the most revered safeties in league history. Jackson won two NFL Most Valuable Player awards and nearly a third.

“Those are easy guys to root for,” said Joe Bruneel, the defensive coordinator at Whitman High School, in Bethesda. “The Redskins-slash-Commanders really haven’t had those guys.”

Bruneel, a Montgomery County native and lifelong Green Bay Packers fan, recalled growing up in the ’90s surrounded by nearly as many Dallas Cowboys die-hards as Redskins die-hards. The Cowboys had established themselves as “America’s Team,” winning three Super Bowls from 1992 to 1995. Washington had won three NFL titles itself over a 10-season span. Baltimore wouldn’t get the Ravens until ’96.

But decades of diverging success have changed loyalties among the region’s newer generations of fans. “Kids are more likely to say the Ravens are their favorite team,” Bruneel said. “Or they’re just as likely to say, ‘Oh, I’m a Patriots fan.’ ‘I’m a Chiefs fan.’ ‘Oh, I’m a Steelers fan.’”

The Ravens have also invested locally at the grassroots level. In 2024, Bruneel attended a flag football event at Walter Johnson High School, in Bethesda, where he was coaching at the time. Montgomery County Public Schools was piloting a girls flag football program through a partnership with the Ravens and Under Armour that provided grant funding, including equipment, coaching stipends and uniforms for all 25 MCPS high schools. (Prince George’s County held its inaugural season in 2025 after receiving support from the Commanders.)

Bruneel recalled looking around the event and asking a Ravens official: “You know what’s pathetic? Where are the Commanders? Yeah, this is Commanders country, quote-unquote. Where are they? And then, finally, they had someone show up. I mean, it just felt like lip service that they were there.”

The bonds that teams build with fans tend to be “generational,” Conway said. But they can be broken down over time. Along with the Commanders’ decades-long struggles, sources interviewed for this story pointed to problems with their stadium and game day atmosphere; the team’s off-field issues under Snyder; and, until recently, persistent quarterback issues as deterrents for lapsed or potential new fans.

“It opens up the opportunity more for you to go after quote-unquote the new fan or somebody that’s disgruntled with their current organization,” Conway said. “It’s going to come down to who can consistently be competitive and win. And I think that’s where clearly the Ravens have had that. They’ve gotten the benefit of that when they’ve been consistently competitive, playoff-bound. And the Commanders have had their challenges in that.”

Commanders’ ‘golden ticket’

Downs, the Ravens’ marketing official, wrote that the team is “focused on reaching Ravens fans wherever they are in Maryland and beyond.” On TV, the team is not hard to find. Friday night’s preseason game, like the team’s first two, will be broadcast in Washington, and most regular-season games are available in the D.C. market.

But the Ravens’ presence in the suburbs is, for now, fledgling. Few sports bars in Prince George’s and Montgomery counties have marketed themselves as Ravens bars. According to published lists of Ravens Roosts and Ravens Flocks, networks of social clubs and fan organizations that watch games together stateside and abroad, the Ravens have fewer supporters’ groups in the two counties than they do in Germany, Toronto and Kansas City, Missouri.

Asked about fan activations, Downs pointed to the “turnout and enthusiasm” for the team’s practice in College Park, as well as its investment in local recreational sports programs, and wrote that the Ravens “look forward to building on that momentum.” But he did not elaborate on those plans.

Minter sidestepped a question after the Aug. 1 practice about his hopes for an annual visit to the D.C. suburbs, acknowledging that M&T Bank Stadium, the team’s usual venue for preseason open practices, might sometimes better suit the Ravens. (According to a copy of an agreement between the Ravens and the University of Maryland obtained via a public-records request, the total estimated cost of the practice, including staffing and use of the stadium, was $365,617.35.)

Grant Paulsen, a co-host of “Grant & Danny” on Washington’s 106.7 The Fan who grew up in Virginia as a fan of Washington’s NFL team, said it was “pretty flabbergasting” that the Ravens would extend their marketing efforts inside the Capital Beltway. The Commanders are “in everybody’s DNA around here,” Paulsen said. He saw the emergence of Commanders quarterback Jayden Daniels as an antidote to Jackson’s mass appeal.

“There was a time where [young fans] saw Lamar Jackson or they saw the Ravens winning and this team losing, and maybe you could grab a few kids that way that become fans,” Paulsen said in an interview. “But now you’ve got the golden ticket in Jayden Daniels. He’s in the cool-kids club. He’s wearing the Members Only jacket. All the kids love him and should, and he’s super talented. So, if he can stay healthy and they can win, I think they’ll be just fine.”

Staying or going?

The Ravens’ expanded HMA does not represent an existential threat to the Commanders, whose operations are “business as usual,” according to sources familiar with the matter. Washington has weathered far worse since the NFL returned to Baltimore — regular coaching turnover, the rise and fall of star quarterback Robert Griffin III, the mushrooming controversy over the Redskins nickname (abandoned in 2020), a congressional investigation into the franchise’s workplace culture and Snyder’s ownership.

But skyrocketing league revenue can paper over only so many of a team’s problems. With Goodell expected to target 18-game seasons in the NFL’s next collective bargaining agreement, Conway said, some teams could face a reckoning: Can we fill our home stadium with our fans at least nine times a season?

Franchises with sustained struggles and poor stadium experiences risk declining attendance, a problem that can quickly compound.

“Every fan that you lose, you’ve got to mint one or two or three new fans and hope that they stay with you over that long period of time,” Conway said. He called local marketing efforts “an investment toward the future as much as it is anything that is going to be material here in the present.”

As the Commanders, who are headquartered in Ashburn, Virginia, prepare to move not only their home games back to Washington but also their College Park-based sales center, the Ravens are embedding themselves even deeper in the state.

In April, three years after the Ravens launched their pilot program with Under Armour, the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association announced that girls flag football would be sanctioned a state championship sport, with M&T Bank Stadium hosting the championship games for the inaugural 2026 season.

In July, the Ravens partnered with Perdue Chicken, calling the Salisbury-based company “a Maryland institution” in a news release.

And in August, the Ravens headed down Interstate 95 and into College Park, a new home away from home. There, inside an unfamiliar stadium, a familiar reception awaited them.

“Shoutout to the fans,” the Ravens’ Jackson told reporters on the field. “Really surprised with how many people came out for a practice.”

Banner reporter Kevin Reynolds contributed to this article.