Football did not return easily to Baltimore in 1996. The team was somebody else's, pilfered from Cleveland with almost the same absence of shame that Indianapolis showed in stealing the beloved Colts a decade before. The name was strange: Ravens. The uniforms looked like nothing worn by the rest of the NFL. This new franchise seemed very much like a second-rate imposter.

But from the south there arrived, in that first year, a man who would define the Ravens. Muscles oozed from his purple jersey. He appeared on the field in a dance of his own making, with flames shooting from all around. He threw back his head. He screamed to the heavens. And while the white helmet and blue horseshoe of the Colts never fully left Baltimore, Ray Lewis gave a new face to football in his adopted city.

Ray Lewis forces a fumble while sacking Bengals QB Andy Dalton in the season opener. (AP)Maybe it is fitting he announced his pending retirement during a week the Colts come back to town. Nobody did more to make Baltimore forget them these past 17 years.

When a sports franchise

Philadelphia should be happy today. It finally found a way to dump Andy Reid. For 14 years the city's football fans have stomped, punched and kicked the Eagles' coach, firing him in parking lot tailgates, on the radio and in the stands. And good ol' Stand Up Andy took their rage, staring implacably across the top of his playlist, seemingly oblivious to the fact his team's fans never found a way to love him.

Stand Up Andy didn't stalk the sideline or throw his cap. He never much screamed. He never ripped off his headphones. He was always a stoic bear of a man, hiding behind an enormous mustache. Philadelphia never appeared to appreciate that. It seemed to long for a man who showed passion. You almost get the sense the fans would have loved Mike Ditka or Jerry Glanville or some other recycled side show from a long lost time rather than endure another Reid news conference that failed to deliver one sound bite upon which to munch.

Eagles fans won't have Andy Reid around to kick anymore after 14 seasons. (Getty Images) Why else could they not accept Stand Up Andy?

LANDOVER, Md. – Into another stadium tunnel Tony Romo walked Sunday night, a loser again in the season's final game. This stroll must be so tiring for him now. He limped along the floor of the concourse that leads to the visitors' locker room at FedEx Field. His legs ached. Nobody walked near him. Once more he would endure his suffering alone.

There are the Dallas Cowboys and then there is Tony Romo. As much as they all talked about team and togetherness, Romo will forever be an entity bigger than all of them. It is on his shoulders that they rise or fall. He understood this as he hobbled away from more imploded expectations, this time a 28-18 loss that gave the NFC East title to the Washington Redskins. It was the third time in five years he has handed away the division on the final day. All of Sunday night's wretched scenarios danced in his mind: The three interceptions. The receivers missed. Another season so close and yet once more empty.

"Shake it off," a FedEx Field

ASHBURN, Va. – He is but 22 years old and playing for a team that was once 3-6, and this makes defining anything about Robert Griffin III tricky. How can one game create a legacy for a man who has already taken the Washington Redskins farther than anyone could have expected them to go?

But RG3 has pulled the Washington Redskins (9-6) into the biggest game of next weekend with the NFC East on the line. Win or risk no postseason. So even though he has changed perspectives on what a quarterback should be in the NFL, blending accuracy with world-class speed, he has thrust himself into a place where the result of Sunday's game against the Dallas Cowboys may shape the discussion around his name for years to come.

If the Redskins win, he will be the rookie quarterback who delivered Washington from a decade of desolation.

If the Redskins lose and miss the playoffs, the first whispers will rise about the quarterback who couldn't win the big one.

[Playoff picture: Redskins

BALTIMORE – He has worn so many shades of arrogance and disgust, but it was hard to look at Tom Coughlin on Sunday and not feel a twinge of pity. His New York Giants have deceived him for reasons neither he nor they seem to understand. Their last two games are defeats by a combined score of 67-14. Nobody does this to one of his teams, especially at the end of the year, when resolve is always the Giants' top virtue.

You can't scream away this kind of failure. You can't throw the headset, bench a player or point a finger at an intrusive NFL world. Blame sat on the head coach's shoulder and he was willing to accept it. If only he knew why. And that, sadly, sat unanswered in a room made of cinder blocks far beneath M&T Bank Stadium.

"We don't have any momentum going," Coughlin said. The Giants are ending the regular season with a whimper and coach Tom Coughlin can't explain it. (AP)

"It wasn't anything to do with scheme," he also said. "I wish it was."

What Coughlin delivered after Sunday's 33-14 defeat to the Baltimore Ravens was a concession speech on the

Being a woman not long removed from college and on the small staff of a small bowl game, Lauren Schram Schweitzer has the unenviable task of reading the minds of 20-year-old men. This is not something for which she is well-trained, nor is it a task she sought. But three years ago when the Washington, D.C. Military Bowl needed someone to pick the gifts it gives to the players, all the faces in the office turned toward her.

San Jose State quarterback David Fales will get an iPad mini for playing in the Military Bowl. (AP)And so now she must think like a young football player.

"I'm always trying to find the latest and greatest cool gadget," she says.

It is not a secret but also not widely known that college football players are compensated for going to bowl games. While NCAA rules prohibit them from being paid, they are nonetheless handed lavish gifts as a reward for simply being on the roster of a team in a bowl. Such rewards are legal and in fact encouraged. The NCAA allows the bowls to spend up to $550 on each player. Since no bowl wants to be cheap, each spends up to the

TACOMA, Wash. – Before he left the Dallas Cowboys to come home again, Jon Kitna had one request of the two principals who run Lincoln High School:

Give me your worst students.

Jon Kitna prepares for an algebra class at Lincoln High School. (Yahoo! Sports)

The other teachers told him to stop. This was last February and it was going to be hard enough to teach three algebra classes in the middle of a semester. He was two months gone from an NFL career that went for 16 years, after all. Yes, this was his old high school, the one where he was a star quarterback in the early 1990s, but didn’t the new football coach understand what he was getting into?

Didn’t he see the numbers? Didn’t he know that four of every five of the students were on free or reduced lunches? That finding a meal was more important than understanding negative integers? Inspiring the best students was going to be difficult enough. Save himself, they advised. Start slow. Make it easy.

Kitna shook his head. Easy wasn’t the point. At 6-foot-4 with a buzz cut and a body built for

INDIANAPOLIS – On his darkest, sickest days, when the cure burned like poison through his body, Chuck Pagano kept a sheet of paper taped to the wall beside his hospital bed. The paper had a list of names and numbers that a football man would recognize as the depth chart of the Indianapolis Colts. And as the chemotherapy did its best work in fighting Pagano's leukemia, the depth chart became his constant connection to the life he once had as the Colts' head coach. The one he refused to give up, the one to which he was determined to return.

And whenever Colts general manager Ryan Grigson visited with news or updates or stories to tell, Pagano nodded toward the chart on the wall.

"Grigs does it look right?" Pagano would ask.

"Um no," Grigson replied, scratching out a name and writing a new one. "This guy's on IR."

But as the weeks went by and more strange, handwritten names appeared on the paper, it was clear to Grigson that the chart had become something living – an