Short of China Town (and maybe Mo-Town?), I don’t know of any other towns that actually exist within a city. Derrr — that doesn’t even make any sense.

And then, what?, I’d have a FIVE hour commute to work each day (10 hours, both ways), between P-burg and Bodymore, Murdaland?

Right.

Geez, when will I learn not have a battle of wits with unarmed men?

1. Angelo said they made a mistake and the trade didn’t get called in. He never said anything about purposely screwing them over on the trade. He apologized for the mix up.

2. Ozzie just said he couldn’t get through on the phone to complete the trade. The part about Jax tying up the phone line has never been proven or collaborated by the NFL. How do you tie-up a phone line? Was Jax on the phone to the NFL talking about the weather during the draft? Since both teams have to call in a trade to the NFL, they have to have multiple lines. Was Jacksonville on all of them? Wouldn’t the NFL find it fishy and come out and say something if that was the case?

3. Ozzie never apologized to Minny for them missing their pick. He never told them the trade didn’t go through, he just watched them miss their pick. The beneficiary of the mix up? Jacksonville getting the pick they wanted. Didn’t cost Ozzie nothing to help out his buddy.

4. Personally, I don’t think Angelo is smart and slick enough to attempt to pull of what John is claiming. I have seem him get flustered and tongue tied in press conferences many times. He is definitely more often described as incompetent rather than conniving.

5. I have noticed in life that the people coming up with the conspiracy theories are usually the people that have done clandestine things in the past, so they think everyone does it. Sometimes the simple answer is the truth.

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

check out this sorry soul. You live in Pittsburgh, so sorry for that, root for the Bears, so you are a wanna be Chitownian, and have to drive to MD, which is the only place you can make any money.

and you are on a board complaining about the Ravens and Baltimore.

Jealous!

————————————————
Thank you for that! I couldn’t have said it better myself. You gotta love these people that can’t get a job in Pittsburgh then come to Baltimore and b*tch and complain about everything. Unfortunetly, I work with plenty of them.

The other guy has the lengthy details about that draft posted above but as far as the friendship between Shack and Ozzie, the Jags traded up with the Ravens in 2008 to take a pass rusher and the Ravens took Joe Flacco.

John Harbaugh didn’t create a conspiracy theory. Jerry Angelo admitted he was wrong.

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

check out this sorry soul. You live in Pittsburgh, so sorry for that, root for the Bears, so you are a wanna be Chitownian, and have to drive to MD, which is the only place you can make any money.

and you are on a board complaining about the Ravens and Baltimore.

Jealous!

He might have been asked about it, but he made up the whole conspiracy theory on his own. He was the one who added the whole new level to the story.

As for what happened in 2003, I will put on my own aluminum foil hat: The Ravens told the Vikings they had a deal, but never called it into the league. They made up the story about the phone lines being busy with a side deal they made with Jacksonville. The Ravens sat there and laughed their a**es off while 2 teams picked players while the Vikings thought they had a trade. And one of them just happened to be his good friend, according to you.

Ozzie is a d**k for either not telling the Vikings the trade didn’t go through or pulling off the big scam. Take your pick.

CMON! Are we going to lockout until THIS is ruled on too?

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Really? It’s July, get over it already. So he wanted to be traded, big deal! Isn’t there a player each week who makes the same request? Would you rather he assault people, rape women, run people over, or be involved in drug rings?

Or perhaps you’re just jealous because he’s wealthy, gets some attractive strange, and will live a life none of us can fathom living?

I’m beating a dead horse here, but if Chicago fans want to really see what whining is, they need look no further than their own quarterback.
============================

You’re right. All I need to do is search this site for any article about Jay Cutler and read the comments. I’ll see an ocean of whining by guys like you because the Bears QB is an unpolished gunslinger who managed to take his team further than all but 3 others in the league.

It’s okay. You can keep whining about how jealous you are because the Bears have a good QB.

This wouldn’t be an issue if the Ravens managed to avoid monumentally choking every year in the playoffs. If they’d have actually played good football they might have made it past the divisional round.

“The right thing would have been to give Baltimore something — either the fourth-round pick or some pick to make up for what turned out to be a broken promise,” wrote King. “The NFL ruled because the Bears never informed the league of the deal, it wasn’t official. I like [Bears General Manager] Jerry Angelo a lot. Always have. But this is dead wrong, and it’s a terrible message to send to fans and people who follow the league.”

First, Peter King is King of the Peters — a doosh and a tool and a pompous, arrogant, narcissistic gaseous windbag at that.

Second — he HATES the Bears, and always has.
This is well known and well documented. It’s obvious that he’s in physical pain any time he has to say anything even remotely positive about them. So for you to quote him as some kind of authority here is just laughable.

Third — it’s obvious to me. Any time someone has to say, “I like so-and-so a lot, I really do!” that should be a dead giveaway that in fact they can’t stand the sight of the person, and find their very existence repugnant.

Fourth — who the hell does King Peter think he is to say what is “honorable” and what isn’t? Like he’s somehow the moral standard for everyone else? S! T! F! U! and get over yourself, Captain Pompous.

Where this notion that the Bears “OWE” the Ravens anything comes from is actually King Peter’s own sissy-ast crybaby liberal entitlement-driven worldview and ideology, where the victims are ALWAYS right.

The Ravens (and that means players, coaches, fans, etc.) are in fact the biggest group of whining, crying, woe-is-me, self-pity-party-throwing, excuse-making, cross-carrying crybaby boo-hoo’ers in the ENTIRE NFL.

They are true whine connoisseurs.

The refs are against them, the league is against them, the Commissioner is against them, the other teams are against them — play that waa waa peddle, Ravens.

And this crying goes all the way back to the loss of the Baltimore Colts — those fans STILL act the beetch bout all that.

The thing that’s clear to this impartial observer: The Ravens exist in a perpetual state of inferiority complex, always TRYING desperately, in vain, to live up to reputation and accomplishments of the Steelers.

Is it cold living in that shadow, Ravens fans?

Hey Harbaugh, how about you get down off your cross and instead of crying like a schoolgirl with scraped knees, you start worrying about coaching your team up correctly, so it doesn’t collapse like a punctured lung (gratuitous Ray Lewis stabbing reference!) in the 3rd quarter of a playoff game?

What was that last year? — THREE turnovers in your own territory in the third quarter?
A series of drops and incomplete passes to end the game in spectacularly soul-crushing fashion?

Yeah, one botched communication on draft day that didn’t and doesn’t even affect your pick or personnel in ANY way whatsoever is really what you need to be focused on instead. RIGHT.

I can’t wait to watch the Bears and the Vikings duke it out for last place in the NFC Central.

The 2003 Vikings/Ravens situation is different from this year’s 2011 Bears/Ravens situation because the Jaguars tied up the phone lines with time running out on the clock. The quote from Ozzie Newsome was so bland because Shack Harris (the Jaguars VP of Player Personel at the time) was/is a good friend of his. The Ravens people kept trying to get through in 2003 while the Bears’ front office had no intention of doing so.

Secondly, he was asked to be on a Chicago radio show. Of course they’re going to ask him about it and he’s has no problem sharing the story.

The debate continues as to whether the Chicago Bears should have honored their verbal trade agreement last Thursday and given their fourth-round draft pick to the Ravens (if you are unaware of the background, this and this will help).

“CHI doesn’t owe BAL a damn thing,” @art33182 tweeted to SI.com’s Peter King yesterday. “BAL did the same thing to MIN back in 2003.”

King responded, “Not true. Read MMQB [Monday Morning Quarterback].”

So I did, and you may want to too.

“The Ravens-Vikings draft-trade story of 2003 is not quite the same,” King wrote in his weekly column. “Similar, but know the story before you say this is the Karma God getting even with Ozzie Newsome.”

In 2003, both Jacksonville (picking at No. 8) and Baltimore (No. 10) wanted to draft quarterback Byron Leftwich. To leapfrog the Jags, Baltimore called Minnesota (No. 7) to negotiate a deal. Not willing to give up their quarterback so easily, Jacksonville also offered a trade to Minnesota. While Minnesota played both sides to get more in the deal, the clock was winding down.

With minutes remaining, the Vikings told the Jags they were making a deal with Baltimore, King explained. Thus, Newsome’s team attempted to call the league to report the deal, but after several attempts, they failed to get through because the phone lines were busy. (There’s been speculation that the Jags tied up the phone lines purposefully.)

Note the first difference between the two trade stories. In 2003, the communication error was not on the Ravens. The league’s telephone lines blocked Newsome’s call. After the snafu, King explained the NFL added two additional phone lines so teams could always get through in the future. In 2011, the Bears insisted to Newsome that they had made the call, when in the end, they really hadn’t.

Still, the Vikings’ time expired and the deal was never consummated for the same reason the Bears-Ravens trade wasn’t consummated – the agreement was never reported to league officials. So when the clock hit zero in 2003, Jacksonville, who was next on the clock, quickly jumped in front of the Vikings and drafted Leftwich.

Note the second difference between the two trade stories. In 2011, both teams eventually got the players they wanted, but in 2003 the Ravens paid a big price. Despite a verbal trade agreement, Baltimore lost out on who they thought could be their franchise quarterback. The Vikings said they still got the player they wanted, but lost out on two extra draft picks. The Jags were the only real winners (although Leftwich never panned out to be that franchise quarterback).

It’s important to keep this context in mind when hearing Newsome’s quote after the Vikings-Ravens non-trade: “The deal was not consummated. A deal is not a deal until I talk to Joel Bussert, and I never talked to Joel Bussert.”

This quote makes it seem like Baltimore was trying to get out of their agreement at the time. But in all reality, it was the Ravens who may have had the biggest cause to protest by losing so much in the debacle. The Ravens wanted Leftwich, they had an agreement that should have made that happen, but a technicality prevented the move.

Instead of complaining about the league’s phone lines and his loss, Newsome did the honorable thing and accepted the consequences.

@art33182 is right. Chicago doesn’t owe Baltimore anything. Nobody has made that case; instead, the debate has revolved around honor. It was the Bears who made the mistake this time around, yet they still profited by their own error. They got the player they wanted (Wisconsin tackle Gabe Carimi) and didn’t have to give up an extra pick.

“The right thing would have been to give Baltimore something — either the fourth-round pick or some pick to make up for what turned out to be a broken promise,” wrote King. “The NFL ruled because the Bears never informed the league of the deal, it wasn’t official. I like [Bears General Manager] Jerry Angelo a lot. Always have. But this is dead wrong, and it’s a terrible message to send to fans and people who follow the league.”