Why don't the Baltimore Ravens name season-long team captains?

The Baltimore Ravens released their first depth chart for Week 1 on Tuesday evening, but one thing they have not done is what they have avoided for more than a few years: naming season-long team captains.

Most franchises across the NFL have released their depth charts and also named one or multiple team captains for the 2023 season already. One of those franchises is the Houston Texans, even though their choice was a bit dumbfounding. One of those franchises is definitely not Baltimore.

Almost exactly one year to this day, John Harbaugh was asked this question about the Ravens not naming captains for the season, and this is what he said.

"We do weekly captains," Harbaugh explained. "We feel like we have leadership throughout our roster, so we want to honor that."

The Ravens are one of the very few teams that haven't named season-long captains in the past, instead going by the week. In fact, the list only featured a very limited amount of franchises operating under those teams, including the likes of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New England Patriots.

This year, though, only the Ravens and the Tampa Bay Bucs have not named captains among their players.

The NFL doesn't mandate teams to name "official" captains, although most franchises have so weak a personality that they just go with the flow and simply do what (almost; not the Ravens) everybody else does. The NFL, however, limits captain-naming to only six members of a franchise.

According to Wikipedia, John Harbaugh has "followed this practice since becoming head coach of the Ravens."

Some fans don't like this, but most of them agree: the Ravens operate as a solid, stout, winning unit and a bound-by-blood family.

Let the 31 other franchises do what the herd does while the Flock does its own thing. It's much better our way, isn't it?

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