What would the NFL look like if the Colts never moved to Indianapolis?

In the middle of a March night in 1984, the Colts packed 12 Mayflower trucks with all the team’s belongings and left Baltimore for Indianapolis.

The relocation didn’t just devastate Baltimoreans — it left a few other cities disappointed, too. Prior to the move, Jacksonville, Los Angeles, Memphis, and Phoenix were all courted as the potential next home of the Colts.

In the more than three decades since, all but Memphis have welcomed an NFL franchise. Even Baltimore got its Colts replacement in 1996 when the Cleveland Browns became the Baltimore Ravens.

Memphis was an extreme long shot at landing the Colts from the start, and its chances weren’t much better again when it bid for an expansion team in 1993. The Oilers’ move from Houston to Nashville in 1997 — and subsequent rebrand as the Tennessee Titans — has since dulled talks of Memphis’ NFL dreams.

Los Angeles didn’t come close to getting the Colts either, with the Rams already in the city and the Raiders becoming the second tenant in 1982.

But Jacksonville and Phoenix were real candidates. What would the NFL look like today if the Colts didn’t relocate to Indianapolis?

In 1972, Robert Irsay purchased the Los Angeles Rams for $19 million and immediately gave the deed to the team to Carroll Rosenbloom, who traded away his ownership of the Baltimore Colts to Irsay.

Rosenbloom swapped teams with Irsay because he was growing more and more frustrated with the team’s situation at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore.

“I can’t allow my fans to have to use those filthy facilities any more,” Rosenbloom told the Associated Press in 1969.

Irsay inherited the same problems when he took over the franchise. While some momentum for a new stadium picked up in Baltimore, it never came to be and Irsay began the process of looking for alternative cities.

But let’s imagine a scenario where Baltimore replaced its crumbling Memorial Stadium with a new stadium in the late 1970s that kept the team in Maryland for the long term. Here’s what could have happened:

The Ravens never come to be

If the Browns still depart Cleveland after the 1995 season, they would land elsewhere and there’s no reason that team would be called the Ravens — a reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s Baltimore home.

Indianapolis gets a different team

It’s tempting to think the Browns would’ve ended up in Indianapolis instead, but it’s likely they would’ve been beaten there by another team. The St. Louis Cardinals, who went to Phoenix in 1988, would have the same choice between Indianapolis and Phoenix that the Colts had in 1984. In this scenario, they make the same choice and the Indianapolis Cardinals are born.

Phoenix is now in the expansion team picture

The Indianapolis Cardinals leaves Phoenix as an attractive spot for a team when the NFL decides to pick two expansion cities in 1993. In reality, the NFL chose Charlotte and Jacksonville. But in this alternate scenario, Phoenix is ahead of Jacksonville in the pecking order.

Jacksonville’s winning bid was helped by the reception the city gave in 1979 when Irsay was considering north Florida as a possible spot for relocation. In this new scenario where the Colts stay in Baltimore without much drama, Jacksonville ends up third behind Charlotte and Phoenix.

Jacksonville still gets a team, eventually

But it’s hard to imagine Jacksonville — a city considered football starved and anxious to embrace a team — has to wait much longer. Let’s make this the new home of the Browns for the 1996 season where they get renamed the Jaguars.

In this alternate timeline, we have:

Phoenix was the other city that remained in the running for the Colts all the way until 1984.

As late as March 1984, just a couple of weeks before the Colts packed up for Indianapolis, there was a meeting between Irsay and a pair of Phoenix businessmen about a possible relocation.

“I felt we had a very positive meeting,” Phoenix real estate developer Eddie Lynch said. “I was quite encouraged. He expressed interest in our package and I had the definite impression that he was leaning toward Phoenix because we are the heart of the Sun Belt’s growing economy and because of our area’s wonderful lifestyle.”

That meeting came two months after Irsay reportedly canceled a meeting with Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt in January and insisted to Baltimore media the Colts were there to stay.

“I haven’t any intention of moving the goddamn team ... I flew six hours to be here tonight to tell you goddamn guys off.”

Irsay was probably the only one who knew how close Phoenix came to actually landing the team, but it was a real possibility.

Indianapolis again gets the Cardinals

If it did happen — like the first two scenarios — we’ll imagine that the Cardinals land in Indianapolis instead. And that’s really the only wrench in the domino effect.

The Jaguars and Panthers are still the expansion choices, and Baltimore still gets the Ravens. It’s really just a swap of the Colts’ and Cardinals’ locales.

In this alternate timeline, we have:

The aforementioned reception Jacksonville gave Irsay happened on Aug. 15, 1979. It was dubbed “Colt Fever.”

With Irsay in town to see the Gator Bowl — a hypothetical new home for the Colts — a crowd of somewhere between 40,000 and 55,000 filled the stadium to watch the Colts owner land a helicopter on the field.

“Anybody in his right mind has to be very pleased and enthused with this reception,” Irsay said of Jacksonville at the time, according to the Washington Post.

But Irsay’s flirtation with Jacksonville only turned the city into a bargaining chip for every NFL owner on the hunt for a new stadium.

Owners of the Saints, Oilers, Falcons and Cardinals all briefly mentioned Jacksonville as possibilities in the decade before the city was picked as an expansion site in 1993. But if the Colts picked Jacksonville back in the early 1980s, Indianapolis may have been that bargaining chip that eventually got a team via another relocation.

The Jacksonville Colts also result in the Indianapolis Cardinals

Like the last scenario, let’s pick the Cardinals as the team that instead winds up in Indianapolis, Phoenix as the city that gets an expansion team, and Baltimore gets the Ravens the same way.

Los Angeles might’ve ended up with the Jaguars

But the real curveball is that getting a team a decade earlier may be a terrible scenario for Jacksonville. With another decade to grow as a city and improve its bid for an NFL team, the Jaguars played their first games at the newly built Jacksonville Municipal Stadium that’s still the team’s home today, now under the name TIAA Bank Field.

When the shine of a new team wore off, the Jaguars went through the challenges of being a bad team in a small market without much tradition. It was exacerbated by the recession of 2008, and has since been an exaggerated issue for a city that hasn’t struggled that much to support the Jaguars. But the buoy through the toughest times was a stellar stadium and its ironclad lease.

If the Colts came to Jacksonville, they would’ve played in the Gator Bowl — an aging stadium that was demolished in 1994 to make way for Jacksonville Municipal Stadium.

Maybe a decade or so of stellar support could’ve convinced the city to build the stadium it ended up constructing for its expansion team. But there’s the very real danger that a deteriorating stadium would’ve cost Jacksonville its team. And in the event of that loss, it’s hard to imagine Jacksonville getting another team for a very, very long time.

St. Louis gets to keep the Rams

So let’s imagine that the Jaguars beat the Chargers and Rams to the punch with a move to Los Angeles sometime around 2008-10. With less option to run the show in LA, Stan Kroenke is forced to iron things out in St. Louis, but the Chargers still end up begrudgingly leaving San Diego to join the Jaguars.

Sorry, Jacksonville.

In this alternate timeline, we have:

March 1984 gave us the Indianapolis Colts and the dominoes fell favorably for Arizona, Jacksonville, and even Baltimore — which got a two-time Super Bowl winner in the Ravens.

If there’s one city that has reason to wish for an alternate reality it’s St. Louis — although it would’ve taken a convoluted series of events to keep the Rams in Missouri. All in all, most cities can be happy with the way things shook out when the Mayflower trucks shipped off for Indianapolis.