30 luckiest sports franchises

26. Baltimore Ravens

The two Super Bowl runs for the Baltimore Ravens in their franchise’s time in the NFL featured two different kinds of luck: one for the lack of competition, and one for an incredibly lucky play leading to a huge run in the postseason.

For starters, their 2000 Super Bowl run featured a year where talented quarterbacks weren’t exactly roaming the land, and if they were, they were to be found in the NFC. To put it into perspective, the Ravens won the Super Bowl as a wild-card team, with Trent Dilfer under center.

As if that wasn’t lucky enough, the fortune cookies must have carried over to the 2012 season, where the Ravens again found themselves in the Super Bowl, this time against the San Francisco 49ers. Just to get there, they needed some luck to get over the hump known as the top-seeded Denver Broncos in the first round.

If a game is literally called the “Mile High Miracle”, you know some serious luck had to be involved, and the Ravens had just that when they launched a last-ditch Hail Mary led to a 70-yard game-tying touchdown with under a minute left in regulation. The Ravens went on to win the game in double overtime 38-35.

If it wasn’t for this run, the team may not have viewed Joe Flacco as the “elite” quarterback they do now, and may not have kept going with Flacco as their franchise quarterback after that 2013 season. And, if it wasn’t for that Super Bowl win, we wouldn’t view the Ravens as highly as we do year in and year out in the AFC.