The Baltimore Ravens recently announced that they are moving training camp to their team facility in Owings Mills, Maryland, from McDaniel College in Westminster, which had hosted training camp since the team’s inception in 1996. The team has attributed the decision to permanently relocate training camp—which was held at the team facility this past summer due to the NFL lockout—to “the way training camp has changed over the years.” In truth, however, it comes down to a provision in the new collective bargaining agreement that has received little attention but could have substantial ramifications—namely (as tends to happen with labor stoppages) worsening the fans’ experience.

The clause in question is the elimination of two-a-days, which had long been a training camp staple. Teams are now prohibited from practicing more than once a day during camp, which poses problems if inclement weather should arise. In past years, the team would either practice in the McDaniel gym (not exactly an optimal football practice facility) or return to Owings Mills for a second practice on the indoor field. (Practices at NFL team facilities are closed to the public.) With the second option no longer permissible, the Ravens—and the other 31 NFL teams, including the New York Jets, who relocated this year’s training camp from the SUNY Cortland campus to their Florham Park, N.J., facility—are forced to decide between closing camp to the fans or losing an untold number of practices to thunderstorms. Pick your poison.

To be fair, the lack of two-a-days wasn’t the only reason the team chose to relocate. As one would expect, the resources at an NFL practice facility are far superior to those at a small, rural college; in years past, the team would have to move equipment back and forth between the two sites. Still, when Ravens general manager Ozzie Newsome announced the change, he cited “the absence of two-a-days, how much space we need for the players and the meetings, the limited number of practices allowed by the new CBA, [and] the importance of having an indoor field when the summer storms come” as reasons for the change. Note how he managed to twice restate “the absence of two-a-days” using completely different wording.

And because of that, a tradition as old as the team is now no more. According to the Baltimore Sun, training camp drew over 100,000 fans annually, and officials in Westminster estimated that camp had over a $2 million economic impact on the city and its local merchants. Not to mention the opportunity to interact with the likes of Ray Lewis and Terrell Suggs up close and personal. No other event in pro sports offers fans the opportunities for interaction that an NFL training camp does.

Disclaimer: As the economically inclined among you may be aware, “economic impact” is the oldest trick in the book when a pro team wants its home city to build a new stadium. But we’re not talking about a booming metropolis that provides countless other opportunities for individuals to spend their money besides a new stadium. We’re talking about a city of 18,000 that stands as the gateway to Western Maryland and its vast expanses of nothing. When the number of people who attend an annual event is more than five times the population of your city, it’s a safe bet to assume there’s going to be a pretty substantial effect on the local economy. (For the record, the population of Cortland, N.Y., the Jets’ traditional summer home, was 18,740 as of the 2000 census.)

So what can be done about this? Add a provision to the CBA that grants exceptions to the two-a-day prohibition in the case of inclement weather. It’s one thing to spend six hours working out under the sun in late July, and this is presumably what the architects of the CBA had in mind when limiting practice times. Clearly, though, this falls into an entirely different category than holding a second practice because the first one was cut short by a thunderstorm.

I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know what steps would need to be taken to add such a provision now that the CBA has long since been ratified. But I do know that while the decision to move training camp to a private facility was one made by a single team out of 32, this is an issue that all NFL fans should care about.