text: Tennessee Oilers era (1997–1998) After the 1995 season, Bud Adams announced the move to Tennessee, causing fan support in Houston to collapse for the 1996 season.  They intended to play at a new stadium in Nashville, but it would not be ready until 1999. The largest stadium in Nashville at the time, Vanderbilt Stadium on the campus of Vanderbilt University, seated only 41,000 — a capacity considerably smaller than the NFL minimum of 50,000 seats. Vanderbilt was also unwilling to permit alcohol sales.
  At the time, the state had two football stadiums that met NFL capacity requirements. The state's largest stadium, the University of Tennessee's Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, was quickly ruled out. Playing at Neyland would have put a transient NFL team in direct competition with the long-established Tennessee Volunteers for ticket sales, and with 102,000 seats it was widely acknowledged NFL games in Knoxville would have been all but impossible to sell out in time to avoid local blackouts on television. As a result, Adams announced that the renamed Tennessee Oilers would play the next two seasons at the 62,000 seat Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium in Memphis. The team would be based in Nashville, practicing there and commuting to Memphis only for games. The arrangement thus made the Oilers for all intents and purposes a traveling team that was to play 32 road games over the next two years.