Rams' relocation a breeze compared to Oilers' move from Houston to Nashville in 1997

Rams' relocation a breeze compared to Oilers' move from Houston to Nashville in 1997

By JACK WANG / STAFF WRITER

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Nearly two decades later, the story still sticks with Frank Wycheck.

It was 1997, and the Oilers were in a state of flux – headquartered in Nashville after moving from Houston, but playing more than 200 miles away at the Liberty Bowl. That meant chartering a flight even for home games, and staying at a hotel near the Memphis airport before playing in front of sparse crowds.

After a few weeks of this, starting center Mark Stepnoski clipped his toenails. He piled them up, and left them in the corner of his room.

“We were away for a week and came back another week, it was still there,” said Wycheck, who was in the midst of his third season as the team’s tight end.

“You would’ve never thought we were an NFL team based on our living quarters,” added former receiver Derrick Mason.

Until the Rams moved from St. Louis to Los Angeles earlier this year, the Oilers’ move to Tennessee – and their subsequent rebranding as the Titans – stood as the seventh and most recent relocation in the NFL’s post-merger landscape. Their coach at the time? Jeff Fisher.

By all accounts, his second try at guiding a move won’t be nearly as difficult as his first.

The Rams have their own share of obstacles. They are Southern California’s most itinerant sports team, having practiced this offseason in both Oxnard and Irvine – some 100 miles apart – and will move back up to Thousand Oaks in a few weeks. They will play home games at the Coliseum, a stadium with both history and clear signs of aging, before a gleaming new venue opens in Inglewood in 2019.

But given what Fisher had to deal with as the Oilers coach in the mid-1990s, these are relatively minor concerns.

In addition to the less-than-ideal hotel – which Mason described as a “two-star” experience – the relocation to Tennessee was plagued by two factors that made life especially difficult for players: sub-par facilities and an almost non-existent fanbase.

The Oilers held training camp at Tennessee State University in Nashville, but once the season started, they found themselves sharing a building with a doctor’s office. There were only four or five showers, and the locker room was built to hold only 40 people comfortably at a time.

That they played in an different city didn’t help either. When the team tried to hold promotional tours in Memphis before the start of the season, few responded.

“No one paid attention to us,” Wycheck said, recalling one red-carpet event on Beale Street. “People were walking on the sidewalk, like ‘What the hell, who are these guys?’ They paid zero notice. They had zero excitement.”

Once they got into the amphitheater, he looked up into the stands. There couldn’t have been more than 50 people. That October, even owner Bud Adams admitted, “I didn’t know how much bad blood there is between Memphis and Nashville.”

Memphis residents knew they were just being used as a way station, and responded appropriately. Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium drew an average of 28,000 fans to Oilers games that season, less than half its full capacity. Fewer than 18,000 showed up for games against Baltimore and Washington. The highest attendance was 50,677 in a season finale against Pittsburgh, but with Steelers fans filling up a sizable portion of the stands.

The Rams shouldn’t have nearly as much trouble generating buzz, given the fans that have long pined for the franchise’s return. The team has already sold out its 70,000 season tickets, and single-game tickets aren’t easy to come by. Seats for the Sept. 18 home opener against the Seahawks start at nearly $200 on the resale market.

Of course, none of that guarantees success for the Rams. Of the NFL’s seven relocations in the last 34 years, only two improved their win total by more than one game. Most hummed near or well below .500, with the exception being the Los Angeles Raiders’ 8-1 record in the strike-shortened 1982 season.

But given the existing support, Fisher can spend more of his time focusing on Xs and Os than the distractions of a cross-country move. The 58-year-old is a well-respected figure, but he has yet to guide the Rams to more than seven wins. Heading into the fifth and final year of his contract, some fans have wondered about his long-term future.

For now, however, Fisher can lean on his experience as a proven steady hand.

“He’s been through this before,” Mason said. “I think that’s one reason maybe they kept him on. … He knows how to handle a relocation process. He knows how to keep the players from thinking about anything that’s extraneous.”