Houston Grabs a Professional Sports Franchise: The Birth of the Houston Oilers (Part 1 - May 18, 2025)
by Scott Sosebee
This will begin a multi-part series on the founding of the Houston Oilers. If readers will indulge me, the series will be digested excerpts from my current book project titled “America’s Team and Texas’ Team: Two Teams, Two Cities, and Two Identities in the 1970s,” forthcoming from Texas A&M Press. This first part will deal mainly with the founding and growth of the National Football League, which, by 1960, would set the stage for the founding of the American Football League and the Houston Oilers.
Recently, when discussing the 1960s and 1970s in my Texas history class, I mentioned that the Houston Oilers captured the spirit and persona of Houston in the 1970s (specifically how the “Luv Ya Blue” teams with Bum Phillips coaching and Earl Campbell running through brick walls). A student said to me, “The Houston Who?” “The Oilers,” I replied, “the NFL team.” Another student said with a laugh, “Their name is the Texans.” I refrained from foaming at the mouth at the presentism of these poor students; after all, all of them were likely born well after the Oilers, in a fit of Bud Adams’ pique, picked up stakes and moved to Nashville to become the Titans. So, it has fallen to me to either walk down memory lane with the vast majority of you, or perhaps impart information that will keep a future student from making such a faux pas,
and take a peek at the founding of the Houston Oilers.
Although it’s hard to believe, the National Football League—currently by far the most popular of all professional sports in the United States—has not always occupied that position. Through at least the 1960s, professional football trailed Major League baseball in spectators by a wide margin, and college football even outpaced the pros in popularity. The NFL began in 1920 during a meeting between the owners/managers of several professional teams that played in a semi-organized “confederation” throughout the Midwest. The meeting was initiated by George Halas, the young coach/player/GM of a team sponsored by the Decatur Staley Manufacturing Company. Halas, along with representatives of ten teams that played in cities located in Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, met at a car dealership in Canton, Ohio, and formed what would become the National Football League.
The National Football League barely survived in its first years, but it soon found a niche. Still, it lagged behind college football in popularity and did not even come close to the soaring heights of fame that Major League Baseball did. One of the reasons was that professional football was not a national sport. Instead, it existed entirely in the Midwest and Eastern markets. Also, its fan base in those areas tended to be centered within the working and lower middle-class populations. They were fans who were passionate and certainly loyal, but financial considerations often limited their attendance at games, and through the 1940s and into the 1950s, in-person attendance was the way professional sports measured popularity and also how it made money. Most of the teams had local radio deals to broadcast games to fans who could not attend games in person, but those deals made little to no money for the teams and did not grow the fan base. However, the nation and the NFL were about to undergo a popular culture revolution, one that would not only change American society but would play a huge role in making the National Football League the most popular sport in the nation. Television was about to change everything.
The marriage between sports and television is the most significant and important development in the history of sports. Television revolutionized how sports were delivered to the public and expanded not just its fan base but also became its revenue foundation as well. All sports benefited from the television innovation, but football—and particularly professional football—reaped the most advantage from the advent of televised sports. Football seemed tailor-made for television. Its unique stop and starts in the action, the spectacle that took place—particularly the inherent violence—made it attractive to an American audience, and even the visuals that were often perfectly captured by a camera made football seem as if it was particularly invented to be viewed on a television screen.
The game that began to change everything happened in 1958 and involved the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants. The NFL Championship game that year was one of those fortuitous collisions that, although they happen by happenstance, have an effect whose significance reverberates like it was a planned phenomenon. The game pitted the New York Giants against the Baltimore Colts in Yankee Stadium, the most famous outdoor venue in the nation. The Giants, a team that played in the biggest market in the league and had become one of the most popular in the entire nation due to their presence on television. They had negotiated a contract with the CBS Network to broadcast their games, which meant that very often, every TV set in the nation that was on during Sunday games was watching the Giants. They counted as its players some of the most visible players in the league, such as halfback/flanker Frank Gifford—whose Hollywood handsome looks made him a newspaper and television attraction—and linebacker Sam Huff, who as the middle linebacker in Giant assistant coach and future Dallas Cowboy head coach Tom Landry’s innovative 4-3 defensive alignment, was becoming the most celebrated defensive player in the game. Their opponent, the Baltimore Colts, were a relatively new team in the league, born in 1953 although their lineage could be traced back earlier to Boston and New York as the Yanks, then—maybe ironically—to Dallas for a season as the Texans, and then finding a home in Baltimore as the Colts. They were not a power franchise in their early years, but under deep-pocketed owner Carroll Rosenbloom, innovative Head Coach Weeb Eubank, and most importantly, strong-armed quarterback Johnny Unitas, by 1958, the Colts were perhaps the best team in the NFL.
The game was a back-and-forth affair, and in the end, the Colts won 23-17 in the first “sudden death” overtime game in NFL history. The NFL had played exciting and transcendent Championship Games in the past, but the difference this time was that a national television audience was watching the game, and they were riveted. The telephone switchboards at NBC network lit up like the Christmas Trees, which likely remained up in most houses from Christmas Day, which had happened three days earlier. It became apparent that people wanted more football.
One of the people watching that game was millionaire Houston oilman Bud Adams. While that game did not set the spark in Adams’ soul to own a professional football team—he had began to look into buying a team in 1956, and in February of that year he had attempted to buy the Chicago Cardinals but was rebuffed—but that game made Adams more determined to have a professional franchise in Houston, and if the NFL did not want him to buy a team, perhaps he could be part of starting a new league from scratch. And that is just what happened.
Next week: Bud Adams and Lamar Hunt become the leading players in starting the American Football League.
The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.