I’m glad that Tennessee has an NFL team. The state deserves one. The people there love their football.

The people in Nashville, where the Titans are based, are probably the nicest in the league when it comes to hosting media people from out of town. They do just a fantastic job.

But with all that having been said, when I look at the Titans, who host the Browns on Sunday, I see the Houston Oilers, their predecessors. I am thrilled that Robert Saleh got another chance to be a head coach, but when I look at him, I see Bum Phillips and Jerry Glanville, two coaches of the Oilers.

Bum and Glanville were shows all by themselves. What characters they were. When Bum was the coach from the late 1970s into the early ‘80s, the Oilers were good, make no mistake about it. They faced the Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC Championship Game in 1978 and ‘79, and lost both times. So, as the 1980 season was approaching, Bum made the proclamation that the Oilers had to “beat Pittsburgh and kick in the door to the Super Bowl.” But when the Browns beat out both the Oilers and the Steelers to win the AFC Central in 1980, head coach Sam Rutigliano, a character himself, announced to his players in the locker in Cincinnati after the team had beaten the Bengals and clinched the title, “Hey guys, I’ve got my best line of the season, ‘Bum Phillips kicked in the wrong door!’ “

Bum knew his football, of that you can be sure. He had a great respect for the game and the people in it, such as head coach Don Shula.

“Now, his’n can be better than your’n, but you can take his’n and he can take your’n and his’n will still beat your’n,” he said. Which is to say that Shula’s coaching ability was such that it allowed him to take any group of players and make them much better.

I loved the Astrodome, the home of the Oilers. People have asked me what was the loudest opposing stadium I was ever in while covering the Browns. That’s easy. It wasn’t Pittsburgh. It was the Astrodome. That place was so loud that it would just blow your eardrums right out of your head. When they would get that Houston Oilers fight song going, it was as if you were just being swallowed up in the sound.

Just as I hate that the original Browns left Cleveland, I hate that the Oilers left Houston. I am glad Houston was able to get a team back, but the Texans aren’t as much fun as the Oilers were.

And there is nobody leaving tickets for a dead person at the ticket window. Glanville was a big fan of Elvis Presley, and he would leave tickets for him at every opposing stadium in the league where the Oilers were playing. That includes Cleveland, which is not far from his hometown of Perrysburg, near Toledo. He laughed and said he hoped that the Browns would have a brand new nail stuck into his locker so he could hang up all his things. He didn’t think too much of the visitors locker room in Cleveland Stadium, and you can’t blame him. It was pretty spartan.

Steve King