Titans

The Titans open another NFL season chasing what has eluded the franchise since 1999: a Super Bowl. That year remains the high point, the run that took Bud Adams's team to Super Bowl XXXIV.

The franchise carries a longer story than its Nashville address suggests. It started in 1959 as the Houston Oilers, a charter club of the American Football League, and won back-to-back AFL titles in 1960 and 1961 before the league folded into the NFL. The move to Tennessee in 1997 came with a stopover in Memphis and a season at Vanderbilt Stadium before the Titans name and Nissan Stadium, opened in 1999 with room for 69,143, gave the team its current home.

Nissan Stadium has stood witness to the club's best and its longest droughts since, but the numbers retired there reach back to the Houston years: Earl Campbell's 34 hangs alongside Mike Munchak's 63 and Elvin Bethea's 65, a reminder that the franchise's identity did not begin with the rebrand.

Division games against the Jacksonville Jaguars carry the current edge, while the Houston Texans rivalry is coloured by geography and history alike.

No player is tied to the Titans more tightly than Steve McNair. He took the franchise to its only Super Bowl, and was named NFL MVP in 2003.