LP Field - History

History

During the 1995 NFL Preseason, the Houston Oilers faced the Washington Redskins in an exhibition game at Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, Tennessee. At the game, Oilers owner Bud Adams met Nashville Mayor Phil Bredesen and began discussing the possibility of moving the team to Middle Tennessee, due to Adams' discontent with the teams' lease at the Astrodome and unwillingness of the City of Houston to build a new football-only stadium. Later that fall, Adams and Bredesen announced the team's intent to move to Nashville. The city and team decided to locate a stadium on the eastern bank of the Cumberland River in downtown Nashville, on the site of a blighted industrial development.

In a special referendum on May 7, 1996, voters in Metropolitan Nashville/Davidson County voted to approve partial funding of the proposed stadium. The vote, which allocated US$144 million of public money to the project, passed with a 59% majority. The pro-stadium organization, known as "NFL Yes!" outspent the anti-stadium group by a ratio of 16:1 during the campaign.

The funds initially would be raised through an increase in the Metro water tax. The ongoing funding is through a 300% increase in Davidson County individual homeowner property taxes. Much of the remaining construction costs were funded through the sale of personal seat licenses. Some State of Tennessee money was allocated to the project, on the condition that the Tennessee State University football team move its home games there, and with the request that the team be named "Tennessee" (instead of "Nashville"), which the franchise was planning to do anyway, in an attempt to appeal to the broader region.

The stadium's construction was delayed when the construction site was hit by a tornado that struck downtown Nashville on April 16, 1998 and destroyed several cranes, but the stadium opened in time for the first scheduled event.

The stadium received upgrades during the summer of 2012. Among the improvements are a new sound system, high-speed elevators to the upper levels, and LED ribbon boards mounted on the faces of the upper mezzanines. Two new high-definition ANC brand LED video displays measuring 157 feet by 54 feet were installed, replacing the entire end zone scoreboard apparatuses. At the time of installation, the two boards became the second-largest displays in the National Football League (trailing only Cowboys Stadium).