Objectively speaking, the Titans’ current home digs of Nissan Stadium are pretty cozy with all things considered. It’s only 23-years-old but has all the concert/sporting events/festival versatility you’d expect from modern communal architecture.
Massive, luminous stadium lights as tall as skyscrapers. Easy walking access to the heart of downtown Nashville. Just about 69,000 seats. The works.
Knowing this about the stadium makes it strange it’s somehow not good enough for the Titans’ executives — like CEO Burke Nihill. In fact, they think so lowly of it that they’d stop spending money on it purely so they can get a new one. It’s like a little kid begging for a new toy that they really, really don’t need: “Pretty, please, Nashville!”
Wait, this sounds like a familiar story for an NFL team and its respective home city.
More from Ben Arthur with The Tennessean:
“The mayor said it last week in (a Tennessean) op-ed that in his opinion, doing nothing is not an option. I think we’ve seen it that way for three or four years. Probably longer,” Nihill told reporters. “Just understanding that the condition of this building, the increasing NFL standards and really all standards for building that we had to stop plugging holes and come up with a comprehensive solution.”
Let me get this straight because I surely don’t want to mischaracterize anything. That “comprehensive solution” is a new stadium. As in, a minimum of a $2 billion ask, simply because the Titans don’t want to maintain their perfectly cromulent current playing surface? Honestly, Nihill almost talks about the Titans’ current coliseum like it’s worn 1970s Astroturf that resembles more of a rough carpet now.
Nihill and the Titans are indeed being honest about their stadium wishes, but hoo boy, that doesn’t make it any more brazen.
Please, Nashville, we are your Important Football Team. Please fund our new home with billions in, uh, couch change. By the NFL’s standards of integrity, it could certainly be worse, I suppose.
