The Oilers Juggernaut

funny thing happened on the way to the ignominy of a losing, poorly attended season for the ersatz Tennessee Oilers of the National Football League: The Oilers, just before midway of the NFL's 1997 season, suddenly looked like potential winners.

Not, to be sure, on the scale of such predictable powerhouses as the San Francisco 49ers and the Super Bowl champion Green Bay Packers over there in the boring -- and long-dominant -- old National Football Conference. But the Oilers' prospects had taken a sudden rise on the strength of Sunday's convincing 28-14 licking at the Liberty Bowl of the Washington Redskins, an NFC warhorse which had just itself knocked off the venerable Dallas Cowboys on Monday Night Football).

Granted, the Oilers were still no better than 3-4, two games below the Jacksonville Jaguars, division leaders in the American Football Conference's Central Division. But, after a road game with NFC weak sister Arizona Cardinals (1-6) next week, the Oilers would have two games with Jacksonville during the following month -- and ample opportunity to get atop their increasingly bunched-up division.

Moreover, there were all of 31,000 attendees at the Liberty Bowl Sunday (some of them juveniles with free paper, to be sure), and, while that doesn't begin to compare with the gates at every other home game in the NFL, it beat hell out of the two previous home-game crowds, those scarecrow assemblies in the mid-teen-thousands who had turned out to see the Oilers lose to the Baltimore Ravens and win over the Cincinnati Bengals.

Meager (or nonexistent) marketing by the Oilers management, a late start on season tickets, poor and costly walk-up ticket service, and residual resentment of the NFL for passing over Memphis: These have all previously been noted by various scribes as reasons for low turnouts in our proud riverfront city suddenly reduced to baby-sitting a football team for the long-term benefit of some upstart country cousins in Nashville. (One nice thing about the late Boss Crump: Nobody doubted who ran Tennessee -- and from where -- while he was around, by damn!)

A note here in further extenuation of those poor local showings: The Baltimore Ravens? Okay, the Ravens (tied now with the Oilers) have had their moments so far this season, and if they had been billed as the Cleveland Browns, which is what they were before owner Art Modell took them to a higher bidder elsewhere two seasons back, they'd undoubtedly have drawn larger numbers in Memphis. If Modell is complaining, as we hear other NFL owners are, about their share of local gate receipts, then he should be reminded -- none too gently -- of that famous text concerning reaping and sowing. Reap on, buddy! That's what you get for making sure your team looks (in those black-and-purple roller-derby threads) and sounds like an Arena League reject.

Modell, like such other anti-philanthropic types as Cardinal owner Bill Bidwell and the late Indianapolis Colts owner Robert Irsay, who took long-established franchises out of St. Louis and Baltimore, respectively, are evidently what passes for role models to today's crop of NFL owners. Although the real culprit may be old Darth Vader himself, Al Davis of the Oakland-Los Angeles-Oakland Raiders, who may be ahead of his time once again in having found his way back home.

What really happened, of course, was that, after more than a decade of denial, the powers-that-be in Oakland coaxed Davis back by showing themselves willing to pay Davis' price -- which included a big new free stadium in the works and perks and tax breaks galore (sound familiar?). Oakland, remember, is the city that experienced nine-tenths of the damage back there in 1989 when something hit that got designated as "the San Francisco Earthquake." We're talking urban inferiority complex (sound familiar?)

Which brings us to Bud Adams, the Oilers mogul who cut the sweetheart deal with Mayor Phil Bredesen of Nashville to get his itinerant bunch of red-white-and-baby-blue heroes relocated in our beloved state capital by game time in 1999. Wait: Speaking of Phil Bredesen, where is Phil Bredesen? Has anyone seen him among the visitors to Ye Olde Liberty Bowl? Has anyone seen any of the other 15,000 or so Nashvillians who were supposed to be headed this way for Oilers games this year and next? Why doesn't ESPN pick on them?

Incidentally, Don Sundquist, the erstwhile Memphian who three years ago went east to Nashville and the governorship, has been sighted at the Liberty Bowl this pro-football year. He was there when the abject Cincinnati Bengals took a fall before some 15,000 souls, and his posted schedule called for him to have been there last Sunday. U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr. has been there (sporting a semi-official Oilers cap), and so have representatives, at least, of County Mayor Jim Rout.

Bud, of course, has been there, too. As he entered the south end tunnel leading from the stadium into the locker-room area after the game Sunday, he was greeted by a rude local citizen who brandished a bullhorn from overhead and called out, "Hey Bud, change the name. You suck!"

That was a kindly reminder, of course, that Adams, who looks not the least villainous -- rather, like a portly, well-seasoned carny, a Tom Parker type -- either forgets things or changes his mind. He was to have conducted a statewide contest on a new nickname to replace "Oilers," remember? In the age of the Utah Jazz of the NBA, should that really matter, by the way? Ask all those Mormon swingers.

Some two weeks after signing on a Nashville PR firm ("my first ever"), Adams was asked Sunday whether he hadn't previously signed on the Memphis PR firm of Walker & Associates. "Oh, well, yeah, I guess I did," the Oilers owner finally recollected.

Adams made so bold, however, as to predict (a) that his team would make the post-season playoffs and (b) that by doing so, it would succeed in filling the Liberty Bowl. Don't look now, but that might be the benefit of the doubt you see emerging at various points along the Memphis skyline.

Meanwhile, coach Jeff Fisher does his best to be polite to the little bands of local well-wishers like those who dogged him Sunday on his way out of the stadium, traveling bag over his shoulder, to the nearby Blues Booster tent .

Was doing all this PR a burdensome part of his job? he was asked. "On or off the record?" he wondered.

All the Oilers are doing their best out there on the existential edge. Take star running back Eddie George, who ran for 131 yards Sunday and is a sure-fire All Pro selection. "I heard the crowd. They helped me a lot," he said at one point in the post-game interview session. Minutes later, someone else asked, in a slightly different way, about the low attendance so far. "I shut it out. I don't pay any attention to it," he said.

Can both things be true? Maybe so, maybe no. That's what you call a broken-field runner, able to tell it round or tell it flat. But if things continue to improve at the rate of the last two weeks, both on in the field and in the stands, Eddie George and the rest of us may finally end up on the affirmative side of things, for real.