The history of the Houston Texans began in , bringing the National Football League back to Houston, Texas after the city's previous franchise, the Houston Oilers, relocated to Nashville, Tennessee to eventually become the Tennessee Titans. The Texans are the newest franchise in the NFL. Despite some growing pains in the first nine years of their existence, the Texans became a more dominant team in the NFL's AFC South division in the 2010s, though they have yet to appear in a Super Bowl or a conference championship game.
Bringing the NFL back to Houston (1997) In June 1997, Bob McNair and Chuck Watson were bypassed by the National Hockey League in an attempt to bring a team to Houston, in part because of a lack of a suitable NHL arena.
Two weeks later, Houston found itself without professional football for the first time since 1959 as Houston Oilers owner Bud Adams got the final approval to move his team to Tennessee. A lawsuit filed by the city of Houston, Harris County, and other parties was settled with Adams paying millions of dollars for leaving town. In an interview with the Houston Chronicle, local entrepreneur and San Diego Padres owner John J. Moores, whose name was often attached to efforts to return the NFL to Houston, said that the city's football fans would be in for a long, dry spell without football and that he did not foresee another league expansion in the next 10 years. While efforts to get an NHL team in Houston faltered, McNair made his decision to set his sights higher and founded Houston NFL Holdings. Steve Patterson, who had been working with McNair in an attempt to bring the NHL to Houston, was immediately named as head of the new organization.
Now committed to the task at hand, McNair and Houston got an immediate morale boost in October 1997, when the NFL Stadium Committee reported to Commissioner Paul Tagliabue on the current attractiveness of Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Houston. Cleveland had lost the Browns in 1995 and had been promised by Tagliabue that the next expansion team would play there, bringing the league total to 31 teams. A future expansion to 32 teams seemed both logical and destined to happen, and Tagliabue praised McNair's strong initial efforts. Two days later, Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo (HLS&R) officials announced they would push for a domed stadium as part of the bid to lure the NFL back to Houston.
1998 In March 1998, McNair learned that the NFL officially awarded Cleveland its promised expansion franchise, making it the NFL's 31st team; NFL Commissioner Tagliabue said that the league would likely add a 32nd team in the next two years, with the three top candidates being Toronto (which would have been the NFL's first franchise outside the US, and the fifth largest market in North America), Los Angeles (North America's second largest media market, and the victim of two relocated franchises in the 1990s), and Houston (which was the fourth largest media market in North America and whose Oilers had been the most recent victim of franchise relocation).
Houston officials worried that Los Angeles would get the nod because of its media market size; in early May, those fears became reality as entertainment guru Michael Ovitz announced he would lead a largely privately financed $750 million project to build a stadium in Carson, California in hopes of landing the expansion team. However, both McNair and Ovitz stated that they needed to know the NFL's intentions regarding expansion by early 1999, lest they lose public support as a result of long delays while the league developed its plans.
In late October 1998, Tagliabue announced that the NFL owners would indeed expand the league to 32 teams, and would decide by April 1999 which city would be awarded the NFL expansion franchise. Meanwhile, Ovitz now had competition coming from his own market, as real estate developer Ed Roski announced a rival bid for a future Los Angeles team; his proposal centered around putting a 68,000-seat stadium inside the shell of the historic Los Angeles Coliseum.
1999 On March 16, 1999, the NFL owners, by a 29–2 vote, approved a resolution to award Los Angeles the expansion 32nd franchise. However, the award was contingent on the city's putting together an acceptable ownership team and stadium deal by September 15; if the parties could not reach an agreement or be close to doing so, the committee would then turn its recommendation to Houston.
A month later, NFL executives flew to Los Angeles. The executives were shocked at the lack of progress – Los Angeles would not allow tax dollars to be used for a new stadium, the competing groups were locked in a standoff as neither would concede its bid to the other nor would the groups agree to combine their efforts in attempts to put together a deal, and neither group was prepared to build a state-of-the-art facility, which Houston had promised in all its bids since 1997.
A return visit in late May yielded little change – Ovitz and Roski were still locked in a standoff; Roski's bid remained unchanged since the onset, while Ovitz unveiled plans to turn the area around the Coliseum into a complex of parks, parking garages, shopping areas and a brand-new stadium. Though Tagliabue and the NFL officials were pleased with the concept, they were daunted by the cost which included $225 million for parking garages, especially since neither Los Angeles nor the State of California was willing to commit the necessary funds. At this point, Tagliabue expressed his frustration with Los Angeles’ inability to get a plan together, and the next month he advised McNair to resume his discussions with the expansion committee.
On September 9, 1999, the league's expansion committee indicated that McNair and other Houston officials should be prepared to attend an October 6 meeting of the NFL owners in Atlanta. The NFL noted that the Los Angeles effort was still making no progress and now featured a three-way battle between Ovitz, Roski, and newcomer Marvin Davis. Although the league would still entertain an offer from any of the competing Los Angeles groups, the league would now consider an offer from McNair and Houston as well.
In the first week of October, Ovitz announced that his group was prepared to offer $540 million for the 32nd NFL franchise to be awarded to Los Angeles. However, later that week, McNair's Houston NFL Holdings proposed a bid of $700 million to the owners for the NFL to award the 32nd franchise to Houston instead; on the morning of October 6, 1999, McNair's persistence finally paid off as the NFL owners voted 29–0 to accept McNair's higher offer. In addition, Houston would host the 2004 Super Bowl, the second time the city would stage the event.
2000 After that, things moved fast for the yet-to-be-named football team. Focus groups were formed across the state to determine the image and direction for the franchise. NFL Properties and team officials began working on the identity, name and logo and the front office began to take shape with the hiring of former Washington Redskins General Manager Charley Casserly as Executive Vice President/General Manager in January 2000. During this time, a handful of team names were trademarked for potential use by the franchise, including Apollos, Bobcats, Challengers, Colt 45's, Energy, Hurricanes, Roughnecks, Roughriders, Roustabouts, Stallions, Stormcats, Texans, Texians, Toros, Wildcats, Wildcatters, and Wranglers.
On March 9, 2000, Houston celebrated the official groundbreaking of Reliant Stadium. The 69,500-seat state-of-the-art facility would become the NFL's first retractable-roof stadium.
After almost a year of speculation, the team was officially christened the Houston Texans during a downtown celebration on September 6, 2000, that included NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue and Bob McNair unveiling the new logo. McNair declared that he was positive about naming the team Stallions, but opted out of this since the horse imagery was overused in the league with the Denver Broncos, the Indianapolis Colts and the secondary logo of the San Diego Chargers. Texans was instead picked to be "something unique to Houston and the NFL", as well as representative of the bravery of Texas natives.
2001 On January 21, 2001, the Texans turned to the coaching staff and introduced Dom Capers as the club's first head coach. Capers had served the previous two seasons as the Jacksonville Jaguars' defensive coordinator. From 1995 to 1998, Capers was the head coach of the then-expansion Carolina Panthers. Capers would soon fill out the rest of the staff in the months to follow. After five long seasons, Houston was at last ready to rejoin the league.
Play begins (2002–2005) The Texans launched their inaugural campaign on August 5, 2002, against the New York Giants at Fawcett Stadium in the Pro Football Hall of Fame Game in Canton, Ohio, in front of 22,461 fans. The Texans' first season game was on September 8, 2002, against the Dallas Cowboys at Reliant Stadium. The two teams had also previously scrimmaged at the first home of Houston's previous team, the University of Houston's Robertson Stadium the month prior. Rookie David Carr hooked up with tight end Billy Miller on the third play from scrimmage for a touchdown (scoring the first points for the franchise). The Texans shocked their intrastate rivals 19–10, becoming just the third expansion team ever to win their first game (after the Minnesota Vikings in 1961 and the Baltimore Ravens in 1996). The Texans lost their next five games before winning for the first time on the road against the Jaguars, a team they would find success against in the seasons to come.
Victories over the New York Giants in Houston and the Steelers in Pittsburgh (despite just 46 total yards of offense – an NFL low for a winning team) and the Texans finished the season 4–12, sending two players (Gary Walker and Aaron Glenn) to the Pro Bowl, the most ever by an expansion team. The season was deemed a success despite David Carr being sacked an NFL record 76 times and the realization that left tackle Tony Boselli, the man they had hoped would protect their young quarterback, would never play a meaningful down for the team due to a botched shoulder surgery.
During the next two seasons, the Texans made steady progress. In 2003, they started out much as they had done in 2002 by shocking the heavily favored Dolphins in Miami to open the season. No other expansion team had ever won the season opener in each of its first two seasons. The Texans would only improve their record by one game in that season, but after a victory over the eventual NFC champion Carolina Panthers and a tough overtime loss to the eventual Super Bowl champion New England Patriots, optimism was high going into 2004 that they could compete with any team in the league. That optimism soured, however, after the Texans started the ’04 season 0–3 and for the first time fans began to question the direction in which head coach Dom Capers and the front office were taking. No other expansion team had taken so long to win back-to-back games and expectations in the third season were growing. Finally, after their first victory of 2004 in Kansas City, the Texans came home and defeated the Oakland Raiders the following week to secure their first win streak in franchise history.
After sweeping division rivals Tennessee and Jacksonville and another impressive pair of back-to-back wins late in the season, the Texans were poised to finish the year 8–8. All they had to do was beat the 3-12 Cleveland Browns at home. The Texans came out flat and unprepared, however, and fell to the Browns 22–14. The game served as an omen of bad times ahead. On the bright side, second year receiver Andre Johnson was selected to his first Pro Bowl and it was the first (and, until 2008, only) season that the Texans did not finish last in the AFC South.