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 team's lease at the Astrodome and unwillingness of the City of Houston to build a new football-only stadium. Later that year, 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 across fron downtown Nashville, in what had been a declining industral/warehousing area.

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 $144 million of public money to the project, passed with a 59 percent 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 would initially be raised through an increase in the Metro water tax. Much of the remaining construction costs were funded through the sale of personal seat licenses. Some money from the State of Tennessee 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 incoming NFL team be named Tennessee instead of Nashville.

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.

On May 3, 2010, the stadium's playing surface was filled with 6 feet (1.8 m) of water due to the heavy rains and flooding from the Cumberland River. The flood also reached down to the locker rooms of the stadium.

The stadium received upgrades during mid-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 HD Lighthouse brand LED video displays measuring 157 feet (48 m) by 54 feet (16 m) were installed, replacing the entire end zone scoreboard apparatuses.

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