Two More Sundays on the River: The Last Preseason Games Nissan Stadium Will Ever Host
Every building gets a last season. Nissan Stadium's has arrived, and the quiet part of it — the preseason, the part nobody frames a ticket stub from — happens over the next two weekends.
The Titans host the Seattle Seahawks on Sunday, August 23 at 7 p.m., a national broadcast on Fox against the defending Super Bowl champions. Then they close the exhibition slate against the Chicago Bears on Saturday, August 29 at 5 p.m. After that, the building never hosts preseason football again.
Twenty-seven summers on the East Bank
It is worth pausing on what that means, because the stadium has been part of Nashville's skyline for so long that it is easy to forget the city once did not have one. The place opened on the east bank of the Cumberland in 1999, the first purpose-built NFL home for a franchise that had arrived from Houston two years earlier and spent its first Tennessee seasons borrowing rooms in Memphis and on Vanderbilt's campus. The stadium was the moment the team stopped being a visitor.
Five months after it opened, on a January afternoon in 2000, a kickoff return went sideways across the field on a lateral and the building produced the loudest sixteen seconds in Tennessee sports history. Whatever else happens to the concrete, the Music City Miracle happened there. So did a Super Bowl run that ended one yard short, a stretch of playoff Januarys, and a couple of decades of ordinary Sundays that are, in aggregate, what a hometown stadium actually is.
The rest of the farewell is already on the calendar. The final regular season on the riverfront opens September 13 against the New York Jets at noon, with another home date the following weekend, and the last regular-season game in the old building lands January 3 against Pittsburgh.
The building going up next door
The replacement is not a rumor or a rendering anymore — it is a roof. The new Nissan Stadium is enclosed, seats roughly 60,000, and is tracking toward completion in February 2027, when the club expects to take possession. Crews recently finished the ETFE cable-net system that spans the top, and the building is expected to be fully sealed within a couple of months.
That word — enclosed — is the whole story. A climate-controlled, covered NFL stadium changes what Nashville can be asked to host in February, which is precisely why the conversation about a Super Bowl in Nashville stopped being a joke somewhere around the time the steel went up. It also means a Titans game in December will no longer involve a wind that comes off the river and finds the gap between your collar and your scarf.
Some of us will miss that wind. Not many, but some.
If you want to be in the room
Preseason tickets are the cheapest seats this franchise will sell in the old building, which makes the next two weekends the most affordable farewell available. If you have been meaning to take a kid to a game at the stadium you grew up going to, this is the window — a preseason Sunday is also, frankly, the easiest introduction to an NFL crowd there is.
🎟 Get tickets to Titans vs. Seahawks on August 23 »
Twenty-seven years is a long time for a building in this country. Go stand in it once more while it is still standing.
