The Titans practice Friday night at Centennial High School in Franklin. They’ll get dressed at their MetroCenter headquarters’ locker room and hop on busses – not the yellow kind – and head off to work under the lights.
In anticipation of that, I checked in with some guys about their favorite thing or memory of the stage in their football lives when they played their games on Friday nights.
Tight end Delanie Walker: “There was always that band playing. That was my favorite thing. Once I heard that I knew it was time to play. I think that would be awesome for an NFL team to have a band. That kind of gets you hyped yup to see your band rocking the stadium.” (The Ravens do still have a band, a carryover from the Baltimore Colts. Washington has one too.)
Nose tackle Sylvester Williams: “Going to eat after the game with the boys. We used to go to Quizno's after every game. I got the bowl, I think it was a chicken bowl, a soup bowl, a chicken soup bowl. I probably haven’t had one since high school. We’d hang out for an hour or two, replay the game, talk about life.”
Cornerback Adoree' Jackson: “My favorite Friday night memory, I think it was my junior year. It was championship to go to state. It was against a team we lost to in the regular season. It was 0-0 going into the second quarter and we did a fake punt and we ended up beating them and we won state that year. Yeah, it was me on the fake punt, 30 or 40 yards.”
Punter Brett Kern: Up in Western New York, I had about three Friday night games in my whole career. Friday night though, we had a playoff game in about almost a foot of snow. I think we were the last seed and we went to this farm town down in the southern counties in Western New York. We beat them something like 47-7. I was punting and kicking. Some of the local farmers brought their snowplows out and were plowing off the yard markers, but they couldn’t get quite to the corners of the field. I had a punt that went left, it almost went out of bounds, but it stopped on the 3-yard line and it just kind of disappeared. The next play, one of our guys picked it for a touchdown and it kind of started the rout. That got us to the Bills stadium for a sectional game.”
Outside linebacker Brian Orakpo: “Man, the bright lights bringing the whole city together. That’s how it was. That whole high school feel, it’s a great feeling, I had a number of great Fridays in Houston. Texas is big on high school football. The crowds were ridiculous, like 30,000. First time is definitely an eye-opener, it’s like bigger than life, and it’s crazy.