Titans president reveals key development in when Nashville could host a Super Bowl in New Nissan Stadium

The Tennessee Titans are still scheduled to move into new Nissan Stadium on time in 2027, and that means the promise of a Nashville Super Bowl in the near future.

I asked Titans President and CEO Burke Nihill about what that will look like, and it turned into a conversation about the largely untold, exciting future of the East Bank Development around the new stadium in this final part of the article series from my exclusive interview.

Click here if you missed Part I—the latest stadium updates and a frank discussion on affordability—or Part II—how the Titans plan on rebounding from a “wake up call” in 2024 to become a Mount Rushmore organization in the NFL.

The Super Bowl is currently scheduled out through February 2028 in Atlanta. So when will Nashville get its turn?

“So I think February 2029, 2030, 2031, I think all of those are somewhat realistic and conversations are ongoing. If you go by past cadence, 2030 is probably the first year in terms of the cadence that they've been taking in terms of building a stadium, opening it, and then getting a Super Bowl awarded.”

The process by which a city is awarded a Super Bowl has changed in recent history:

“But the process is a little bit different than it was years and years ago, where there was a sort of open bidding process fighting over it. It's conversational at this point.”

As well as the draft here in 2019 went, you’d have to imagine the league is very excited to host a Super Bowl here as well.

“The people who put on the draft are the same people who put on the Super Bowl and help to make a recommendation to the owners about where to go next. So they experienced the Nashville party, yeah, and I can assure you, there's a level of excitement about bringing that event here.”

There’s a little bit of extra work that has to go into the first time a city ever hosts the big game:

“When they go to New Orleans, you’ve got muscle memory from taking the Super Bowl there plenty of times. They think through every angle for each new host city. Our hotels are in great shape for what they want to do. You know, the city in general: they trust it. They like the airport. I think we're in great shape on all of that. I think it's not even a concern.”

Really what presents the biggest logistical problem for league planners is all the work that will be going on around the new stadium for years to come.

“But one of the places where they're gonna have to do a lot of digging is this development around the stadium, and just being sure about, like, if you bring the Super Bowl in 2029 or in 2030, what does the area look like? Is there a giant crane hanging over the stadium or something like that? So those conversations include all of that, and we have to coordinate with the city as well.”

Development around the stadium on the East Bank is something most folks don’t really grasp just yet. I know my understanding was minimal heading into this discussion.

This isn’t just a beautification project around the new Titans stadium; it’s the beginning of the Nashville skyline finally breaking beyond the river and the metropolitan area using the east as a true outlet for growth. New skyscrapers, which are already being planned, will extend the skyline as a highly-intentional urban infrastructure design takes advantage of such a blank canvas on the ground level.

“In terms of the building scale and size, while maybe not quite as dense, a little bit more spread out than downtown, this is not something that’s as simple as a handful of six story buildings that pop up.”

The East Bank as a whole is 400 acres, and the old stadium site constitutes roughly 100 of them. Oracle, the tech giant moving their headquarters to the East Bank, should be breaking ground soon on their significant portion of the development which the city awarded in Phase I. Additional portions of that pre-planned phase will begin to break ground soon, not waiting on New Nissan stadium to open. There could be as many as 4 or 5 phases by the time the area is fully finished.

The entire East Bank is roughly ten times the size of The Gulch on the far opposite side of downtown. If you’ve visited there, you know how long that project has gone on and how much they’ve already done. But you may be surprised to learn that they’re only in Year 15 of a 30 year project. So while so much has been accomplished already, and the space certainly doesn’t feel “incomplete” anymore to visit and utilize, they’re only halfway home on their plan for the area.

“So whether or not you think about it as the downtown expanding outside the river, I think it's going to be one of the great pockets of Nashville. And, I know I can speak in audacious terms: I think it's going to be one of the great areas of the world. You've got a riverfront that's never been engaged. You've got a city who can help to shepherd this thing through so you get the green spaces and places for people to hang out and create a sense of place. You can get everything right so it flows. You've got this stadium that's a celebrated anchor tenant that's lit for 50 nights a year for ticketed events, and probably just about every day of the year for other things going on. We've got our plaza, which is going to be incredible, and we're going to activate that thing like crazy with movie nights in the park and yoga and farmers markets and little concerts. It's very, very different than what has been. Why not us? In terms of taking a place on the Mount Rushmore of NFL franchises and cities? I mean, you think about what our current reality has been up until now, which is an aging building built pretty basically, surrounded by parking lots, to that future where I think a lot of the energy of our city, especially for locals, will be right out our front door, and we'll have a lot of ability to play into that. If the football team is sustainably great, which I believe it will be, and we do all of these things right? We're a completely different organization than we are today.”