The 1994 Houston Oilers season was the 35th season overall the Oilers played and their 25th with the National Football League, and was part of the 1994 NFL season. Despite finishing with a 12–4 record and a first-round bye the previous season, team owner Bud Adams made good on a threat to break up the team if they did not win the Super Bowl. The two biggest losses the Oilers suffered were the trading of Warren Moon, the team’s longtime starting quarterback, to the Minnesota Vikings and the departure of defensive coordinatorBuddy Ryan, who was hired to coach the Arizona Cardinals. With Moon being replaced by career backup Cody Carlson and the defense left without its leader, the 1994 Oilers went into a tailspin despite returning several of their explosive offensive players such as Ernest Givins and Haywood Jeffires. The team started out with only one win in their first ten games, which led to head coachJack Pardee being fired. When the season was over the Oilers stood at 2–14, tying their 1983 squad with the team’s fewest wins in a sixteen game season and the second-fewest overall, with the 1972, 1973, 1982 squads only winning once each season. The ten-game swing is the worst season-to-season drop in games won in NFL history, which would later be tied by the 2013 Houston Texans. Seven of their fourteen losses came by three points or fewer. Although the Oilers finished with the worst record that season, they did not receive the #1 pick in the 1995 NFL Draft due to the entry of the expansion Carolina Panthers and Jacksonville Jaguars into the league. However, the news was not all negative. With the high pick the Oilers chose Steve McNair, who would go on to become one of the franchise’s all-time great players, and after Pardee resigned his defensive coordinator Jeff Fisher was promoted to replace him. Fisher would go on to lead the franchise, which moved to Tennessee under his watch, for the remaining five games of the 1994 season and stay for the next sixteen seasons before he was fired following the 2010 season. In A Football Life: Houston 93 the narrator says of the 1994 season that: and
Offseason
After having imploded in the playoffs against Kansas City in the, the Oilers traded long-time quarterbackWarrenMoon toMinnesota, leaving Cody Carlson as the starter for the 1994 season.
This ninth successive defeat for the Oilers has the unusual distinction of being the most recent NFL game as of 2019 during which bothteams scored a safety, and one of only eight since at least 1940.
