1972 Houston Oilers season

The 1972 Houston Oilers season was their 13th season overall and third with the league. The team failed to improve on their previous season's output of 4–9–1, winning only one game.^[1] They missed the playoffs for the third consecutive season.

The low point of the season came in week four, a 34–0 loss on Monday Night Football to the Oakland Raiders. With the game out of hand, ABC cameras panned the stands at the Astrodome and found a man who appeared to be sleeping. When he realized the camera was on him, he shot the finger at the camera. When the camera discovered the sleeping fan, Howard Cosell intoned, “Right there, is a vivid pictureization of the excitement...”. Don Meredith shot back when the fan flipped the bird, “They’re number one in the nation!”.

Perhaps another low point for the Oilers was the final game of the season against the Cincinnati Bengals. The Oilers lost that game by a score of 61–17, the worst loss for the team in its history up to that point; exactly 17 years later, the Oilers lost 61–7 to the Bengals in Cincinnati to shatter that dubious mark. The 61 points were the second most points any NFL team had ever allowed since the merger, one fewer than the Philadelphia Eagles allowed to the New York Giants three weeks earlier.

Coincidentally, the Eagles defeated the Oilers 18–17 in the Astrodome two weeks before losing 62–10 to the Giants despite not scoring a touchdown, with Tom Dempsey connecting on six field goals.

After their win over the New York Jets 26–20 in week 3 (one week after Joe Namath threw for 496 yards and six touchdowns to defeat the Baltimore Colts), the Oilers did not win another game until week 8 of next season, when they shocked the Baltimore Colts 31–27 on the road. Sandwiched between these two games was an 18-game losing streak, which was an NFL record at the time; it was eclipsed by the 0–26 start experienced by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1976 and 1977.