It wasn’t always like this.
Derrick Mason remembers the Lamar Hunt Trophy ceremony in the middle of Jacksonville’s Alltel Stadium on Jan. 23, 2000, after his free kick return touchdown helped the Titans stun the top-seeded Jaguars 33–14 in the AFC Championship Game. In the years leading up to that meeting, Tennessee and Jacksonville had found early success in their fledgling NFL markets and jockeyed for position in the old AFC Central, but the stakes had never remotely approached a trip to the Super Bowl. The teams combined to go 27–5 in the ’99 regular season, a year that still holds up as the closest either franchise has come to winning it all.