Vance Howard at “Luv Ya, Bum!” Premiere at Paramount Theatre during the SXSW Conference & Festivals on March 13, 2025 in Austin, Texas.
Chris Saucedo/SXSW Conference & Festivals via
08/05/1975 – Houston Oilers head coach O.A. “Bum” Phillips instructs a group of players on how he wants them to block on punts at training camp at Sam Houston State in Huntsville
E. Joseph Deering/Houston Chronicle
08/05/1975 – Houston Oilers head coach O.A. “Bum” Phillips at training camp at Sam Houston State in Huntsville.
E. Joseph Deering/Houston Chronicle
HUNTSVILLE — An act of kindness and perhaps brilliance 50 years ago this summer by a Walker County restaurateur for a wide-eyed kid and his ilk helped lead to an award-winning documentary on the Houston Oilers and their beloved coach Bum Phillips.
“The Oilers had training camp in Huntsville and David Tinsley hosted the ‘Pancake Breakfast’ at his restaurant, the Chicken Shack,” recalled a smiling Vance Howard, executive producer of the “Luv Ya Bum” documentary. “The Oilers would come out and sign autographs for kids and eat pancakes.”
Howard, 62, was one of those Huntsville kids in the mid-1970s, and his interaction with the Oilers as a teenager sparked a love affair with Houston sports — and resulted in a flick selected by South by Southwest attendees as the top documentary last year showcased at the annual festival in Austin.
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HOUSTON EXPLAINED: Bum Phillips’ firing shocked a city and ended an era
“We wanted to pull people back to a nostalgic period of time, and show old Houston back in the late 1970s and early 1980s,” Howard said of “Luv Ya Bum,” released last fall and now available on Amazon Prime and Apple TV springing into football season. “We accomplished that … not only for football fans, but for those who are historians or Houston fans who will enjoy seeing the old architecture and the town back then.”
“Luv Ya Bum,” a play on the declarative “Luv Ya Blue” slogan of that era, zeroes in on the iconic Phillips, head coach of the Oilers from 1975-80 and during their gloriest of seasons, when they lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers in the American Football Conference title games following the 1978 and 1979 regular seasons.
Oilers owner Bud Adams fired Phillips following the 1980 season, after the Oilers lost to the Oakland Raiders in a wild-card game, and in 1997 Adams moved the franchise to Nashville, Tenn., where it became the Tennessee Titans.
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The Oilers failed to reach the conference title game again while in Houston under five full-time coaches who followed Phillips, and the NFL replacement Houston Texans (2002-present) are still trying to reach their first AFC title game.
Adams and Phillips, Bud and Bum, died three days apart in 2013, both at the age of 90.
“Bud Adams did everything I asked him to — believe me, the Oilers have been fair to me,” the folksy Phillips told reporters while cleaning out his office following his firing. “Bud gave me the football to run with — I guess I just didn’t run far enough.”
O.A. “Bum” Phillips Jr., born in 1923 in Orange, served in World War II and played collegiately at Lamar in Beaumont and Stephen F. Austin State in Nacogdoches. His first coaching job was at Nederland High near Beaumont in the early to mid-1950s, and he would routinely drive from Nederland to College Station to learn football under then-Texas A&M head coach Paul “Bear” Bryant.
While at Nederland, too, Phillips pondered means to simplify the naming of defensive alignments, and helped develop the “technique” numbering system. For instance, “2-technique” means lining up directly across from an offensive guard.
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“It’s still being used today,” Howard said of the numbering structure. “Bum was a lot smarter than people think, and he was also a really good motivator and a good leader. He did it in such a way that his players really liked him, and they didn’t feel belittled or beaten up — they felt empowered.”
Phillips spent a year on Bryant’s staff at A&M in 1957, when running back John David Crow won the Heisman Trophy, but did not follow Bryant to Alabama when the budding college icon exited College Station for Tuscaloosa, Ala., that same year.
“If you get a chance to learn from Bear Bryant, you’re learning from the best,” Howard said. “Not many coaches turned down Bear Bryant, but Bum was committed to Texas, this was his home. Money wasn’t important to him — his home state was what was important to him.”
Out of 13 different coaching jobs in football, Phillips only left the state on three occasions: as the San Diego Chargers’ defensive coordinator from 1967-71, as an Oklahoma State assistant in 1973 and as the New Orleans Saints’ head coach from 1981-85.
Howard was not an Oilers fan in the traditional sense of many youngsters in the Houston area. He was 12 years old when his family moved to Huntsville in 1976 from Big Spring, 80 miles northeast of Odessa.
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He grew up a Dallas Cowboys fan in West Texas, but soon learned Huntsville had a special fondness for the Oilers, based on the town being about an 80-minute drive from the Astrodome, and the Oilers holding training camp on the Sam Houston State campus from 1974-76.
For its part “Luv Ya Bum” is the equivalent of an 86-minute joyride on the Texas Cyclone at Astroworld — like the Oilers both long gone — for longtime Houstonians still enamored by Houston’s first NFL team, including interviews with the city’s most celebrated backfield of running back Earl Campbell and quarterback Dan Pastorini.
“I don’t know if Earl is in a class by himself, but I do know when that class gets together, it sure don’t take long to call the roll,” Phillips famously said of Campbell, a Tyler native and the 1977 Heisman Trophy winner at the University of Texas.
Pastorini described Phillips as “like playing for your dad … a nice dad.”
Movie critic Joey Magidson described “Luv Ya Bum,” narrated by Houstonian Dennis Quaid, as “the rare doc that leaves you with a good feeling” and “good for the soul.”
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One of the documentary’s swerves is the recollection of a long-forgotten disco tune called “The Super Bowl Itch” by then-Oilers receiver Kenny Burrough, who memorably wore the number “00.”
Less memorable and long before the Chicago Bears’ “Super Bowl Shuffle” of 1985, the “Itch” ditty included the lyrics, “Dante will call the plays; Campbell will run the maze; Give it to Double-O; hang on and watch me go … I’ve got the Super Bowl Itch.”
“So bad it was good,” a grinning Howard said of the “Itch,” adding of the many long-tucked-away tapes in Houston television stations: “We dug and dug and dug and had so much archival footage … just like any other documentary it could have been five hours long, but we condensed it to an hour-and-a-half.”
Howard, who attended both Texas A&M and Sam Houston State, made his money in waste services and financial management, and this decade began putting his dollars into entertainment with the founding of Lucky Number 8 Productions in Houston in 2022.
Howard’s swim into storytelling has resulted in “Luv Ya Bum” and the upcoming thriller “Eleven Days,” based on the 1974 prison siege in Huntsville led by drug kingpin Federico Carrasco, among other releases.
Howard, who in 2020 bought and restored Huntsville’s historic Cafe Texan (which now includes a museum) on the downtown square, also has plans for a multipart documentary on the great cattle drives of Texas during the late 1800s.
“This place is just full of great stories,” Howard said of the Lone Star State. “We’re bringing in college students to help, too. They’re learning how to edit … and put a film together. Lucky Number 8 built an editing room and studio here (in Huntsville). There are a lot of great stories to tell.”
Few will stir emotions like “Luv Ya Bum,” however, for NFL fans who in the late 1970s figured the Oilers would finally scratch their itch for a Super Bowl victory — or at least a Super Bowl showing.
“It’s hard to do,” then-Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw said in the documentary of playing in and winning a Super Bowl. “You have to get the breaks, and you get good calls and you get bad calls. … We got ’em, and Bum didn’t get ’em.”