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Tennessee Titans fired off the latest salvo in the battle over blue. On Thursday morning, the Titans announced “Titans Blue” as their primary home jersey color starting in 2025.
The move came nearly a year after the Houston Texans unveiled an alternate uniform combination that features a color the franchise coyly calls “H-Town Blue.” The blues are nearly indistinguishable, and the battle over which NFL team owns the hue rages on.
There’s a lot of contempt in that color. Conflict remains over terms never formally settled in Houston three decades ago, when a city consumed by scorn banished the owner of a team whose departure was once unthinkable.
Call it a Texan standoff — regretted only after everyone shoots. There’s still no ceasefire over the physical remains of the Houston Oilers, now the Titans, and the ongoing feud is defined by petty antagonism and proxy wars.
In each of the last two seasons, Titans owner Amy Adams Strunk raised eyebrows and stoked outrage by authorizing the wearing of throwback Oilers uniforms against the Texans, the team embraced by the city that rebuked her father.
In Thursday’s news release, the Titans revealed they will not wear their Oiler throwbacks in 2025. But in making “Titans Blue” its primary color, the team is quite literally marking its territory.
Tennessee’s uniform switch is also a strategic maneuver. Strunk has blocked moves by the Texans, who, urged by fan council members still mourning the loss of the Oilers, pursued expanding their usage of a color they argue belongs to Houston.
The Texans built their case during the NFL’s annual league meetings in 2023. As explained in a team-sponsored podcast, they presented a “120-year story” referencing a “light blue color” found in Houston’s city flag, old curb tiles and classic cop cars.
The University of Houston and Rice University allied with their hometown team by debuting Oilers-themed alternative uniforms in 2023, which earned UH a cease-and-desist letter from the NFL. In defiant solidarity, the university published a lengthy homage that laid claim to “Houston Blue,” a color it says is “synonymous” with the city.
The Texans weren’t attempting to rebrand themselves, but the NFL has had to interpret tricky trademark policy while managing combative ownership groups arguing over the extent of a city’s right to a color. The intellectual property’s dormancy has made this divorce unusual.
Of all the league’s relocations, Houston’s is the only one in which the departing team shed its name and shelved it, preventing the franchise that backfilled the market from using it. Neither Titans nor Texans ownership agreed to an interview for this story.
Strunk, who gained control of the Titans in 2015 after Adams died in 2013, has defended the legacy and iconography of her father’s team. She openly shot down former Texans defensive end J.J. Watt’s desire to wear Oilers uniforms, and after the NFL’s 2021 rule change freed teams to wear a second helmet, she secured the Oilers throwback uniform for the Titans.
The decision to wear those throwbacks against the Texans ignited old flames from the embers of a decades-old relocation saga.
“Frankly,” said Steve Radack, a former member of the Harris County Commissioners Court, “I think it will just throw a spotlight on the sin of that time.”
It will.
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