When the Tennessee Titans host the Houston Texans Sunday at Nissan Stadium, it will renew one of the NFL’s most peculiar rivalries.
And because both teams go into the game floundering at 0-4, this rivalry could use a little bit of something to make it exciting.
What will probably make most Texans fans see red is having to watch their team face the Titans in their Houston Oilers-esque uniforms, which are aesthetically a major upgrade but borrow heavily from a Luv Ya Blue past that a lot of Houstonians feel belongs in Texas, not Tennessee.
In the past, the Texans have tried to incorporate a shade similar to that blue in one of their alternate uniforms. But a good number of Houston fans just can’t get past the fact that Bud Adams picked up stakes and moved from Houston to Nashville (with a stopover in Memphis) nearly 30 years ago, doing so with the blessing of then NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue and taking the Oilers colors, logo and history with him.
And while Tennesseans balked at the name “Oilers” and eventually got Adams to change it, the franchise’s past – for better or worse – came with the team.
A few years later, the Texans were born, and though Houston fans have embraced having the NFL back in their city, there is still that little matter of the Oilers name and the Columbia blue colors that sticks in their collective craw.
The Titans pulling the Oilers throwbacks out of mothballs a few years ago and making sure to wear them every time the Texans visited Nashville didn’t help erase the hurt either – even if the Texans often prevailed on the field against the “Oilers.”
I get that the good people of Houston, who were loyal to the Oilers, will always feel like the team and the colors belong to them.
But they belong to the Adams family and the Titans, who this season are sending a not-so-gentle reminder of that with the slick-looking new Columbia blue uniforms with red outline on the numbers.
Take a cue from the Ravens
If the Titans organization throwing the Oilers’ visual past at Houston fans feels like a slap in the face, I would suggest it’s time to get over it. How? Take a cue from Baltimore, where the Titans just played this past Sunday.
Baltimore, you might recall, used to be home to the Colts before that franchise packed up in the middle of the night and moved their entire operation to Indianapolis in the early 1980s. The Colts had a much richer and successful history than the Oilers ever did.
And it hurt Baltimoreans so badly that the city once had a team in the Canadian Football League that wore uniforms that were a similar royal blue to what the Colts don. They were initially called the CFL Colts, but were forced to legally drop that name and adopt Stallions.
But a few years later, then-Browns owner Art Modell, himself looking for a new stadium after getting sideways with Cleveland – took his team to Baltimore, where they became the Ravens.
While inside M&T Bank Stadium, in the ring of honor there was a plaque that honors Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts.
But aside from that, no one was thinking about what was going on with Indianapolis on Sunday. Baltimore fans fully embraced the Ravens and have turned their game day into one of the best in the NFL, cheering on a perennial contender that has become part of the city’s fabric.
So, instead of the remnants of Oilers fans in Houston still trying to cling to their light-blue past, take a cue from Baltimore and let it go.
Terry McCormick also covers the Titans for TitanInsider.com