The 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.
“It’s been one constant for the organization since 1960, the first days of the Houston Oilers,” the release said.
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 settled for using “H-Town Blue” as an accent color in their alternate uniforms. Given the rigidity of the NFL’s uniform policy, the Titans could all but monopolize the use of the blue in their primary uniforms for several seasons.
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. “H-Town Blue isn’t just a color,” Bruce Matthews, a Hall of Fame player for both the Oilers and Titans, narrated in a video released by the Texans in October. “It’s a part of our story.”
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, complete with new uniform sets.
The Texans weren’t attempting to rebrand themselves, but the NFL has had to interpret tricky patent 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.
The University of Houston wore Oilers-inspired throwback uniforms in each of the last two seasons. (Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)
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.”
A stakeout of reporters stood near the front steps of a small office building as a nondescript car slunk by unnoticed, then banked into a loading dock just beyond view. The garage door opened. Robert Eckels, Harris County’s newly elected county judge and a uniquely optimistic local official for 1995 Houston, drove inside for yet another secret meeting with K.S. “Bud” Adams Jr.
Adams’ office doubled as a museum. Cherokee by ancestry, nephew to one of the nation’s principal chiefs, Adams collected enough artifacts to bequeath Indiana’s Eiteljorg Museum an exhibit worth millions. The Oklahoman lived out his own lore. A former University of Kansas football player and an aviation engineering officer in the Pacific Theater of World War II, Adams moved to Houston after a flight grounded by fog afforded him a tour of the city.
He was an oiler. So was his father, K.S. “Boots” Adams Sr., a former president of Phillips Petroleum. Bud, at 23, started a Houston-based oil company that struck wealth, and throughout the 1950s, sponsored an AAU basketball team he called … the Oilers. Those visiting Bud’s office might’ve been subjected to that story. Or the “Foolish Club” tale, in which Adams and Lamar Hunt — both spurned in 1958 negotiations to relocate the NFL’s Cardinals (then in Chicago) — vented over dinner in Houston, struck inspiration, then convinced six other investors to start the American Football League with them.
His two-time AFL-champion Oilers battled the NFL for players. He’d beaten the Rams to LSU’s Billy Cannon by sending attorneys to sign the Heisman Trophy winner under Tulane Stadium’s south goalpost immediately after the 1960 Sugar Bowl. After a rough transition to the NFL following the 1970 merger — Houston won a total of nine games over its first four seasons in the league — the Luv Ya Blue Oilers became one of the most memorable teams of the late 1970s.
They were a marvel that manifested in the Astrodome, an architectural innovation that, along with NASA’s relocation to Houston, garnered respect for a Texas city that was never a cowtown. The team was as the city saw itself: a booming force both cool and country, far more formidable than its crudely drawn caricature.
Their head coach, Bum Phillips, wore a Stetson hat on the sideline and dispensed Texanisms like “the harder we played, the behinder we got.” Their running back, Earl Campbell, won the 1977 Heisman Trophy at the University of Texas and starred in Skoal commercials. Their long-battered quarterback, Dan Pastorini, wore the NFL’s first flak jacket, married “Playboy” model June Wilkinson (and posed in “Playgirl” himself), starred in low-budget thrillers and broke the nine-second barrier while racing jet-powered boats.
After the Oilers twice reached the AFC title game only to lose to the eventual Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers, Adams ended Luv Ya Blue by infamously firing Phillips on New Year’s Eve 1980, absorbing media blowback that his ego couldn’t handle a more popular figure on his payroll. (Adams insisted the decision was over Phillips’ refusal to hire an offensive coordinator.) He slogged Houstonians through a miserable four-year rebuild, then leveraged any city who’d entertain a relocation — Jacksonville, San Antonio, Phoenix — to secure a better lease with the Astrodome, plus $67 million in public funding for a 1987 renovation of the Dome that tore down its iconic scoreboard but still wasn’t enough to make Houston the host site of the Super Bowl.
“Bud earned the disfavor in a lot of different ways,” said Terry O’Rourke, who served in the Harris County attorney’s office from 1986 until 1996. “It included comments like, ‘Why are we spending all this time and effort on an owner who’s not committed to winning?’”
Oilers running back Lorenzo White rumbles down the Astrodome turf in 1989. (USA Today Sports)
Eckels was the agent of a failed rescue mission. He was willing to do what no other local official would: build Adams a new stadium. Eckels’ civic newness meant he was less biased in his dealings with Adams. Plus, he understood that much of the hate swirling around shrouded a major point: Adams was right about the Dome.
The Oilers had always paid rent within an arrangement that proved untenable. The county-based Houston Sports Association, the original owners of MLB’s Astros, financed the Astrodome. Even after the HSA sold the Astros, the baseball team remained the stadium’s primary tenant and subleased to the Oilers. In other words: An NFL team was paying an MLB team to play in an outdated facility.
Adams had expended nearly all of his political capital in the 1987 threat to leave for Jacksonville and ended up signing a 10-year lease that boosted his estimated revenue by $750,000 per year (while paying the Astros $3 million annually in rent). Adams said he left $60 million to $80 million on the table by staying in Houston, according to John Pirkle’s book “Oiler Blues.” The new deal wasn’t viewed as a sacrifice to the city he loved, but even city officials who despised Adams admitted his decision revealed how reluctant he was to leave.
Under his final lease in Houston, without a salary cap and without the stadium-oriented luxuries that enriched other owners, Adams spent lavishly on the Oilers. Winning was the only remaining way to earn public favor. He knew recapturing Luv Ya Blue-type sentiment could help secure allies and votes for a new stadium, though his miserly tendencies underscored how missing out on exponential wealth influenced his thinking. Former Oilers and Titans coach Jeff Fisher said Adams would “stare at a request purchase order for $60 for laser pointers for the team on his desk for months,” but “if you needed $10 million to sign a corner, you got it.”
In his zeal to field a contender, Adams had created an all-or-nothing scenario for the 1993 season. The NFL was introducing a salary cap in 1994, and the Oilers were going to be significantly over budget. During training camp, he stunned the locker room by saying if they didn’t reach the Super Bowl that season, he’d dismantle the team. The statement worsened the morale of a dysfunctional squad that would deal with infighting — and an actual sideline fight between coordinators Kevin Gilbride and Buddy Ryan — throughout a strenuous 12-4 season that ended with a blown lead to the Kansas City Chiefs in the AFC divisional round.
That June, the Oilers had begun discussions with Houston Mayor Bob Lanier about a new downtown dome that would also house the NBA’s Rockets and a potential NHL franchise. The proposed cost was $235 million, of which Adams pledged $50 million. Lanier was initially interested. But the mere mention that he and Adams were exploring a new facility during a November 1993 appearance on a television talk show incited Houstonians against the project, which soon bore a sardonic nickname: “The Bud Dome.”
Astros owner Drayton McLane stoked public disgust by defending the Astrodome (as soon as the Oilers left, he’d demand a new baseball stadium, and Harris County later spent $180 million in public money on what is now Daikin Park). Rockets owner Les Alexander, eyeing his own stadium amidst his team’s back-to-back title runs, pulled out.
Bud Adams got his stadium built in Nashville in 1999, but he continued to live in Houston until his death 14 years later. (P. Casey Daley / USA Today Network)
Adams hedged a final stadium-or-bust threat by striking an exclusive negotiating agreement with Nashville on Aug. 11, 1995. More city officials started to sense the gravity of the Oilers actually leaving. Several held a good-riddance attitude, siding with a Houston Chronicle opinion poll in which 75 percent of Harris County residents held an unfavorable opinion of Adams.
But Eckels, in a rare civic effort to work with Adams, told The Athletic he’d found $150 million within an already passed hotel occupancy tax that was available for Harris County to allocate toward a new stadium — with no need for a vote. Eckels said he and Adams had agreed on the design for an outdoor venue by November 1995.
But by then, Nashville was nearly finalizing an offer Adams wouldn’t refuse. Officials in Tennessee swiftly organized a stadium and relocation package that, according to “Oiler Blues,” increased Adams’ revenue stream to $350 million over 10 years. All Tennesseans needed to do was vote on the issue. Only then could Eckels negotiate terms with a Houstonian he said “didn’t want to leave the city.”
“I just crossed my fingers and hoped that the people of Nashville didn’t want a team that bad,” Eckels said. “But they did. They passed it. And the rest is history.”
As the Oilers prepared to leave Houston, there was no movement similar to the one led by Cleveland Mayor Michael White, who helped force Browns owner Art Modell to leave the team’s name, records and colors behind. Houston’s legal battle with Adams focused only on the fulfillment of the 10-year lease signed in 1987. And Adams sued first.
In what Terry O’Rourke called the strangest lawsuit he’d ever seen, the Oilers filed a federal lawsuit on Aug. 22, 1995, to prevent Houston, Harris County, McLane or anyone from challenging their right to move across state lines. A trio of Houston-based private attorneys, of which Matt Mitten is the only living member, chose to battle Adams pro bono for Harris County. Mitten said they considered several strategies to keep the Oilers in Houston. Their best case would have required a provision in the lease that enforced liquidated damages if they tried to leave early, but no such clause was added in 1987.
Why? Steve Radack, who worked on the lease, said “no one could conceive” Adams would actually “pack up and leave.” “We kind of got axed by Bud Adams,” Radack said. “People trusted him to do right.”
Mitten’s contingent wanted to move the case from federal court to a local jurisdiction that might have offered more liberal interpretations than conservative-leaning U.S. District Judge Lynn N. Hughes. Mitten started working to persuade Hughes to invalidate Nashville’s exclusive negotiating agreement, saying it restricted trade.
But when he awoke on the morning of Sept. 1, 1995, he discovered in a front-page story in the Chronicle that unbeknownst to him, his partners had secured an injunction against the Oilers by filing a lawsuit with a state district judge. This infuriated Hughes, who called both parties to his office and instructed them to reach a settlement. The Oilers agreed to fulfill their lease (later they were allowed to leave a year early), and the Houston contingent agreed to drop their lawsuit.
This would have been the moment in which local officials and attorneys could have pushed for the Oilers’ name, records and colors to stay behind. But Mitten was not aware of any such discussion during settlement talks. Eckels, who was briefed during the case, was more definitive.
“No,” he said. “The Oilers, when they left, they left.”
Adams immediately kicked off a contest in Tennessee to rename the team, “unless someone knows a place around here where some oil might be coming out of the ground.” The short-lived Tennessee Oilers spent two awkward years playing home games at the Liberty Bowl in Memphis and Vanderbilt Stadium in Nashville before moving into their new Nashville facilities in 1999.
Eckels said the design of Nissan Stadium looked very much like the one he and Adams agreed upon in Houston nearly four years earlier. The newly named Titans immediately reached Super Bowl XXXIV.
The Texans were limited to using light blue as an accent color in their new alternate uniforms, which were unveiled in 2024. (Alex Slitz / Getty Images)
Adams held on to his grudge against the Houston officials who rejected him. Titans executives, coaches and players felt the influence of their owner’s ire. Fisher said he and former general manager Floyd Reese, who died in 2021, used to joke that they could go 2-14 so long as their two wins came against Houston.
In 2006, within a few weeks of the NFL draft, Reese and Fisher were prepared to spend the No. 3 overall pick on Jay Cutler, a quarterback for nearby Vanderbilt they’d coached in the Senior Bowl. But Fisher said Adams instructed them to take Vince Young — a Houston native who’d just quarterbacked the University of Texas to a national title — even if it took trading up to get him. Titans executives and coaches heard Adams had seen Bob Lanier’s wife, Elyse, advocating for the Texans to draft Young on a Houston-area talk show. She hyperbolized that if they didn’t, she’d jump off a bridge. Adams let loose a comment with his directive to snag Young.
“He wanted to see (her) jump,” Fisher said.
Adams authorized the addition of 13 former Oilers players and executives, including himself, into the team’s Ring of Honor, but the Oilers were otherwise buried. Their alumni felt like abandoned children of a divorce, uninvited by either the Titans or the Texans to be fully part of their new families. “I felt lost,” said Robert Brazile, a Hall of Fame Oilers linebacker from 1975-84.
When Houston was awarded an expansion franchise in 1999, Texans founder Bob McNair cleaned the slate by choosing a new name and colors, and the fledgling franchise, tactful not to re-open wounds over history that was still fresh, enlisted a handful of former Oilers to be “Texans Ambassadors” for the team at various events. But true reunions for out-of-towners were rare. The Texans honored the Luv Ya Blue era during the halftime of a 2007 game, and Brazile remembers addressing their group during a private meal.
“I want you to look at the person next to you,” Brazile told them. “After this group dies, there will never be another Houston Oiler. So let’s embrace this right now, enjoy this moment, because tomorrow’s not promised to any of us.”
The original Houston Oiler continued to live in the city even after he relocated the team to Tennessee. Adams died at his desk in his River Oaks mansion in 2013.
“He absolutely loved Houston,” Fisher said. “He wanted his team to remain and stay competitive in Houston.”
On the grounds at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo this month, passersby wore Oilers hats as they walked between NRG Stadium and the Astrodome. Larry Stafford, a Texans season-ticket holder since the team’s 2002 inauguration, said it’s “a gut punch” walking by the Dome on game days. Devoid of any tenant, it is a withering tombstone local officials say is cheaper to maintain than to demolish. And, perhaps, a reminder for the Texans and Titans — each of whom is in the early stages of new stadium projects — of what can happen when things get too far gone.
Since taking over as Titans owner in 2015, Amy Adams Strunk has boxed out the Texans in celebrations of Houston’s football history. (Christopher Hanewinckel / Imagn Images)
Adams’ daughter, Susie Adams Smith, and her husband, Tommy, ran the Titans for two seasons until Amy Adams Strunk assumed control of the franchise. The founder of a fox hunting organization near San Antonio, Strunk was described by a colleague as the “Annie Oakley of Texas.” “She can ride like the wind, and she’s fearless,” Lt. Col. Dennis Foster told The Chronicle of the Horse in 2009.
Strunk, 69, spent her adolescence in Luv Ya Blue locker rooms, where she befriended Oilers players and coaches. She embraced Houston’s pro football past in a way her father never did. Within her first decade of ownership, she boxed out the Texans in a territorial celebration of Oilers history, kick-starting an annual reunion, inducting five more alums into the Ring of Honor (including Brazile and Bum Phillips) and securing the retro uniforms for the Titans.
“When we moved to Nashville, the (Oilers) history — it just kind of all stopped,” Strunk said in a team-sponsored video from the first reunion. “It was important to me to let those guys know that I hadn’t forgotten them.”
When former Oilers wide receiver Ken Burrough died on Feb. 24, 2022, Brazile said Strunk — whom he calls “my big sister” — was the first person who called him. We’re going to Kenny’s funeral in Jacksonville. She picked up Brazile at his home in Mobile, Ala., and also scooped up Vernon Perry, a former Oilers safety, along the way.
“She cares about the history,” said Fisher, who first joined the team as a defensive coordinator in 1994. “She cares about the immediate past and where the Titans were and where they are now.”
She also inherited her father’s stubbornness. According to league sources, there was once a perception within the Texans organization that there were discussions for Houston to possibly regain the Oilers history and intellectual property. But any pipe dream of the Titans ever relinquishing the Oilers intellectual property and history to the Texans would likely elicit an expletive if expressed inside the Titans’ facility.
That Tennessee twice wore Oilers uniforms against Houston embodies the feud that’s been vaguely acknowledged by Hannah McNair, Texans vice president and Cal’s wife. A Houston native and UH alum, she disclosed on the team’s flagship radio station in April 2024 that the Texans “started getting pushback” after the NFL initially approved their usage of H-Town Blue, followed by a debate about how much of the color the Texans could use in their uniform redesigns.
“What was the reason?” a radio host asked Hannah.
“What do you think?” she replied.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photos: Kirby Lee, Darryl Norenberg, Malcolm Emmons / Imagn Images)
