Old-school Houston football fans won’t have to worry about the Tennessee Titans rubbing their Houston Oilers history in their faces by wearing the bygone team’s Columbia Blue jerseys as throwbacks, but owner Amy Adams Strunk is making sure everyone will remember that connection to Houston’s beloved team by making light blue its primary color going forward.

Adams Strunk — the daughter of the late Bud Adams, who moved the Oilers from Houston to Tennessee in 1997 and took all the franchise’s branding and history with him — brought back the old Oilers uniforms as the Titans’ alternates beginning in 2023. To no one’s surprise, the sweet Columbia Blue outfits with the classic oil derrick on the helmets were a smash hit across the country, but people in Houston took exception to the Titans insisting on wearing them against the Texans each time Houston’s new team visited Nashville.

In an announcement on the team’s website Thursday, the Titans say they won’t wear those Oilers throwbacks in 2025, but they will lean heavily into the color.

“We’re talking to fans and we’re listening, and there’s a clear appetite to have the Titans, their team, represented on the field in this noticeable color that has been with this team from 1960 in Houston, into Memphis, at Vanderbilt and as we’ve played at Nissan Stadium,” Titans President and CEO Burke Nihill said on the team’s site. “We’re going to emphasize that this year and change to Titans blue as the primary color. As we sit here today, the plan is to wear Titans blue at every one of our home games this year.”

The Titans wore primarily light blue uniforms in just two games in 2024, but the team said whoever they select with its first-pick in April will hold up a “Titans Blue” uniform.

“Our fans, our players, they love it,” Nihill said. “The Titans Blue has always been a part of this organization, and there is something that is uniquely this organization when that color is the dominant color. You see it, and you know the team that is being represented — it’s the Titans.”

Titans Blue, of course, is a lot like Columbia Blue, which is a lot like what the Texans have taken to calling H-Town Blue.

When the Texans redesigned their uniforms in 2024, they would have liked to lean more into the lighter blue of shade that’s so popular in Houston, but because the Titans still own all the Oilers branding, the Texans had to tread lightly. They were able to get approved an alternate uniform that features “H-Town Blue” as an accent color.

When the Texans unveiled their new uniforms, Hannah McNair, owner Cal McNair’s wife and vice president of the Houston Texans Foundation, talked about the battle with the league over incorporating the familiar color into the team’s new look.

“I think there was some talk, I think even publicly we discussed that we were going to be able to use a different color than Columbia Blue, so when that was released and we got approval to do that, that’s when we started getting some pushback,” Hannah said in a 2024 appearance on SportsRadio 610. “And then it got to a point where they just said no you can’t, and then we compromised.”

When Hannah was asked for the reason of the pushback, she didn’t name the Titans, but bluntly replied, “What do you think?”

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