Above you see the fully revamped Tennessee Titans uniforms for the upcoming 2026 season and beyond. The first thing you’ll notice about these uniforms is that they look great. The second thing you’ll notice is that they’re not new at all. They’re just the old Houston Oilers uniforms, but with a lightly updated Titans decal affixed to the helmet. If you were once a fan of the Houston Oilers, or you currently cheer for the Houston Texans (don’t do that), you’re likely annoyed, if not outraged. That’s YOUR blue the Titans just yoinked away: a final middle finger hoisted up by the Adams family after relocating the Oilers from Houston 29 years ago.
For the rest of us … whoa, hey, Tennessee finally got itself a real team!
It takes a lot of effort for any NFL franchise to go nearly three decades without making a lasting impression. Even the Jets managed to do a Buttfumble somewhere in there to leave a mark. But the Tennessee Titans, by contrast, have long excelled at the art of not being seen. The only relevant season came in 1999, their first season with that name. For the two seasons prior, they were the Tennessee Oilers and played all of their home games in Memphis for one of those seasons. No one gave a shit, especially people in Memphis. Then they moved to their permanent home stadium in Nashville, formally became the Titans, and immediately went on a playoff run that started with the Music City Miracle and ended a single, infamous yard short of winning the Super Bowl.
People gave a shit. For one year only.
After 1999, the Titans became a great, sucking void: a near-perfect representative of AFC South football, and of every lackluster Thursday night game you and I have ever attempted to tolerate. The names alone are enough to make you wince: Jeff Fisher, Jake Locker, Kenny Britt, Albert Hayneswo—you know what? I can’t keep thinking about any of these people or I might harm myself. I hate thinking about the Titans, and I regret pretty much every game of theirs I’ve ever watched. Even when they rinsed Tom Brady and the Patriots at Foxboro in a divisional playoff game six years ago, that glee was tempered with the realization that I’d have to watch Ryan Tannehill start an AFC title game, which he promptly lost.
There have been “good” Titans teams this century. Who can forget the 13-3 Titans juggernaut of 2008, with Kerry Collins at the helm? There have also been a handful of good players in Nashville during this stretch, too: Derrick Henry, Eddie George, Chris Johnson, Jevon Kearse … uh, Derrick Henry again. But they haven’t won fuck all since that first Nashville season, and they’ve never been cool. For decades, they’ve played a deeply uncool brand of football (run, run, incomplete pass) while rocking a color scheme that wouldn’t even be welcome in a GEICO ad. They never looked like a real NFL team. They looked like a mistake, and they played like it.
The Houston Oilers? Now, they were no mistake. That was a cool-ass team: Earl Campbell, Bum Phillips, Warren Moon and the run 'n shoot offense … that was a team you could daydream about playing for. Even though the Oilers never went to the Super Bowl, and even though the best Oilers team of my lifetime was the one that staged what remains the largest collapse in NFL playoff history, they were a real team. They were cool. You know why? Because they looked cool. Show ‘em, Earl.
And so the Titans, who retained the Houston Oilers' records and branding rights in their move north, are stealing from their previous existence in order to bring cachet to their current one. You could argue, either in a court of law or in a bar, that the Titans have no right to Oiler-ize their color scheme. It’s unethical, rude, and even lazy. But I’m not gonna do that. Why? A few reasons. One: I have more important things to be mad about. Two: Fuck your feelings, Texas.
Three, and most important: I don’t want to stop any NFL franchise from looking as cool as possible out on the field. The Titans are back to being the Oilers now, because they never should have stopped being the Oilers to begin with. They can never rectify the mistake of bailing on Houston, nor do they want to. But at least they look good again. In fact, these unis make the Titans the coolest they’ve been since 1999. They look like they belong. Now they just have to play like it.
