The AFC South has always been kind of a meh-stival—four under-noticed teams (just one media market inside the top 25) all doing relatively dull things (having the worst cumulative record since the division became an actual thing) and only very occasionally getting our attention for anything other than draft position. Thus it is with admiration as well as curiosity that we gaze upon the escalating uniform war between the Houston Texans and Tennessee Titans over the use of what the rest of us would just call light blue.
Or as the Titans call it, Titans blue. Or as the Texans call it, H-Town blue. Or as the rest of us call it, "The Nothing Else To Do Battle Royal."
You can read all about it, courtesy of Brooks Kubena at The Athletic, or you can just marvel at the small-minded grudge-holding involved here. The Titans, who used to play in Houston as the Oilers but left almost three decades ago, are planning to update their uniforms to look more Oiler-like and preventing their old town from having a claim on them, while the Texans, who replaced the Oilers six years later, want their old colors back and are willing to get as pissy about it as the Titans.
And as we all know, nothing is more entertaining than watching rich adults get pissy with each other.
Mostly, this isn't about colors, of course, but a pointless legacy fight over the memory of Bud Adams, the oil man (who'd have imagined that?) who bought into the original American Football League in 1960, put his franchise in Houston, then got snippy about spending money and the decomposing Astrodome, so he moved the team first to Memphis and then to Nashville, first as the Tennessee Oilers (think Utah Jazz just with less panache) then as the Titans. The team has appreciated about 196,000 times over since Adams's original buy-in, but he's still a villain in Houston nearly 30 years later because the Texans, owned by the family of original owner Bob McNair, have done nothing on the field to distract the citizens from their memories of the good old days that weren't as good as they're letting on.
Adams's daughter, Amy Adams Strunk, owns the Titans now, and she's taken to the idea of rebranding the featureless Titans uniform scheme with the light blue that had been the principal color of the Oilers but only an accent color in Tennessee. She doesn't want the McNairs (or Houston as a whole) to get its grudge-holding mitts on something that her family made famous, so she's holding a grudge of her own.
The Texans, whose principal achievement since forming in 2002 has been to create the most forgettable uniforms in the sport (and that's saying something when you've got the blue-on-white Indianapolis Colts), are planning to use their own version of baby blue as an accent color. Strunk is trying to block that by making her baby blue the only real baby blue, while Houstonians—who still think her dad is a jerk for dragging and then moving the team even though he's been dead since 2013—maintain that their light blue is part of the city's football legacy and don't want the Adams family (sorry, couldn't resist) to steal that, too. They are already well torqued off by the Titans wearing Oilers throwback jerseys in the last two seasons, so we have dueling middle fingers aimed at each other's eyes.
As the gods intended.
Kubena breaks down all this turbo-pettiness well, all the way down to how both the University of Houston and Rice were served with cease-and-desist letters from the NFL for trying to appropriate the blue for specific games because, as the town's logic goes, the blue belongs not to Adams Strunk or the NFL but to the city and all its teams. How the city hasn't managed to involve the Astros and Rockets in this increasingly not-quite-civil war is beyond us, but hey, maybe Kubena's got a sequel chambered for the next slow day.
But we do admire the way a basically bland color—which is in any event being used to better effect by the Los Angeles Chargers, another team that abandoned its ancestral home for its even more ancestral home because its billionaire owner couldn't get the city to make him a new stadium—has become a wedge issue between two families and two cities who otherwise only have the worst division in the NFL to fight over. When your history is that threadbare (the Oilers' last championship was in 1961, and the Texans haven't sniffed a single conference final), you may as well fight about the cloth. There's even a 25-year-old book by John Pirkle about the end of the Oilers in Houston called Oiler Blues. Because why the hell not?
Long story short, the fight over the color is getting better now that the Titans have made it their primary uniform accent. Now we await developments from the Texans on one of the rare issues that all Houstonians can agree upon. We're good with blood feuds here, after all, as long as the wedge issue is this picayune. When it's a battle that hinges more on feelings than actual property, why not say it with swatches?
