After wearing them for two seasons, the Tennessee Titans will be keeping their “Houston Oilers” throwbacks in the closet for the 2025 season.
The team announced several big uniform changes on Thursday, and as part of that announcement the Titans revealed that they won’t be wearing their iconic, but controversial, throwbacks for the upcoming season. The Oilers throwback uniforms are definitely popular with fans, but they have come with some controversy. When the Oilers left Houston to move to Tennessee following the 1996 season, a lot of people felt that the team’s name and colors should have stayed in Texas, but they didn’t.
The Titans got to keep the rights to the Oilers name and they unveiled a throwback in 2023 that they actually wore against Houston, a game that the Texans won (The Titans are 1-2 in their Oilers throwbacks, and ironically, both losses have come against Houston). In April 2024, Hannah McNair, the wife of Texans owner Cal McNair, didn’t hide her feelings about the Oilers jerseys: She said they should have stayed in Houston.
“Houston takes a lot of pride in [the uniforms], and you know, Tennessee doesn’t care as much,” McNair said. “It’s not as meaningful to their fans.”
One thing that Titans fans do seem to love is the baby blue color on the Oilers jerseys that the Titans have also embraced. The color is so popular that Tennessee will be making “Titans blue” its primary home jersey color for the 2025 season.
Titans President and CEO Burke Nihill explained why the team decided to make the switch from Navy blue to “Titans blue.”
“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,” Nihill told the team’s official website. “We’re going to emphasize that this year and change to Titans blue as the primary color. … Our fans, our players, they love it.”
Nihill said the plan is for the team to wear their Titans blue jersey for every home game in 2025.
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