Titans: No Oilers Throwback Uniform Until NFL Changes Rules

For those hoping the Tennessee Titans would dip into their Oilers past, I’ve got some news.

Via TitansOnline.com reporter Jim Wyatt, during an appearance on The OTP (The “Official Titans Podcast”), Titans owner Amy Adams Strunk said the team wouldn’t bother wearing a Houston/Tennessee Oilers throwback uniform as long as the league stuck with its “one helmet” rule.

“That uniform without that helmet just wouldn’t make sense”, Wyatt quoted Strunk as saying on the podcast.

There’s been some buzz about the @Titans potentially wearing throwback #Oilers uniforms. Owner Amy Adams Strunk just said on the OTP it won’t happen unless the NFL approves teams wearing a 2nd helmet.

“That uniform without that helmet just wouldn’t make sense,” she said.— Jim Wyatt (@jwyattsports) April 18, 2019

Presumably, the Titans would be permitted to wear the throwback uniforms, but they’d have to be paired with their usual helmet shell which is currently a dark navy blue and wouldn’t match any of the helmets the team wore when they were known as the Oilers. The Oilers wore several different helmet shells over the years: silver, powder blue, and, as they wore in Tennessee and during the most of their history, white.

Teams are permitted to swap decals and face masks by the league, so the Titans would have been able to do this had they retained the white helmets the team had used right up until the end of the 2018 season. A ’bout of unfortunate timing for everyone. Whoops.

The Titans began life as the Houston Oilers in 1960, then a member of the American Football League before merging with the rest of the league into the NFL’s American Football Conference for the 1970 season. In 1997, the Oilers relocated to Tennessee where they briefly kept their previous name, playing as the Tennessee Oilers for two seasons. The team was re-named the Tennessee Titans in 1999.