Tennessee Titans fans claim to embrace Luv Ya Blue, but they hated Oilers name. Here are receipts.

The bickering between fans of the Houston Texans and Tennessee Titans is stuck in a nonstop loop.

Y’all want to be us so bad, Titans supporters taunt the football fans in Houston while clinging to the history of the Houston Oilers.

Y’all don’t know anything about Luv Ya Blue, Houston football backers retort.

The truth is somewhere in the middle. Many longtime Houston sports fans do still yearn for the days of the Oilers, while being die-hard Texans fans who want nothing to do with the Titans. That much is evident in how the city has embraced the Texans’ new rivalry uniforms that lean into what they call H-Town Blue, a shade that irritates Titans fans who claim to have an affinity for a past era.

But, as much Columbia Blue merchandise as the people of Nashville may currently buy from Amy Adams Strunk, the truth is they flat-out rejected everything about the Oilers’ name and branding when her dad tried to do the same when he moved the team to Tennessee in 1997.

The proof lives in the archives, perhaps summed up best by a 1998 editorial cartoon drawn by The Tennessean’s Sandy Campbell. Shortly after Bud Adams, the owner of the Houston Oilers, finally caved and agreed to change the name of his team from the Tennessee Oilers to the Tennessee Titans, the Nashville newspaper’s artist depicted three different Titans. There was a Titan of Industry wearing a top hat and lighting his cigar with dollar bills. Next to it was a Titan Missile, the country’s first long-range ballistic missile. Below those two was a drawing of a person labeled “Titan Football Fan.” The punch line that resonates nearly 30 years later is the fan, who has a pom-pom in one hand and a drink in the other, is wearing a shirt that reads “Anything but Oilers.”

And that sums up how the people of Tennessee felt about the Oilers, about Luv Ya Blue and about the iconic oil derrick logo they would sometimes wear as a poke in the eye to the city of Houston.

When Bud Adams first pitched moving the Oilers from Houston to Tennessee, he wanted a new stadium – something Mayor Bob Lanier and voters wouldn’t give him in Houston – so he told the people of Nashville this would be their team with a branding with which they could identify.

It didn’t take long before Tennessee realized Adams wasn’t necessarily going to stick to his word.

Tennessean columnist Larry Woody wrote in 1997 that “from the time Adams first began to whisper in our ear, one of the things he promised was that the team’s name would be changed. He said that when the team moved here, he would hold a contest to let fans help rename the team. Now he is waffling.” Tennessee’s Kingsport Times-News was more blunt, with an editorial headlined “Tennessee got slickered by Houston Oilers owner.”

Nashville city council member Ronnie Steine even filed a 1997 resolution trying to force Adams to change the name, telling The Tennessean, “I still think the team coming here is wonderful. All I want to do is send a message to Mr. Adams to make him aware of how strongly we feel about changing the name. I don’t know if he realizes how strong the sentiment is.”

The fans made it clear with their wallets. In the team’s first season in Tennessee, the Tennessee Oilers averaged just 28,028 fans per game at Memphis’ Liberty Bowl in 1997. That was even worse than the paltry numbers the Oilers drew to the Astrodome in 1996 when they were a lame-duck franchise.

The Tennessean described a 1997 home game against the arch-rival Pittsburgh Steelers in which the crowd “was clad predominantly in black and gold,” and Bruce Matthews, who was an all-time Oilers great in the Astrodome days and stuck with the team in the move to Tennessee told the paper, “we had to overcome the crowd,” despite it being a home game.

The franchise moved to Nashville and played at Vanderbilt Stadium the next season, but Adams stuck with the Oilers name which led to an average attendance of just 37,444 fans.

That’s when the NFL intervened with an idea. Tennessee’s struggling attendance was driving down the league’s gameday revenue ticket pool, a chunk of which was shared by every other franchise. So Paul Tagliabue, the NFL commissioner who later would make good with Houston by granting the city an NFL expansion team that would become the Texans, struck a deal with Adams: Change the team’s moniker to something that Tennessee fans will accept and you will get to retain the Oilers’ history, logo and colors forever.

“Adams, who had been publicly reluctant to change the name, said the ‘clincher’ in changing his mind was National Football League commissioner Paul Tagliabue’s agreement to retire the name Oilers and allow the franchise to retain and protect its 39-year history,” NFL beat writer Paul Kuharsky wrote in The Tennessean at the time.

In that same story, Tennessee coach Jeff Fisher acknowledged the new fan base’s intolerance of the Oilers name, saying: “It’s what our fans have been asking for for a long time. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t run into somebody who asks that question first. We’ve got to put that to rest.”

Four months later, Adams made it official by dumping the Oilers’ name and uniforms and announcing his team would be known as the Tennessee Titans with a completely new look beginning in 1999.

“And no matter how many times he said yesterday that he was going to do this all along, the simple fact is he fought it with all his might,” Tennessean columnist Jeff Legwold wrote. “Fought it until yesterday, when he admitted Oilers in Tennessee was a dry hole.”

So, Tennessee got its new look and Houston was left to forge a new NFL identity under Bob McNair.

In hindsight, Lanier and Houston should have taken a cue from how Cleveland treated Art Modell when he moved his team to Baltimore in 1996. Modell, who was hated in Cleveland just like Adams was despised in Houston, agreed to leave the Browns’ name and history behind if the city of would drop any legal fights against him. Modell renamed his new team the Baltimore Ravens and the NFL agreed to start a new Browns franchise in time for the 1999 season.

Instead, Lanier fought more for making Adams stick to his Astrodome lease. Adams had threatened to move before, convincing Houston to tear down the Astrodome’s iconic exploding scoreboard in favor of more seats in the upper deck. Even after getting his extra seats, Adams decided to move anyway less than 10 years later. The problem was he still had two years left on his lease with the city and Lanier wasn’t going to let him just pick up and move. Instead, Adams played the 1996 season in a half-empty Astrodome before finally buying his way out of the final year in the Astrodome for $5 million, but he still left town with all the Oilers history.

Soon, the Houston Texans were born and nearly 30 years later, the two sides still fight over every inch of Oilers Blue and H-Town Blue.

Original Titans fans are old enough though, so they’ll remember what they really thought of that gear. Gary Puckett was a fan attending a Tennessee game in 1998 the day after Adams announced he would change the team’s name to the Titans. Puckett told the Tennessean that day, “I wasn’t going to support the Tennessee team until it got a new name.”

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This article originally published at Tennessee Titans fans claim to embrace Luv Ya Blue, but they hated Oilers name. Here are receipts..