Last week, the NFL’s Instagram account wished Houston Texans defensive end J.J. Watt a happy birthday, and he responded with a wish. “Gift idea hint: Get the Titans to give us the rights to the Houston Oilers throwback uniforms,” he wrote. Wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins, similarly inspired, shared his own fantasy of wearing the Oilers’ blue and white. An online poll by KHOU found that 89 percent of its readers would like to see it happen. Teams regularly don throwbacks to honor their pasts, and the football past of Houston includes the Oilers.To buy more Texans Jerseys with cheap price, you can visit texans365 official website.

It won’t happen. Amy Adams Strunk—daughter of Bud Adams, the man who founded the Oilers in 1960 and moved them to Nashville in 1997—told Titans beat reporter Paul Kuharsky that the prospect of the Texans playing in Oilers uniforms wasn’t even up for discussion. “Very interesting, except the Oilers don’t have anything to do with the Texans,” she said. “So that’s a hard no.”

Strunk’s statement is correct from a legal perspective. The Texans and Titans are distinct businesses, each controlling their own intellectual property and trademarks. But what she said is also absurd. Of course the Oilers have something to do with the Texans—they’re both NFL franchises that have called the same city home. The people of Houston celebrated triumphs and mourned failures with each, investing emotionally and buying heaps of team logo-emblazoned merchandise along the way.

Yet when you own something, as Strunk’s family does the Oilers logos, uniforms, and colors, there’s plenty of incentive to remind people that it’s yours, and there’s little reason to acknowledge that someone else (in this case, the Houston community) might feel ownership of it too.

Sports franchises like to play their relationship with their home community both ways. When Bud Adams rechristened his team the Titans, he explained that he was giving them a new identity to reflect their new home. “This is going to be Tennessee’s team,” he said. In one significant way, this was undoubtedly true: the people of Nashville paid $80 million toward building a stadium—something Houston voters had refused to do—and they remain on the hook for millions of dollars’ worth of annual maintenance and upkeep costs. A 2017 study found that Nissan Stadium was in need of $477 million in improvements, although the specifics of who would pay for those are still undetermined. Given the Adams family’s history, folks in Nashville have reason to be concerned that, if they balk at paying for those upgrades, the commitment that the Titans are “Tennessee’s team” might turn out to be less than wholehearted. And the Adams family isn’t unique in this respect. Every professional sports franchise is keen to portray itself as a community asset, but many owners play hardball when it comes time to get stadium deals approved. Most often they threaten to skip town if their demands aren’t met.