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Rice Will Wear Oilers-Inspired Unis This Saturday; Will UH Follow Suit?

The Rice University Owls have announced they will again wear their “Oilers-inspired” uniforms this Saturday, when they take on the University of Texas San Antonio (UTSA).

You may recall that another Houston-based University also wore a set of Oilers-inspired uniforms last year: the Houston Cougars.

While the Rice uniforms weren’t quite as close to the uniforms once worn by the Houston Oilers as the Cougars’ unis were, both used powder blue jerseys in almost the same shade as the Oilers. The Owls also wore a silver helmet that bore more than a few similarities to those once worn by the Oilers.

So you had two Houston-based teams both wearing pretty Oilers-esque uniforms last season. The Tennessee Titans, the franchise that uprooted itself from Houston, noticed this as well. And they were not pleased.

The Titans/NFL sent the Cougars (but not the Owls) a cease and desist letter, arguing the Cougars wore the uniform “in a manner that is likely to cause consumers to believe that the Houston Cougars are associated with, or are an authorized licensee of, the NFL and the Titans.” The potential for consumer confusion is at the heart of most trademark cases.

So, why were the Cougars targeted, but not Rice? Per Paul’s article (linked above)…

Rice has also worn “Love Ya Blue”-inspired alternates this season, but they are apparently not facing the same legal scrutiny from the NFL. Per this article:

Rice also used the ‘Luv Ya Blue’ color scheme in 2023 but they don’t appear to be included under the same trademark infraction, at least according to the NFL. One source tells me it could be for two reasons – one, the Owls put “Rice” on the front of the jerseys and two, the Oilers played at Rice Stadium as an AFL franchise from 1965 through 1967.

There are other college football uniforms based on NFL designs. The University of Iowa, for example, wears Steelers-inspired uniforms. And in 2017, Arkansas wore a Cowboys-themed uni as a salute to Jerry Jones (although that one was rendered in Arkansas colors, not Cowboys colors, so there’d be no room for consumer confusion).

So Rice is apparently in the clear to again wear the Oilers-inspired throwbacks. The Cougars, on the other hand, could face penalties if they “violate” the C&D letter. But the Houston Cougars are having none of it, and have indicated they will wear the uniforms at some point this season.

In their C&D letter, the NFL said “the Houston Cougars’ attempt to free ride on the popularity of the NFL … violates the intellectual property rights of the NFL and the Titans.” The Cougars claim that’s nonsense and argue the city of Houston’s connection to the light-blue color long predates the Oilers. “We literally have a story [to] show the city uses it,” Cougars athletic director Chris Pezman said. “This isn’t a reach. This is a layup. We’ve got a very defensible position.”

The Cougars have made one small concession: It will modify the helmet and pants striping to make the uniform less Oilers-y. Will that be enough to keep the NFL/Titans at bay?

As yet, we haven’t seen the “modified” Cougars H-Town blue alternates, and in fact, I don’t believe the team has made an announcement they will definitely be worn. But if they do, it will be curious to see what the NFL/Titans’ response is. If the Rice alternates were “different” enough from the old Oilers uniforms, perhaps the modified Cougars’ unis will be changed just enough to satisfy everyone.

On another note: the Titans are fiercely protective of their “intellectual property.” When Houston’s replacement NFL team, the Texans, redesigned for this season, they incorporated H-Town Blue into their recently unveiled alternate uniforms and new “H” logo, though it appears the team had to reach a compromise of sorts with the NFL and/or Titans. Ultimately, they settled on using it as an accent color, though it is featured prominently on new team merchandise.

And the Houston Rockets — the city’s NBA franchise — have used “H-Town Blue” and red in one of their own alternates back in 2020:

With so many Houston-based teams (Texans, Cougars, Owls, Rockets) all incorporating “H-Town blue” into their uniform schemes, it may be harder and harder for the Titans/NFL to make the case that teams wearing said color are infringing on the Titans intellectual property.

Let’s hope the Cougars follow through with their promise to wear the Oilers-inspired alts again (even if they’re slightly modified). This whole episode just highlights the lengths to which the Titans will go to forbid other teams from “copying” them. I’ll admit the uniforms the Cougars wore last year that generated this whole controversy were pretty close to those once worn by the Oilers, but for the Titans to be able to strong arm Houston-based teams into not wearing H-Town Blue seems ridiculous, especially since the Cougars have pointed to the fact that the color existed in Houston long before the Oilers did.

Meanwhile, let’s enjoy these beauties this weekend when Rice hosts UTSA.

Your thoughts?

 
  
 
Comments (28)

    I believe that the Titans, because they’re just so bad, are just plain jealous of the UH Cougars’ Houston unis. Heaven forbid that consumers have confusion with their lousy team. Interested to see, if the Cougars try their Houston sets again, what their tweaks will be — how about a cougar head on the helmet? That wouldn’t provoke consumer confusion, would it, Titans?

    We have to remember that, according to the NFL and the Tennessee Titans, NFL fans are too stupid to be able to tell the difference between the current college teams of Houston/Rice and an NFL team that has not existed in decades….

    I strongly support the Titans’ tight hold on the Oilers branding…including the colors(though no one should own a color scheme, they ‘own’ the red/LuvYa look).
    Houston (the city) didn’t give a hoot when the Oilers left (heck, the Oilers were so bad they hardly cared when they were there). So-called H-Town Blue pre-dates the Oilers – so why did no one ever use the term until the Texans started self -loathing and advertising their inferiority complex (sometimes by proxy) on social media after 20 years of decent branding.
    I say the colleges homage is ok…it’s not the NFL. I’d love for the Temple Owls to do a winged helmet/very stripey Eagles tribute someday – in Cherry and white though.

    The Titans franchise should have had to leave the Oilers branding and name behind when they left for Tennessee. Slap in the face to fans in Houston when they wear those unis. Additionally they have worn them against the Texans which is an even bigger F.U. to the fans and city.

    A lot of that was because they didn’t want to do a re-branding until they moved into “The Coliseum” now “Nissan Stadium”. I did get to watch them play the Steelers when they played their first year in Memphis. Memphis had the red ass over Nashville getting chosen over them. Needless to say, there weren’t many Oilers fans in attendance. The Liberty Bowl was a sea of black/gold. That’s why they played at Vanderbilt Stadium the next year.

    Houston seemed glad to be rid of the Oilers – and while the Texans were prevented from using the branding in any way per the agreement between NFL Commish Taglibue and the Adams family, they did petition the Chiefs to use the Texans name. Both the city and the team could have paid tribute to the likes of Campbell, Moon, Bethea, Matthew’s, etc…with say, statues or number retirements but never did and still haven’t.
    And then I suppose the Colts history should have remained in Baltimore, the Raiders history shoulda stayed in Oakland, both the Rams and Cardinals in Saint Louis, and so on, right?
    To me, that’s wrong-YMMV.

    “And then I suppose the Colts history should have remained in Baltimore, the Raiders history shoulda stayed in Oakland, both the Rams and Cardinals in Saint Louis, and so on, right?”

    Man, this. History staying with franchises provides a clean thru-line. History staying with cities gets very convoluted, very quickly.

    Well, the Cardinals history should actually have stayed in Chicago, if you’re using this type of logic.

    YVVM

    I was a massive Oilers fan from afar as a teenager. My walls were covered in pictures of Warren Moon!
    I was gutted when they left town & didn’t feel any affinity with Nashville or Tennessee.

    The Tennessee Oilers made no sense, so they made the decision to disown the logo and the light blue/red colour scheme. It made it easier for everyone to move on.

    But for the Titans to now claim those colours as their brand is ludicrous. Their unis are light blue, dark blue and grey. Not light blue and red – they stopped wearing them. Nobody is going to confuse these teams with the Titans. It is just being petty.

    I understand they own the logo and other teams can’t use that, and Tennessee just look silly pretending now to honour a uniform they couldn’t dump fast enough, so enforce the trademark of the logo, but give it a rest with the colours. (When Denver released their white helmets last year, someone on here posted a link to an identical Syracuse uni. Stripes and all. But we all survived the confusion then, so I’m pretty sure we will now).

    “Houston (the city) didn’t give a hoot when the Oilers left”

    This isn’t remotely true. Houston (the city) told Bud Adams (rightly) to go f himself when he threatened to move unless they built him a new stadium using mostly — 75% — public money, just a few years after the city spent close to a hundred million dollars renovating the Astrodome to appease Adams. Fans stopped coming to games, sure, but only after Adams announced the move to Nashville.

    The Oilers, btw, were all of three years removed from a stretch of nine straight winning seasons when they said goodbye to Houston.

    And how much did the taxpayers wind up shelling out for the Texans Stadium, the expansion franchise fee (which surely got passed onto the consumer), Astrodome upkeep, etc? Not saying that Adams was a swell guy, but he did make Houston a big-league city in ‘60 (the Astros and Rockets…through relocation BTW… would come later) and enriched the coffers and civic pride in (so called) H-Town. And he got to choose the colors before Lamar Hunt did. Shrewd!

    Pretty sure the taxpayers still ponied up a lot for the Texans homestead -possibly more than what Adams asked for…and may have wound up paying the franchise’s entry fee to the NFL (seat licenses, other fees) to boot. Would have been cheaper to keep the Oilers-then no one on Houston would feel inclined to play ‘dress-up’.

    Well, that’s the cost of the rare privilege of a city firing an owner.
    I wish it weren’t so rare; we might have more money for our schools. The owners get to fire cities every time they move.

    I believe the overall theme here is…
    The daughter of Bud Adams hates the city of Houston…
    Most people don’t like haters…
    And if they like the name and super D duper patented colors so damn much why don’t they just switch back to the Tennessee Oilers….
    And in the same vein, why the hell didn’t the Texans pay Tennessee and just revive the Oilers franchise????

    Houston wanted Bud Adams gone, not necessarily the Oilers. He kept holding the city ransom for luxury boxes in the Astrodome, but he didn’t do what he needed to do to put a championship product on the field. After the AFC championship loss to the Bills (the greatest choke ever), Adams once again threatened to leave if he didn’t get the stadium improvements he wanted. That’s a bad look, and Houstonians rightly dared him to follow through on the threat, and when he left, folks told him not to let the door hit him on the way out. It wasn’t a result any loss of love for the *team*, only the “carpetbagging” (as it was commonly written in the press) ownership.

    Getting real tired of the Titans’ attitude with this. Nobody is confusing anything. They are simply fondly remembering a franchise that no longer exists in the city, or in recognizable form anywhere else.

    Ok, so there was originally a team called the New York Titans that became the Jets. So, I don’t really see how the Titans are viewed like they have done no wrong. Granted, that team was originally the Oilers. There was also a team called the Dallas Texans. That team is now the Kansas City Chiefs. So, the Houston Texans, IMO, are not completely innocent either.

    The Tennessee Titans should have turned over the entire Oilers history when Houston was awarded an expansion team. Kind of like what happened in Cleveland.

    The Tennessee Titans are entitled to keep their vintage Houston Oilers logo hostage, because that’s the same corporation. But the more the Titans make arguments that they own that shade of blue in the context of American football, the more I hate them. You can’t have such dibs on black or regular red or athletic gold…you’re not Home Depot with a trademark of orange in home improvement…literally just stop it

    Is the reason that the Titans organization so litigious about this because they to this day continue to make money off licensing the Oilers logo and colors to clothing companies? Just looking at the Fanatics, there’s tons of Oilers merch available. Clearly the Oilers brand still holds plenty of cultural cachet, that the Titans view as monetizable.
    I could see them thinking the could start losing revenue if people switched to buying UH “Luv Ya Blue” merch instead of theirs. Before anyone mentions it I know UH hasn’t done that, but I’d imagine the Titans are seeing the possibility of “not yet”.

    Those Arkansas Cowboys inspired unis are gorgeous. They’d also be nice to breakup all the maroon/burgundy/whatever color name you choose that SO many college teams have with almost identical uniforms.

    Bama, Indiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas. Probably forgetting one or two. Especially since the SEC has 3 teams like that.

    I wanted the Arizona Cardinals to change completely to red & silver. This Arkansas uniform shows why.

    I’ve seen written sources that claim the Steelers gave Iowa explicit permission to base their uniforms off of the Steelers’ uniforms, so I would say that Iowa gets a pass.

    I don’t like that Rice version (colors are too washed-out, and the helmet doesn’t really seem to go with the rest), but I fully support every sports team in the Houston area using this color scheme just to stick it to the Titans.

    As usual, Rice’s attorneys were a little more clever than UH’s attorneys (all the way back to Captain James A. Baker). But I’m cheering for UH going head-on against Amy Adams because somebody’s got to remind the NFL that they’re not our rulers.

    I would remind everyone that it was Tennessee that relegated that light blue color to a secondary Motif on their uniform set decades ago.
    And for the record I still love my idea of having both teams wear Oiler throwback uniforms when they meet each other, one road, one home…
    It would be incredible ratings, who wouldn’t want to watch?

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