Storyline: I miss the Oilers’ powder blue and white uniforms and cheering the team on every Sunday. What memories!
Courtesy: Pinterest
The Houston Oilers–a team in the old American Football League and then the NFL (following the merger of the two leagues)–played football from 1960-1996. That NFL franchise is known today as the Tennessee Titans.
The Oilers were a charter member of the American Football League. They were owned by Bud Adams, a Houston oilman, who had previously made several unsuccessful bids to get a professional football franchise to Houston.
While the Oilers never won a Super Bowl, they appeared in the first three AFL Championship games. They won the first–against the Los Angeles Chargers–in 1960. They repeated in 1961, but lost to the Dallas Texans in 1962.
For the first eight years the Oilers played at Rice Stadium and then Jeppesen Stadium. Then they became the first professional football team to play in a domed stadium, The Astrodome. I remember going to the Astrodome every Sunday with my father and watching the likes of Warren Moon and Earnest Givens.
Back in those days, Houston pro football experienced good times and bad. There was the “Luv Ya Blue” era with Dan Pastorini and Earl Campbell in the late ’70s–when the team almost went to the Super Bowl–and there was the team’s demise, when the franchise moved to Tennessee and became the Titans.
Courtesy: YouTube
But for me the biggest Oilers’ highlight was when they were quarterbacked by George Blanda. Blanda started out in the NFL in 1949 with the Chicago Bears. He started a few games, but an injury put him in second-string status and Blanda was used mostly as a kicker. After a few seasons in Chicago, Blanda got into a dispute with Bears’ owner, George Halas, and retired from football in 1958.
When the American Football league was established in 1960 Blanda made a comeback with the Oilers. He was considered an NFL reject at the time, but proved to everybody that he still had play left in him. Consider his records: most interceptions thrown (277), oldest quarterback to play in the NFL (48), and the first NFL player to score 2000 points.
As much as I love the Houston Texans, I miss the days of the powder blue and white uniforms. Just how much? A few years ago I was in a Houston mall and saw a gentleman wearing an old Oilers hat. That reminded me of just how much I miss cheering for the team every Sunday.
What memories!
