Titans are latest team to show how not to handle a great coach

There are objective prerequisites for every job with every NFL team. With one exception.

There is no experience or educational requirement to be an owner.

It’s one of the most fascinating aspects of pro football. Businesses that are skyrocketing toward ten figures in value are still run like mom-and-pop stores. When pop dies, mom or son or daughter or nephew or someone else in the family takes over. Regardless of whether they know anything about running a football team.

It happens throughout the league. Unless the family members opt to cash out (or unless they have to, in order to pay estate taxes), someone who would never, ever be hired to run a multi-billion-dollar business falls into the position, by blood or by marriage.

The latest example of people who run NFL teams not necessarily having the skills to run an NFL team comes from Tennessee, where a decision was made this week to fire head coach Mike Vrabel. The decision came from Amy Adams Strunk. She’s the daughter of Bud Adams, whose estate plan split the team between the three branches of his family tree but inexplicably failed to give one of them control over the teams.

That became a low-key mess for the league and Titans for several years, until a deal was brokered to put Strunk in charge. Like many other situations throughout the NFL (Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Houston, L.A. Chargers, Las Vegas, Dallas, New York Giants, Detroit, Chicago, Tampa Bay, New Orleans, San Francisco, Arizona, Seattle), control has flowed within a given family from the person who bought or founded the team. There’s no guarantee that the person who inherits the ability to run a team will ever be equipped to do it.

TheAthletic.com has taken a deep dive into how things went sideways between Strunk and head coach Mike Vrabel. It ranges from Strunk reportedly being chafed by Vrabel’s belief that Ran Carthon wasn’t ready to be a G.M. to Strunk reportedly taking offense to the praise Vrabel heaped on the Patriots when he was…


Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/titans-latest-team-show-not-164604824.html

Author : ProFootball Talk on NBC Sports

Publish date : 2024-01-14 16:46:04

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