Tennessean details Titans succession plan

Discussion in 'Tennessee Titans and NFL Talk' started by NewsGrabber, Dec 12, 2008.

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  1. NewsGrabber

    NewsGrabber Guest

    Posted by ESPN.com's Paul Kuharsky NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Leading up top the Titans trip to Houston, Jim Wyatt visited with team owner Bud Adams in Texas this week and writes Friday of the long-term plans for the franchise.

    This is good stuff. There have long been assurances from team powers that a plan was in place for succession after Adams passes away.

    But in his interview with Wyatt, he revealed details of those plans publicly for the first time. Here's a key piece of the article:

    As things stand now, his daughters Susie Smith and Amy Strunk will each get a share of the team, Adams said, and the other third will go to the family of his deceased son, Kenneth S. Adams III - his grandsons, Kenneth Adams IV and Barclay Cunningham Adams, and their mother, Susan Lewis.

    His daughters aren't interested in running the team, Adams said, and Barclay is just a junior at Ole Miss. It's Kenneth who is being groomed to someday run the show.

    The 24-year-old University of the South graduate has spent the past two seasons sampling every facet of franchise operations as an administrative assistant to Titans Senior Executive Vice President Steve Underwood.

    Adams said he's thinking about elevating his grandson to vice president, perhaps in two years.

    "I want him to get a little more age on him because I think he'd be respected a little better," Adams said. "But he might be the one running it after I'm no longer the head guy. First he has to get well acquainted with all the phases of the organization, and he has been working in all those areas to try and do that."

    In 2007, his first year around the team, Kenneth Adams hopped around from department to department with the team, touching on every possible area. He held yard markers with the equipment men at practice, helped set up interviews for the media relations office and learned about stadium operations.

    There was great potential for things to be awkward, with team executives and staffers in position to feel like he was observing them and reporting back to his grandfather.

    But he disarmed all of that with a regular-Joe manner and a willingness to dive into so many different areas of the organization at the ground level. At training camp at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, he played nighttime basketball games in the campus arena with staffers, interns and media.

    The potential for him to be a team VP at 26 will likely cause some of those anxieties to resurface, but the team's highest ranking executive who's not an Adams, Steve Underwood, is a sensible guy and loyal steward, and he'll help make things smooth as the Adams who will eventually be the primary family presence with the team continues to learn the business.

    "He is so interested in trying to figure out why our business works the way it does and has learned a tremendous amount just in the last year and a half,'' Underwood told Wyatt. "I don't think there is any question that he has the ability some day to have a leadership role in our organization.''



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