Thursday, July 24, 2008
By the Way / Kotz / Media Tennessee Titans’ Bud Adams, You’re Average
Posted by Pete Kotz on Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 5:03 AM
When it comes to guiding our fair combatants of the gridiron, Bud Adams is decidedly average.
So says Michael Silver, who covers the NFL for Yahoo. In a column yesterday, he ranks NFL owners from 1-32. Adams slots in at 19, one step below Silver’s rankings last year for Sports Illustrated.
On the upside, the owner basically gets points for staying out the way and hiring good people to do the actual work. In terms of managerial traits, it’s not a bad strategy. On the down side, the columnist appears to have weird fetish about Adams’ hair. Writes Silver:
Adams, now in his mid-80s, has been less involved in league matters in recent years, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Senior executive vice president Steve Underwood is well-liked by the owners, and coach Jeff Fisher, also an executive vice president, co-chairs the competition committee. The Titans are generally regarded as a well-run franchise that milks the most out of the Nashville market, and Fisher’s presence makes it an attractive place to play. To Adams’s credit, he has retained Fisher for more than 13 seasons, making the former Bears safety the league’s longest-tenured head coach, and provided him with a smart, personable general manager in Mike Reinfeldt. This is the point at which I usually make fun of Adams’s hair, but I think he may be too old for that now.The worst owner in the league, naturally, is Jacksonville’s Wayne Weaver, followed by the man that time forgot, Al Davis of the Raiders. The best? New England’s Bob Kraft. Second and third, however, are the meddlesome duo of Dallas’s Jerry Jones and Washington’s Dan Snyder. Which makes you wonder about Silver’s assessment. For all his liabilities, Adams is still selling out a 70,000-seat stadium in one of the smallest markets in the league. In his mind, that’s likely the purest measurement of a smart owner.
