Panthers Owner Jerry Richardson Sons Resign from Team

My thought is that because they are heirs to the team that for business reasons they need to be considered “owners” and not employees, if anything were to happen to Jerry Richardson. Inheritence law is ver tricky especially when the thing you may inheriet is worth a billion dollars. Rememeber when the Redskins were sold to the highest bidder because of inheritence taxes? It would not surprise me to find out that they (keep in mind there are other minority owners) are going to become the legal majority owners in the future.
As far as the moving thing… No worries there. This team is going nowhere. Bank of America just restructred their stadium debt a few years ago so for at least 26 years they are here in that present staduim unless they can write a 200 million dollar check to pay of their mortgage. Plus where would they go? Nowhere… so get that thought out of your minds.

There are a ton of issues when it comes to keeping a business in the family like this. The good news is that we’ve never heard a single thing that would lead us to believe there would ever be in-fighting among the Richardson family, and that’s good news long-term for Panther fans.

I’ll just share this one little story. My college roommate my freshman year was one of the sons of Bruton Smith (he of the NASCAR and car dealership empires). This was some seventeen-ish years ago before even Texas Motor Speedway, but even then the Smith boys had discussed among themselves what it would mean when their father passed, and what it would mean when his assets passed to them, and how their relationships might change as a result. And it’s a huge benefit if the kids get along with one another, which the Smiths all did. But they understood how it tore families apart when they fight among themselves, and had plans in place to avoid that.

The Richardsons seem to have a lot of similarities, with less money and less assets in play (because the Smiths are out-of-this-world wealthy these days), but it’s definitely a lot bigger than your average mom-n-pop shop. So my hope is that this is, as you’ve all said, part of a process to make the succession from Jerry to Mark and Jon as smooth as possible across the entire Richardson empire. And hopefully that doesn’t happen for many, many years.

No successors were named for the both of them.

i mean theres many ways we could look at this….1 mark and jon wanted a “Vick” or wutever and big cat wouldnt have it…draft pick decisions via trades…the trade today with wutever pick we used…big cats loss in faith in his 2 sons ability to run the team…or maybe to be his successor in the event something were to happen… but the panthers.com article just leads me to believe that there is some sort of problem or what have you…since there was no reason given to make sense of this