How have the Titans been able to keep selling out games despite becoming decreasingly relevant in recent years? As NewsChannel 5 in Nashville reported last month, the Titans cut a deal with a ticket broker for free and discounted tickets in order to clear out the inventory.
But there’s a catch. A $3 per ticket catch. As explained by the Tennessean, the Titans are supposed to collect a user fee for each ticket sold, and then to surrender that money to the Metro Sports Authority.
They didn’t. But Titans interim CEO/president Steve Underwood said the tax bill will be paid within a month, and that the team is “desperately sorry” for the mistake. He also bristled at the notion that the team tried to avoid the tax obligation.
“The idea that we would deliberately withhold and intentionally try to minimize the ticket tax, avoid payment of the ticket tax -- that’s repugnant to us,” Underwood said. “Even the suggestion of that is repugnant to us. It’s more than silly and completely false.
“If you hear that we deliberately do not pay taxes, it is a lie. That is not the truth and it has never been the truth. That has never been the Titan way.”
It’s easy to say that now, but under the “Titan way” this shouldn’t have happened in the first place. Underwood blames the situation on ticket office employees who have since been fired, which means that those Titans employees clearly weren’t doing things the “Titan way.”
Underwood and the Titans are lucky they caught the problem, which possibly dates back to 2012, on their own. If it hadn’t been detected internally, it may have been detected externally. And the “Titan way” may have ended up going the way of Pilot Flying J.