Rumors were swirling early in 2014 that the Tennessee Titans were for sale.
Owner Bud Adams had died less than a year earlier, and as Mike Mularkey, then the Titans' tight ends coach, walked off the field, he overheard a couple players joke that his young assistant tight ends coach, Arthur Smith, should have his father buy the team.
Mularkey, AD: scan tool. six or seven months into his job at the time, was perplexed.
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"Finally, I just said, just in passing, ‘Who's your dad?'" Mularkey recalled.
Smith, now the Titans offensive coordinator and soon to be one of the hottest head coaching candidates on the market, is the son of FedEx founder and CEO Frederick Smith.
The elder Smith is one of the 200 richest people in America, worth an estimated $3.9 billion, according to Forbes, and yet his son toiled away in anonymity as a football grunt for years.
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Mularkey said Smith never mentioned his upbringing during their first few months together in Tennessee, and never used it to try to advance his career.
"He didn't say a word," Mularkey said. "You would never know."
Others who have worked with one of the NFL's rising coaching stars say the same, that Smith is incredibly smart, very good at what does, determined to make his own name in the sport he loves and a big reason why the Titans (9-4) can clinch a playoff berth with a win over the Detroit Lions (5-8) and help from other AFC playoff contenders on Sunday.
The Titans rank second in the NFL in rushing offense, third in total offense and fourth in scoring. The Lions, who fired Matt Patricia as head coach last month, will be looking for a replacement at the end of the season and could have Smith on their short list of candidates to interview.
"Extremely proud of him," said former North Carolina coach John Bunting, who recruited Smith to North Carolina and gave him his start as a graduate assistant in 2006. "You know who his dad is, so he was born with that silver spoon, but he never, ever was anything but a hard worker, a gentleman and a tough guy. Fitting for an offensive lineman. He had a couple injuries. He played a little bit, not a lot, but when it came to him asking me to have him as a graduate assistant, I jumped at that because I knew that he would be super dedicated and committed to what we were doing."
Smith, part of Bunting's first recruiting class, had a modest and injury-riddled playing career at North Carolina and spent one year as a graduate assistant at the school before making the leap to the NFL.
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He joined Washington as a college scouting assistant and defensive quality control assistant in 2007 under Joe Gibbs - whose NASCAR team has a FedEx sponsorship - and stayed on Jim Zorn's staff the following season, before returning to college as an administrative assistant/defensive intern at Ole Miss in 2010.
In 2011, Smith jumped back to the NFL, where he made the slow climb to coordinator, surviving three coaching changes in Tennessee and doing any job thrown his way.
"You never would have known nor thought that, that was his father just because of maybe your pre-disposed to think something else about him," said ex-Titans coach Ken Whisenhunt, who retained Smith as assistant tight ends coach when he spurned the Lions to take the Tennessee job in 2014. "But not the way he worked, not how much he really wanted to get better and interacted with guys and no job was too small for him, and everything that he did was done really well. So, he's very impressive because where he was in his career at that point, he was still young and still kind of in a position where he was trying to get better and get a position for himself. He's really done a great job."
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Smith endeared himself to Mularkey with his thirst for knowledge when the two first started working together, and he took over as tight ends coach midway through the 2015 season, after Whise.
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