PACKER IS GONE FROM CBS…..
This story is bigger in our area than Brett Farve’s return to the NFL or the MLB All-Star game coming up on Tuesday. Billy Packer GONE? This is huge news for the Triad and for the state of North Carolina in general. This is basketball country first and foremost and the most famous basketball announcer to ever pass through our state is Billy Packer. WWE Raw will be in Raleigh tonight and the SMACKDOWN Brand will be in Charlotte on Tuesday with Ric Flair possibly dropping in on the show in Charlotte.
Across the board, Packer is a much bigger name than Flair or even Richard Petty. Love him or hate him, Packer along with Jim Thacker, made college basketball what it is today in N.C., and Packer took his game to the national spotlight and he was topps at that level too.
NEW YORK — Billy Packer is out after 27 years as the lead college basketball analyst for CBS, making way for Clark Kellogg.
Kellogg has done game and studio analysis for CBS for 16 years. He will partner with Jim Nantz on his first Final Four in April. Packer did 34 consecutive Final Fours.
“With his unquestioned popularity and performance over the years, Clark Kellogg earned all rights to this top spot,” Sean McManus, president of CBS News and Sports, said in a statement Monday. “Like Billy Packer, Al McGuire or any of the most highly regarded broadcasters, Clark is an original voice with his own style and perspective.”
Kellogg said he was “excited, humbled and quite pleased.”
“I appreciate the confidence Sean has expressed in affording me this new role,” he said in a statement.
ESPN NBA analyst Greg Anthony, a former star guard for UNLV, is being strongly considered as a replacement for Kellogg in the CBS studio, according to the Miami Herald, which first reported Packer’s dismissal.
Anthony was a member of UNLV’s title-winning team in 1990 under Jerry Tarkanian.
The 68-year-old Packer confirmed the move Sunday, through a CBS official, to the Herald. Packer is pursuing other basketball projects and declined further comment.
Packer, who played point guard for Wake Forest in the early 1960s, always spoke with authority. But his brusque, commanding style did not always go down well.
In 2006, he criticized the selection of four Missouri Valley Conference teams, before Bradley and Wichita State reached the round of 16. In 2004, Packer took umbrage at Saint Joseph’s getting a No. 1 seed.
In 2000, Packer bristled when asked to identify himself by two female students checking credentials before a game at Duke. One of the students, Jen Feinberg, quoted Packer as saying: “You need to get a life. Since when do we let women control who gets into a men’s basketball game? Why don’t you go find a women’s game to let people into?”
Packer later e-mailed an apology to the women.
Four years earlier, he apologized on the air after he was criticized for referring to then-Georgetown guard Allen Iverson as a “tough little monkey.”
*****from cbs.sportsline.com*****
Andy what have you been smoking? North Carolina is first and foremost Nascar country, half of the people in NC have know idea who Billy Packer is, but probably 99% of the people know who Richard Petty is. Out of all your comments that has to be one of the dumbest you have ever made. I went to Bowman Gray Stadium Saturday night for the race—15,000+ were there to see it, this is racing country.
Packer more popular than Flair & Petty in N.C.? You must be out of your mind. I mean, you’ve got “The Naitch” & “The King”. These two guys can go by their nicknames and everyone knows who they are. The only nicknames Packer have, can’t be repeated on TV and shouldn’t be put in type. Good riddance to the racist, sexist annoyance that was Billy Packer.
BP is gone but I will always remember those sweet words, “this game is over”, spoken in the first half of Kansas and unc. True unc made it a game but Good did win over evil that night.
Dean Smith is the BIGGEST name in North Carolina. Don’t even try to say is ain’t so. You are all racists!
billy packer is gone?who cares besides andy?anybody?
The BP that I will remember will be Billy Packer and not Benny Parsons.
Kyle Busch has put the Pettys in their place. We will remember Kyle Busch and not Kyle Petty and Richard is fading fast.
Billy Packer needs to go back to working Putt Putt games with Mark Clayton.
After 27 years, yall can’t well up any sympathy for the man being canned errrrr “not having his contract renewed?”
Is all of the media turning into just a commodity we are all distanced from and don’t have any identity with?
Billy Packer HAS to be known by just as many people in NC (much less around the country, where CBS is also seen BTW) as Richard Petty or Darrell Waltrip or Tony Stewart or…help me, I’m running out of NASCAR names everyone knows…
Oh man though, Putt-Putt on tv was the bomb.