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*****