November 9, 2008
CHAPEL HILL -- North Carolina celebrated peak football weekend with something not seen in many seasons here -- an important victory. Nineteenth-ranked Carolina defeated No. 22 Georgia Tech 28-7 on a homecoming Saturday, dressed in varsity blue and on a na...
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November 8, 2008
GREENSBORO -- Bill Hayes still likes to watch football practice. It's in his blood, going back to his days at Winston-Salem State and N.C. A&T, days when he'd walk from station to station watching the workouts, the intricate and mundane details of bui...
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November 6, 2008
CHARLOTTE -- Fresh from a week off and extra time at home, the Carolina Panthers are preparing for a long, strange road trip and hoping to avoid the big pothole that is Oakland. The franchise, not the city. Carolina will leave Friday for the long flight w...
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November 3, 2008
CHARLOTTE - Some walk in muttering. Some walk in with an assistant coach attached to their leg. Some run straight to the bathroom. Some walk straight to a trainer's table. No matter how you picture halftime of an NFL game, you're probably wrong. There rar...
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October 27, 2008
CHARLOTTE -- Jake Delhomme said he sometimes wants to know exactly what Steve Smith is thinking. And sometimes, he'd just as soon not. Sunday was one of those days. Staked to a 14-point deficit in front of a church crowd, the Panthers shook down the heav...
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October 26, 2008
GREENSBORO -- George Ragsdale walked onto the field early Saturday wearing a floppy rain hat and a rumpled look. He looked like he'd been doing it all his life, and he had in a sense. Ragsdale looked like he was part of the furniture at Aggie Stadium. The...
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October 22, 2008
WINSTON-SALEM -- Wake Forest will head back to the Sunshine State this weekend and try to avoid being sucked into the ACC's black hole. Coming off its worst game since Jim Grobe pulled the Deacons out of the dark ages, Wake must deal with Miami and hope...
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October 21, 2008
GREENSBORO -- Another season, another N.C. A&T football coaching change. For the fourth time in six years, the Aggies will bring in a coach to try to get the football program back to where it was, back to the days when A&T could count on winning g...
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October 20, 2008
CHARLOTTE -- The showdown between one of the NFL's best offenses and one of its best defenses turned out to be one of the biggest mismatches of the season when Carolina trounced New Orleans 30-7 Sunday to erase the stain of last week and move on into the...
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October 19, 2008
MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- The yard sales were doing a brisk business up U.S. 58, cars pulled over into side ditches and pickups with the tailgates down lined up along the side roads. Crude signs pointed people to still more yards further along the highway lead...
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October 17, 2008
RALEIGH -- The old man walked into the stadium at about 7:30 Thursday night and looked out across an arena far from filled. Kickoff was 10 minutes away, and he was already being interviewed. His lieutenants, veterans Mickey Andrews and Chuck Amato, were m...
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October 16, 2008
CHARLOTTE -- These are the strangest of days in the NFL. The 4-2 Panthers looked like Super Bowl contenders two weeks ago in a 34-0 win over Kansas City, and they looked like the worst team in the worst division last week in a 27-3 loss to Tampa Bay. Of c...
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October 15, 2008
WINSTON-SALEM -- No sooner had Tommy Bowden been ushered out as football coach at Clemson than the experts down that way had a list of potential successors. At the top of that list was a name that appears at the top of every college coaching list in Ameri...
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October 14, 2008
GREENSBORO -- Lee Fobbs has been around college football long enough to know how things work. And he's been around N.C. A&T long enough now to know things haven't been working here in a long time. Aggies fans have been around long enough to know losin...
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October 12, 2008
CHAPEL HILL -- Upon further review, Carolina apparently still won Saturday. With bells tolling and objects being thrown onto the field and 60,500 wild-eyed people speaking in tongues, one of the best games we'll ever see was in the hands of some unseen f...
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October 11, 2008
CONCORD -- When the cars finally stopped spinning and NASCAR got a handle on things down in Alabama, pausing only long enough to make the wrong call, it was time to return racing to the adults. The boys packed up their tools and waved goodbye to the Alaba...
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October 10, 2008
WINSTON-SALEM -- Given enough time to tinker, football coaches are capable of anything. Even old-school Jim Grobe. With almost two weeks to prepare for a Thursday night game against Clemson, with national prestige, bowl bids and a division title on the li...
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October 9, 2008
CHARLOTTE -- Maybe you had to be there, but something changed that Sunday afternoon, something you could feel, something you could see. The game turned ugly, Tampa Bay's players screaming at a Carolina Panthers rookie who was giving it back just as fast a...
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October 7, 2008
CHAPEL HILL -- Cameron Sexton knows this is a big game this week, in part because so many people are telling him it is. Shaun Draughn knows it must be bigger than normal because so much seemed to be going on around the stadium Monday morning. North Caroli...
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October 6, 2008
CHARLOTTE -- The phone rang on the sideline Sunday in the waning moments of Carolina's 34-0 drubbing of the Kansas City Chiefs. Muhsin Muhammad answered it then promptly handed the phone to Steve Smith. "Here," Muhammad said. "It's for you." Moments earli...
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October 2, 2008
CHARLOTTE — Not much happens between the first and second quarters of a NFL game. The players take a short breather, and the coaches give a short lecture and the fans in the stands don't even have time to make a beer run. A lot happens between the first...
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September 29, 2008
CHARLOTTE -- The autumn wind began to blow through the NFC South again Sunday. Carolina caught an updraft, and the Falcons flew home. Muhsin Muhammad and the stars came out for the Panthers in a game that suggested an early pecking order in the division......
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September 25, 2008
CARY -- Mike Goodes is at home on the PGA Champions Tour. That doesn't mean he's all that comfortable out here. And it certainly doesn't mean he's arrived. But the 50-year-old from Browns Summit is one of the guys on a tour that, above all else, demands y...
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September 23, 2008
GREENSBORO -- Of course, he thought they were kidding at first. Why wouldn't he? After all, how many people on earth have a fish named for them? Bodie McDowell does. And all these years later, it still makes him proud and a little amused to think about it...
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September 22, 2008
WINSTON-SALEM — A rose for Miss Mary. A matriarch of a dying business died Sunday in the city she helped build. Mary Garber, newspaper woman and social pioneer, passed away at the age of 92. She left behind nieces and nephews and a life's work, using he...
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