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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 as he was taking it. Steve Smith didn't like the Bucs, and the Bucs didn't like the brash rookie who'd just muffed a punt in front of the Tampa Bay bench.

It was the teams' first meeting since they had been thrust into the new NFC South Division in 2002, and to say they were born enemies would be an understatement. Tampa Bay won the game, Warren Sapp said Smith needed to grow up and everyone agreed that they didn't like anything about the other team.

And a rivalry was born.

Carolina will travel to Tampa, Fla., on Sunday for a division game against its top rival. For all the talk of Atlanta being the Panthers' I-85 nemesis and the history with the Saints that goes back to 1995 and the NFC West days, Carolina's biggest rival is the one it most resembles.

"Both team have some similarities," Bucs coach John Gruden said Wednesday. "They're very tough defensive teams. Both teams offensively are tough-minded. I think they want to run the ball for the most part. You see both teams in two-back sets banging in there and play-action passing. And there's some characters on each team also. You know, I'd like to hang around with Steve Smith and some of those guys up there."

Gruden came to Tampa the same year John Fox arrived in Charlotte. That was the year the NFL reorganized the divisions, taking Carolina out of the ill-fitting NFC West and placing the Panthers alongside their geographic neighbors. The assumption was that Atlanta, the team Carolina played in its first regular-season game in 1995, would always be the team's biggest rival. And make no mistake, the Panthers have a real rivalry with Atlanta. But it pales in comparison to the rivalry with Tampa Bay.

"Ours started out early on when the division first came into existence," Fox said. "It's continued, and I don't think it will be any different Sunday."

"You can throw the records out," quarterback Jake Delhomme said. "It's a division game first and foremost, but it's Tampa."

Some of the original combatants, some of the characters that made it such a heated rivalry, are gone. Kris Jenkins, the Panthers defensive tackle who blocked a field-goal attempt and an extra-point try in the 2003 game in Tampa, is on the New York Jets' roster. Sapp, the colorful defensive tackle who yapped with Smith and anyone else who came too near him, has retired.

Todd Sauerbrun, the punter who once got into a squabble with Tampa Bay kicker Martin Gramatica, was released by the Panthers. Gramatica was released by the Bucs. It was Sauerbrun who once stated that Gramatica and his entire family were idiots.

"His brother's an idiot, and I don't know his other brother, but he's an idiot, too," Sauerbrun said in 2004.

Gramatica responded later in the week that of all the people who know the Carolina punter, "100 percent of them hate him."

Carolina won that week, just as the Panthers have the last five games in Tampa. Delhomme is 7-1 against the Bucs and has never lost a game he started in Tampa. That hasn't set well with the Buccaneers, and it's no surprise that players down there are coming close to calling this a must win. Even their coach admits it's a different kind of game when Carolina comes to town.

"I hate to say it, but it's a big rivalry to us," Gruden said Wednesday. "Certainly we've got a lot of respect for them. Given the history of this one, this is special, and we look forward to it every year."

"It's like Nebraska-Oklahoma on the pro level," said Bucs linebacker Barrett Ruud, a former Nebraska player.

The teams have a grudging respect for one another, though individual players and even the cheerleaders themselves have been known to get involved in strange situations when the division rivals play in Tampa.

The strangest of all, aside from the famous cheerleader brawl, was when Sauerbrun walked off the field the Sunday after his comments about the Gramaticas landed in the Tampa paper. Some guy was screaming obscenities at him from the stands, ugly threats that caused even the bizarre Sauerbrun to stop and confront the man.

"Do I know you?" he asked.

It was the other Gramatica brother.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com