Billy Packer: Last of the Know-It-Alls

On Packer and free speech

Not many tears were shed when Billy Packer was unceremoniously ushered out of his job as CBS’ lead college basketball analyst in 2008. This was a little strange: Packer had called every Final Four on TV since 1975 — before the term “Final Four” was even in widespread usage. By all rights, he was a fixture of the sport. And yet the sense at the time was that he had overstayed his welcome. Fans were ready to move on from him.

It seemed like every year in the mid-aughts, there was some silly controversy about something Packer had said. In 2008, he got flak for announcing “This game is over” with nearly eight minutes to go in the first half of the Kansas-UNC semifinal.* In 2007, people didn’t like that he criticized the refs for calling a flagrant foul on Gerald Henderson, even though Tyler Hansbrough ended up with a bloody nose on the play.** In 2006, people got angry when he complained about the inclusion of so many mid-major teams in that year’s tournament. This was something of a bugaboo for Packer, who was ALSO criticized in 2004 for saying Saint Joseph’s, who were undefeated in the regular season, didn’t deserve a 1-seed because they played in a weak conference.

*To be fair, Kansas was up by 26, and they DID win by 18 — but UNC narrowed the gap to as low as four late in the second. Does this prove Packer was right, since Kansas never gave up the lead? Or wrong, since the game did eventually tighten? You decide!  

**As a Duke fan, did I like that both these controversies came at North Carolina’s expense? No comment…

Mostly, Packer just always seemed to be complaining about something. The refs shouldn’t have done this, the committee shouldn’t have done that, this player just screwed up… Even though he had dedicated his life to covering college basketball, he never seemed to be having fun when he called these games. It was like watching the games with an ornery uncle who didn’t have anywhere else to go.

The obvious contrast to Packer, at that time, was Gus Johnson, who had started to call early rounds of the NCAA Tournament in 1996, and was famous for how worked up he would get about the games. If Packer was always so mad, Johnson was always so excited:

In the mid-aughts, Johnson’s excitement was infectious and fresh, whereas Packer felt like a relic of an older time.

When it was announced last month that Packer had passed away, at the age of 82, I thought about how much sports announcing has changed since Packer left the booth. In many ways, it has gotten much better. It’s no longer as acceptable for an analyst to rely on hoary old clichés, the way so many did in the ‘90s and ‘00s. There’s also so much data readily available to broadcasters that, aside from ones who stubbornly refuse to make use of the data, they can’t help but be more informed than they used to be. And there’s so much turnover that bad ones seldom stay in their jobs for very long.

But it’s also very difficult to imagine someone as opinionated as Packer existing in the modern media landscape, and that’s kind of sad. 

Or maybe “opinionated” is the wrong word. After all, Jeff Van Gundy is opinionated. If you watch an NBA game, Van Gundy will give you his opinions on everything from LeBron James’ hair to Taylor Swift’s music. But Packer was opinionated about basketball exclusively, and his opinions were formed by expertise. He wasn’t trying to be your friend (it was kind of hard to imagine Packer having friends at all), and he never felt the need to pretend your opinions were as valid as his. Unlike most announcers, he wasn’t a former coach or player, and so he rarely tried to protect anyone’s feelings — even those of college kids. At the time, Packer’s negativity could be a real drag. But now I watch games on TV and I yearn for negativity, if only because it’s so damn rare. 

I watched a lot of NFL football this past season, which meant listening to a lot of Tony Romo. And Tony Romo LOVES football, in the same way Gus Johnson loves basketball. Romo’s not shy about loving football. In fact, he’s so vocal about loving football that you kind of think he’s putting you on. Nobody can be having this much fun in a 13-3 game, after all. It’s not that I think Romo is insincere, but that I think the job of a broadcast booth now is to sell the game to the audience. And Billy Packer never felt the need to sell you on anything. He figured you should be grateful just to hear him talk…

Does this make him some kind of leftist hero, or a martyr to free speech? Of course not. I’m certainly not saying that Packer was some kind of early victim of “cancel culture” (Packer did say kind of racist and definitely sexist things, but that wasn’t really why CBS ditched him); but I think there is a lesson here in how speech actually gets constricted.

Because even though CBS was right to move on from Packer, it’s telling that in the years after they did, they had trouble finding an adequate replacement. For a few years, they tried Clark Kellogg, who was exceptionally boring until they paired him with Steve Kerr – who quickly left to coach the Warriors. For the last seven Final Fours, the booth has been Jim Nantz, Grant Hill, and Bill Raftery, who are perfectly fine (mainly because of Raftery).

There are no shortage of great college basketball announcers, but CBS has kept the primary team as staid and inoffensive as possible. Not because there was any kind of explicit mandate for announcers to avoid Packer-syle negativity; they just don’t like announcers bringing up anything that might leave a negative taste in a viewer’s mouth. So it’s a world full of Romos and Johnsons and Hills, a world where people like Tony Dungy issue bland, obviously insincere apologies anytime they accidentally reveal an actual personality. When a few hegemonic corporations have such control over speech, you don’t NEED to actually censor people, or silence your announcers, or order people to turn Damar Hamlin’s near-death experience into a feel-good story. You just set up a filtering mechanism that weeds out Billy Packer-style negativity, and the only ones left are too busy having fun to even think of bringing up such things. 

As Noam Chomsky told a journalist nearly 30 years ago (not originally in reference to college basketball announcing), “I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. What I’m saying is if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”