NCAA announcers have Utah ties

When the championship game of the NCAA men's basketball tournament tips off, both CBS announcers will have local ties.

Jim Nantz, who'll be handling the play-by-play, was, of course, a KSL-Channel 5 sportscaster before he joined CBS in 1985. He's been the network's lead college basketball guy since 1990 and remains one of the best sportscasters in the business.

And this year he'll be teamed with Clark Kellogg, whose younger brother, Eric, played basketball at BYU in 1985.

OK, I know that's a ridiculously tenuous tie to Utah. But the point of interest here is that Kellogg will be sitting next to Nantz, and Billy Packer won't.

Packer was both extremely popular and extremely unpopular. It wasn't so much his performance during games that made him enemies, it was his other comments.

Some of that was simply because fans are fans. And they didn't like Packer expressing his opinions. Like when he criticized teams, conferences, the NCAA Selection Committee and so on.

Some of it was rather ridiculous, like an out-of-left field charge of racism.

And part of it was because Packer could, at times, come off as an obnoxious know-it-all.

But he'll be missed. And Kellogg has big shoes to fill.

AT THE RISK of being redundant, how about another round of applause for KJZZ-Channel 14's coverage of the high school boys basketball championship?

It's worth mentioning simply because the games were on the air. And, more than that, they were nicely produced, directed and announced.

Of course, it didn't hurt that both the 4A and 5A title games didn't go according to script. Even if you didn't have a rooting interest in either game, it was exciting to see both West and West Jordan pull off big upsets.

A FEW WEEKS AGO, Blaine Fowler was doing the color commentary on a telecast of a Wyoming basketball game on The mtn. And the former BYU backup quarterback told viewers that, being a native New Yorker, he knew something about the mean streets where Queens native Afam Muojeke played basketball before joining the Cowboys.

I laughed.

Fowler is from the, ahem, mean streets of Elmira. And Elmira, in addition to being pretty much a small town, is about 250 miles away from Queens.

So that's roughly the equivalent of somebody from Rexburg, Idaho, claiming they're from Salt Lake City.

Yours truly is also a native New Yorker, from another small town about 50 miles closer to New York City. I'm probably one of the few people in Utah who saw Fowler quarterback his high school football team, when his Elmira Free Academy squad lost at Union-Endicott.

And there aren't any mean streets there, either.

E-mail: pierce@desnews.com