Lucille Webb was in the stands at the end of the football game between N.C. Central University and N.C. A&T University when a fight broke out on the field.

"You watch," said a companion. "This is what's going to be in the paper, not the game."

True enough. The headline in the sports section last Sunday was "Postgame brawl mars rivalry's return." And the lead story on Page One on Monday was "Brawl leads N.C. A&T to call off 2008 match," accompanied by a large photo of a police officer trying to subdue fist-throwing players with pepper spray.

Unfair, cried fans of the two schools. Yes, the postgame fracas in Greensboro was an unfortunate case of really bad sportsmanship. But focusing on the fight, they said, threw an unduly harsh light on an otherwise exciting football spectacle between the two longtime rivals.

"If this involved Duke, N.C. State or UNC-Chapel Hill, I'm sure it would not have made the front page," wrote Jackie Cates of Raleigh. "This is just another example, along with the 'Jena 6,' of minorities being discriminated against in the media. It seems as if the worst is caught/portrayed while good goes unnoticed."

Webb, an A&T alumna who attended with her husband, Wake County Commissioner Harold Webb, also questioned the story play, though she deplored the behavior. "I just think if you had it on the front page of the sports section, that would have been fine," she said. "I don't know why it was worthy of a front-page headline."

Because, said Managing Editor John Drescher, it was news. "One of the definitions of news is how rare something is, and this was a highly unusual event," he said. "Anyone who says this isn't news is hiding their head in the sand."

Drescher guessed he'd been to 150 college football games, and he'd never seen anything like the AT&T-Central outbreak, involving coaches and most of the players from both teams. (He didn't attend the game, but based his judgment on the pictures and reporting.)

Also making it front page-worthy, he said, was the importance of college sports in this area and the fact that the AT&T athletics director said, in Monday's story, that next year's game would be canceled. (Next day, she backed away from that threat.)

Another factor, Drescher said, was that the story in Sunday's paper had been underplayed. It appeared on Page 15 of the sports section.

One of the complaints from callers was that The N&O doesn't give adequate coverage to Central and other historically black colleges in the Triangle, then blows up the bad news. It's true that The N&O does not give as much sports coverage to Central and Shaw and St. Augustine's colleges as it does to UNC-Chapel Hill, N.C. State and Duke. Drescher said their fan bases aren't as large as those of the ACC schools, but he understands the gripe.

"It is a fair question to ask whether we should cover them more. But I'm not going to ignore an important story because of concerns about how we cover a certain school prior to that," he said. He later sent me a list of a half-dozen recent stories about Central, mostly positive.

He added: "Our job is to be accurate and fair. I think we were. When there's bad news, some people want to blame the messenger. That's misguided. People who are upset about how events played out Saturday night should direct their anger to the athletics directors at both schools, who are responsible for the players and coaches at their universities."

Bruce Lightner, a prominent black leader in Raleigh, agreed with the front-page treatment; he said the players' behavior was unacceptable: "I think it was a story and should have been right there where it was." He said the coverage was not an issue in the black community.

Whether it was or not, I disagree with the coverage. I didn't see much in Monday's story that was not in Sunday's, except more detail and the photograph. Both focused on the fact that there was a brawl that had to be broken up by police and that the A&T athletics director talked about scrapping next year's game. That The N&O made a mistake by underplaying it the first day does not justify overplaying it the second.

The trooper sex headline

Speaking of front-page headlines, many of you were dismayed by this banner headline on the front page of Saturday, Sept. 22: "Trooper had sex in patrol car." The headline was sensationalistic, tabloidish, inappropriate for a family newspaper, you said.

I agree. The story -- about a court ruling on a highway patrolman fired for the reason stated in the headline -- was important and did merit front-page treatment. Especially in the context of seemingly endless reports of questionable morality and mishaps among our highways' finest.

But the headline was unduly salacious; not only that, it missed the news. The story was about a judge's ruling that the Highway Patrol wrongly fired the trooper over the incident, which had occurred four years ago. "Court upholds trooper in sex-case firing," maybe.

Drescher, the managing editor, wrote an interesting blog item last week explaining the editors' reasoning. You can read it at http://blogs.newsobserver.com/ editor/index.php.

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