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"It's funny," Maready says. "Tar Heel fans will claim that he's exclusively a Duke fan ... and then Duke fans will swear that he hates them. You know, everyone thinks that he hates them. And I think he just hates everyone, basically."

Funny, but in separate interviews, Packer and Nantz offer similar descriptions to explain fans' resentment. "Everybody thinks he's everybody else's guy, which means he's doing it right," Nantz says.

"What I've always loved is the competition of being able to go out there and say what I see and to be objective, but that in turn obviously annoys people, because 50 percent of them, that objectivity is not gonna be what they want to hear," Packer says.

Fans carry no weight

The barbs from fans and media critics might concern Packer if they mattered much to him.

Uh, no.

He doesn't dismiss fans entirely. He says he understands that he's working for them, too. The very passion that prompts some local fans to jeer him keeps him hungry to continue analyzing ACC games on Raycom, the regional network.

When it's time to judge what he's said on the air, however, this ultimate insider -- a coach's son who played and coached himself -- turns primarily to three sources: fellow broadcasters and TV producers, coaches past and present and, of course, himself.

"I would never not give a fan the right to have an opinion or even to want to talk about it, but I would give no weight to some guy that's runnin' his mouth about what I do," he says. "That's a waste of my time. I don't spend any time with that nor ever worry about it."

Coaches like Syracuse's Jim Boeheim appreciate Packer's basketball background and ability to analyze a game "without trying to barbecue coaches and players." Far from grilling coaches, Packer has been accused of identifying too closely with them on the air -- a criticism he refutes while then making the case that, as athletes come and go in today's college game, "the coach is the most important player in the game."

Off the air, he's done charity work with Boeheim and, though he doesn't like to go into detail about his deals off the court, acknowledges he has had financial relationships with other coaches. For example, he hired Memphis' John Calipari to coach a team of college seniors on a European tour Packer arranged.

He has also put together projects sponsored by Nike but insists he's never been paid by that or any other shoe company.

Again, those are different compartments. Packer The Dealmaker and Packer The TV Analyst are kept strictly separate, so in his mind, he's got nothing to hide.

"I'm a walking conflict of interest," Packer says. "... Now if somebody could show me where that conflict turned out to have a negative impact on the game, then I would be first of all embarrassed by it and certainly make sure it didn't happen again."

He keeps his own scorecard based on avoiding factual errors, remaining objective and, most important, staying ahead of the game, spotting developments even before the coaches do. He so detests being slow on a call that he tries to "referee the game in my own mind as if I had a whistle, and so I don't need to see the replay," he says. "I'm gonna say what I see."

That approach has opened him to second-guessing, particularly following two claims he made last year: that Duke's Gerald Henderson didn't intentionally bloody the face of North Carolina's Tyler Hansbrough in a regular-season game, and that Georgetown's Jeff Green didn't walk with the ball just before hitting the winning shot in an NCAA game against Vanderbilt. Even CBS' studio analysts, Clark Kellogg and Seth Davis, said replays showed Green had traveled.

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