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It's the certainty that bugs some people. The traffic on his petition site really picked up after the Henderson-Hansbrough incident, Maready says. In his Page 2 column on ESPN.com, Bill Simmons wrote: "In Packer's world, he's always right, and everyone else is always wrong. Unless they agree with him."

Those who know him would argue that such critics are confusing certainty with self-righteousness.

"Billy once said to me, 'I'm often wrong, but I'm never in doubt,' " Dick Packer says.

Unafraid to critique her husband's commentary, Barbara Packer says she has told him when he appears to be angry on camera or "a bit too serious."

How does he take it?

"He kind of laughs," she says. "You have to understand Billy. ... It takes an awful lot to anger him. He is very easygoing. He's very loose. He's actually the antithesis of what appears on the TV screen."

That outsiders don't "get" him doesn't keep Packer up at night. (Actually, he sleeps great, he says.)

"Very few people know anything about me, period, other than their own perceptions," he says, "which I kind of like that, too."

Origins of an analyst

He is, first of all, the son of a coach.

Little secret: The Princeton offense for which Pete Carril became known? Tony Packer was running a version of it as Lehigh's head coach in the 1950s and '60s, although his exacting son acknowledges "there'd be no historical way to say that." Carril succeeded Tony Packer for a year before moving to Princeton.

A few years ago, after Sports Illustrated published an article describing Carril as essentially the guru of the motion offense, Dick Packer says he ran into Carril and asked him good-naturedly: "If you're the genius, what does that make my father?"

Putting a finger to his lips, Packer recalls, Carril replied: "Sssssshhhhh."

Tony Packer also coached baseball at Lehigh and, as an assistant, helped the football team go unbeaten in 1950.

Billy was born Anthony Paczkowski 10 years earlier in Wellsville, N.Y. -- he says his father changed the family's Polish name so he wouldn't risk losing job opportunities, and "William" was added at the same time.

When he was 5, Billy was already a gym rat, and at Lehigh, he'd go straight from school to his dad's practices. When they were alone together, their conversations began to mold in the young Packer a way of seeing the game that influences his commentary to this day. They would diagram offenses and defenses in the living room and talk more about thinking through the game than about specific skills.

"When my brother comes on the screen," Dick Packer says, "I see my father."

Assistant on the floor

By the time Billy got to Wake Forest, after a recruiting brush with Duke, he wasn't shy about basketball or business, making money on the side and making himself an extra assistant coach.

"Something went wrong and he didn't like it, he would tell us, and he didn't mind going back at the coach even," says Al Koehler, a former teammate and now director of investigations for the N.C. Department of Insurance.

Packer, who developed an unusual bond with legendary Horace "Bones" McKinney, felt comfortable enough to occasionally challenge the man he considered a mentor. McKinney possessed enough self-assurance to listen.

A Baptist preacher who was considered one of the sharpest coaches in the country, the late McKinney would get so excited on the bench that he once tried a seat belt. (Didn't work.) He might yell out three or four different plays at once, Koehler says, so Packer, an All-ACC guard, would avoid his coach by bringing the ball upcourt "on the opposite side from Bones."

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