Before the season, the television network's brass informed Billy Packer that it wanted to give Clark Kellogg a shot at the lead analyst's role on live games. The outspoken Packer, 68, who had been working under a series of one-year contracts with CBS "on my own accord," asked only that nothing be said about his departure until after the season so the news wouldn't detract from the games.

CBS waited until Monday to announce that Packer's contract would not be renewed for a 28th season and that Kellogg would replace him. Packer quickly made it clear that he wasn't just done at CBS.

"I'm not going to broadcast any more basketball games," Packer said in a telephone interview Monday, meaning that he also won't return as an analyst on Raycom's ACC telecasts or consider offers from other networks.

Thus ends a remarkable run on national TV, including 34 straight NCAA Final Fours, a championship record that longtime partner Jim Nantz says will never be broken. Over more than three decades with NBC and CBS, Packer gained a reputation for taking strong stands and refusing to budge from them, generating both intense admiration and dislike.

"I tell you, I'll miss the old crank," said Will Blythe, author of "To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever," a book on the UNC-Duke basketball rivalry.

"I never thought I'd say that," added Blythe, 51, who said Packer has grown on him in recent years. "Next to Dick Vitale's irrational exuberance, Billy Packer seemed like at least someone who hadn't lost his mind altogether. I got so I could depend on his acrid evaluations of coaches and players."

But CBS' regular-season and NCAA Tournament ratings declined in 2006 and '07. The 2006-07 regular-season average was the network's lowest ever, and the 2007 tournament average was its second lowest. (The ratings for last season were not available from CBS.) CBS Sports President Sean McManus has insisted that such factors as lopsided games were to blame.

In a prepared statement released Monday, McManus said only that Kellogg deserved the new assignment. McManus offered no further explanation for Packer's departure.

"With his unquestioned popularity and performance over the years, Clark Kellogg earned all rights to this top spot," McManus said in the prepared statement. "Like Billy Packer, Al McGuire or any of the most highly regarded broadcasters, Clark is an original voice with his own style and perspective."

Packer disputed a USA Today report that he had been fired.

"No, that's not true," he said. "I worked through and completed my contract. I mean, you'd have to ask CBS that, but I completed my obligations to CBS, which was to work through this year's championship."

On whether he had any problems with his compensation or how CBS was covering college basketball, Packer said: "No, that's neither here nor there. I don't have any comment on that."

CBS has not named an in-studio replacement for Kellogg, but it is expected to be former ESPN analyst Greg Anthony.

For his part, Packer said simply that the time was right for him and CBS to part company. In typical fashion, he refused even to consider his departure a career transition, seeing as how he has never considered himself a professional broadcaster.

Packer, who lives in Charlotte with his wife, Barbara, saw his TV role as something of a secondary job to a wide range of business interests, which include a golf course and residential development in Roaring Gap.

"It's not a transition; not to me it isn't," Packer said. "If I stop building houses, if I stop looking at pieces of real estate to buy or to develop, that would be a transition."

He said he has already turned his attention to a business project involving basketball that would have conflicted with his role as a broadcaster.

"It's something I've been working on for about a year," he said, declining to offer details.

Mark Packer, who hosts a daily sports radio show in Charlotte as "The Packman," said he's only surprised that his father didn't step away from the microphone three years ago.

"He's kind of made up his mind that he's had enough," Mark Packer said, noting as well that his father didn't like the direction in which the college game had gone.

Billy Packer, who starred as a player and later served as an assistant coach at Wake Forest, said Monday that college basketball can be good, but not great, in a system that allows players to turn pro early.

His biggest regret, he said, is that he couldn't do more to bring "some semblance of order" to the relationship between the college game and the NBA.