News & Observer | newsobserver.com | 2008 NCAA Men's Bracket

ECU's season-ticket sales have surpassed 20,000 for the 2009 football season, the school announced Thursday.

Less than 2,000 season-ticket packages are available and there are no individual tickets for the Appalachian State game (Sept. 5) or Virginia Tech (Nov. 5). That means if you want to see either game, you have purchase season tickets (or the secondary market).

N.C. State AD Lee Fowler spent 40 minutes with 850 the Buzz on Thursday morning.

The Wolfpack Internet Idol covered football, basketball, nonrevenue sports, money and U2 in his long conversation with Adam Gold and Joe Ovies. The most important topic Fowler covered:

• Combo guard Lorenzo Brown still has not been cleared by the NCAA.

If Jerry Colangelo and the Boston Globe are correct, Duke will have to share Mike Krzyzewski with USA Basketball for another three years.

Is Coach K's second gig good for his day job? Coach K thinks so (26:30). Why else would he coach the national team for another three years?

Is it a bad thing? Hmmm. The numbers don't support that argument but the numbers are in a vacuum.

ECU could go 0-4 against its nonconference schedule. With App State, UNC, West Virginia and Virginia Tech there is no guaranteed win on the Pirates' schedule.

Almost every college football team plays at least one gimme (most play two). Not ECU.

N.C. State linebacker Nate Irving was released from the hospital Friday, school sports information director Annabelle Myers said in an e-mail on Monday.

Irving had been taken to the WakeMed Trauma Center in Raleigh after suffering a fractured leg and a collapsed lung in a one-car wreck before dawn on June 28.

DURHAM — Junior forward Kyle Singler floated a possibility that seems to make sense for Duke’s unusually configured 2009-10 basketball team.

"What we’ve been talking about... is we might be playing a little more zone this year than in years past,” Singler said during an exclusive interview Thursday. “That might not be the way Coach [Mike Krzyzewski] wants to do it, but with the personnel that we have, we are a big team.”

Four players who were expected to be on N.C. State’s 2009 football roster will not be with the team, the school announced Thursday.

Coach Tom O’Brien announced that sophomore cornerback Dominique Ellis is transferring. Three players who signed with N.C. State in February – Tyson Chandler, Raynard Randolph and Bryan Underwood – will not enroll in the fall.

South Stanly defensive end Justin Taylor has committed to Virginia Tech, picking the Hokies over fellow finalist N.C. State.

"He's only played one year of football," said South Stanly coach Luke Little Wednesday. "He's real raw. But everyone who looked at him was just so impressed by the way he hustles, and he's real athletic."

Once people got a look at the 6-foot-3, 220-pound Taylor during spring evaluations in May, the offers started coming in. He went from none to eight in less than a month.

All those packed houses at Carter-Finley Stadium and the RBC Center apparently haven’t gone unnoticed.

Men’s Health Magazine ranked Raleigh as the No. 18 sports-obsessed city in the United States. The ranking of 100 major U.S. cities appears in the July/August issue of the magazine.

Update: The deal is worth nearly $38 million.

North Carolina has signed a 10-year deal with Nike to be the exclusive supplier of athletic footwear, apparel and accessory products to the Tar Heels, the school announced.

This marks UNC's fourth contract with Nike, and it is retroactive to July 1, 2008.