July 28, 2008

You know NFL training camp has officially begun when writers start breaking out their stories on long snappers. You can expect the same storyline when Carolina football training camp opens this Friday; Trevor Stuart is listed at first on the pre-camp depth chart as long snapper, but if Lowell Dyer can push him, get ready to read a shocking TarHeelBlue.com treatise on the heart-pounding snapping battle.

See, that's the kind of sarcastic stuff snappers have to read all the time. Like former Tar Heel Ethan Albright, who woke up Sunday morning to read a Washington Times feature that refers to him as an "athlete"--yes, even after a Pro Bowl appearance the 13-year veteran still has to see the word athlete in quotation marks when it refers to him. Still, there's some good stuff there, including his reaction to earning the lowest player rating in last year's Madden video game.

By the way, if you can't get enough Ethan Albright, you can look up the YouTube tribution mentioned in the story. We'd link it, but the language in the song is rough and so are some of the comments on the page. Crazy kids these days, can't control their YouTube comments.