Brian Out Loud Archive

It’s been a little over 20 years, but I still remember the buzz inside the press box at Carter-Finley Stadium in Raleigh the night North Carolina State played Georgia Tech.

All the excitement on a warm night in mid-September centered around some freshman quarterback named Phillip Rivers.

I swear the Jacksonville Jaguars have raised Vince Lombardi from the dead and hired him as their next head football coach.

Never mind. It’s just Urban Meyer.

Reclassification is expected to take place for high school sports at some point in February.

I hope the Florida High School Athletic Association makes good decisions when it comes to the reclassifying process.

Opting out has become a hot topic in a crazy college football season that has been played amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

So hot, in fact, that it has fueled comments on social media that cannot be printed in a newspaper.

It began with losing Kobe Bryant. And that one stung. Losing all-time greats at a young age is never an easy pill to swallow.

That should have been enough for 2020. But it wasn’t. The year got reckless and just kept delivering punch after punch.

Michael Carter and Tommy Leggett are entering the 2021 NFL Draft. That surprises no one.

Both are talented football players good enough to excel at the next level. It was obvious they were destined to be special when they were standout athletes at Navarre High School.

Enough notebooks to start one heck of a campfire with have laid inside a compartment in my desk for several years now.

Each one contains notes of games gone by, countless interviews with athletes and coaches and details on big moments that will forever go down of some of the best in this area’s sports history.

If we were looking for a sign that the sports train has gone off the tracks during the COVID-19 pandemic, the wait is over.

Florida State didn’t play a football game for a third consecutive week last week because of COVID issues.

It’s not as if I haven’t seen playoff losses before in football.

Navarre has been through its share of them in the five years I’ve covered the team.

Every memory is still vivid.

Maybe I missed the memo. Maybe I was left off the press release list that was sent out by the Florida High School Athletic Association.

Or maybe I just need to clean out my email because an important one from the FHSAA is buried under the rubble of other emails that include requests for your checking account number so that you can have $100,000 deposited into your bank today.