Locker room talk

 There are cameras everywhere now. We all know this, right?

So maybe North Carolina State football coach Dave Doeren should be a bit more, um, circumspect the next time he addresses the troops after a big win. Especially when it's a win over an in-state rival you've been dominating lately.

In case you missed it, Doeren's Wolfpack knocked off North Carolina last month in the final game of the season for both schools.

Afterward, a cameraman from the ACC Network caught Doeren saying this: "It's been 1,460 days since those pieces of s*** beat us."

Needless to say, this didn't sit well with North Carolina coach Mack Brown, who was still annoyed by it at his national signing day presser yesterday.

"I thought it was classless," Brown said, among other things. "... you don't call kids a piece of s***."

He's right, of course. Doeren knows he's right, too, which is why he called Brown to apologize after the video clip got out.

However.

However, allow me to chuckle a bit at the outrage coming out of Chapel Hill and elsewhere.

See, back before there were cameras everywhere, what Doeren said, or something like it, probably got said in a whole lot of locker rooms before or after a rivalry game. Think Bo or Woody never said anything derogatory about Ohio State/Michigan? Hell, Woody wouldn't even utter the word "Michigan" in the run-up to the game -- and that was in public.

What do you suppose he was saying behind closed doors? Especially when, asked why he went for two after the last touchdown in Ohio State's 50-14 beatdown in 1968, he famously replied "Because they wouldn't let me go for three"?

Similarly, Bob Knight, also quite famously, was known to despise Illinois when Lou Henson was there, because he thought it was a dirty program. That was common knowledge. Think Knight, of all people, restrained himself in the locker room before playing the Illini, and didn't utter a few discouraging (and likely profane) words about their program?

And as for Purdue ...

Well. Publicly, Knight once dressed a live donkey in Purdue gear and brought him on his weekly coach's show. What do you suppose he said in private?

 Enmity between rivals is hardly a shameful thing except when it's carried too far, and sometimes it has been. But a coach defaming a bitter rival in the privacy of the locker room? That's dog-bites-man stuff.

Except, of course, when someone catches it on camera. And these days, that's pretty much all the time.

Word to the wise, Coach Doeren.