Brownlow's Twitter Mailbag: Cam's comments, beer-spilling etiquette and UNC-Duke

By Lauren Brownlow, WRALSportsFan columnist/reporter

It's the off-season, folks, and so it's time for my offseason Twitter Mailbag! It was technically the off-season last week, but I was in a car for more than 15 hours all day Tuesday so forgive me if I wasn't able to muster the energy for one of these last week. But I did, and here it is in all of its glory! You all really brought it with the questions. So speaking of said car ride, I'll get into my trip to New Orleans for the Final Four, which new Duke coach might find himself on the hot seat first, beer-spilling etiquette, Cam Newton's sexist comments and more!

Let's get to the questions, shall we?

It's hard because I barely know where to begin. It was amazing, a whirlwind, overwhelming, adrenaline-pumping, all of those things. This was the third Final Four I have covered in some capacity and the second I was on press row for (I sat in the stands in Detroit in 2009). I road-tripped to every Duke NCAA Tournament venue except two in 2013 and 2015, and Shawn Krest and I drove to Indianapolis together both times. So we hopped in a car together and planned to stop as far into Alabama as we could get, but only after we stopped at Auburn since I wanted to see Toomer's Corners and all of that. We did that, and it was a great stop. It was wild how they were so welcoming but also treated us as if they had never met a person from North Carolina before, but great college town. Anyway, we stopped like two hours outside of New Orleans but left time for two road trip stops: a Tato-Nut (potato doughnut) in Ocean Springs, Mississippi (minimum 30 minutes from the ocean, by the way) and the world's largest chair like two miles off of the Mississippi interstate in the middle of nowhere which, unrelated, not worth the trip! But we got there Friday afternoon, jumped right into coverage (literally) and basically, I spent the next four days either covering basketball or walking around New Orleans. I barely stopped to eat or drink or sleep. I could walk around that city for hours and not get tired of it. I did use some help from the internet to figure out where to go, but honestly, the best parts of my wandering came when I stumbled upon cool places. There are so many weird and quirky places to drop in and either window shop or sometimes buy something. Those basketball earrings I wore for the Panic Room? Found them in a random gift shop. I also discovered that I am very into thrifting on this trip.

But honestly, the city itself is just magical. It's like the best part of 5-6 different cities. It's so alive all the time, and for a big city, it lacks a lot of the necessary artifice that most big cities have. But you can have almost any experience you want there. You want history? Plenty of it. Weird and interesting voodoo and magic and some dark things? Yep. Hippie, artsy spaces? Oh yes. Noise? There's noise to be found, and big-city smells, but nothing like what I was expecting. Bourbon Street is like a weird hybrid of Vegas and Myrtle Beach with a dash of Times Square sprinkled in, but you can escape if it if it's not for you. My biggest regret is because of schedule and the massive influx of tourists, I wasn't able to experience the food scene nearly the way that I wanted to. But I felt like I got to know the city very well. My favorite cities in the world before this included London, Venice, Amsterdam, Munich, Denver, Asheville, Phoenix, Vegas, just to name a few. There's a lot I like about each and plenty I don't. But the best parts of all of them can be found in New Orleans. It's insanely walkable, has great food, friendly people, tons of history and interesting places to explore and amazing shopping. Plus, I visited during the time when it was warm but not oppressively hot, which I'm sure helped. But I've kind of fallen in love with New Orleans and it's vaulted atop my city power rankings.

And then ... the basketball. Oh my goodness, the basketball. It's hard to imagine having lived nearly 39 years and not having experienced the Carolina-Duke rivalry as anything other than the full-on spectacle that it is that a Final Four meeting between these two could live up to the hype. But it absolutely did. It's not often you feel the importance of a moment while it's happening. After Carolina beat Duke at Duke, someone asked me if that was actually the best UNC win over Duke ever. And the only other one I could think about was 2005. It was Roy Williams' first win over Mike Krzyzewski, and it very much said after a tough stretch for UNC that the Tar Heels were very much back. Hubert Davis managed to have two such wins over Duke, the last of which sent the hated (to UNC fans) Krzyzewski home forever. How do you top that? You don't, really, and what a moment for him. And what a moment for Krzyzewski, who handled his ouster with grace in spite of everyone wanting him not to. As a person who loves both actual sports and the human drama behind them, this Final Four had everything.

And I really thought the title game would be a disappointment. I suppose losing the halftime lead made it sting a bit more than it might have for the Tar Heels, but in this area, we just do not leave many basketball seasons when neither Duke nor UNC won it all and feel like it wasn't a disappointment for either. It was incredibly gratifying for me as a writer and a person to watch both of these teams find themselves during this NCAA Tournament and do things that I know not only I didn't expect them to do, but also plenty of the rest of you, looking at your brackets. It was wonderful to watch this Duke team, which had looked so stressed all year long, finally have some special and memorable moments during Krzyzewski's final season. And I'm still dumbfounded by how quickly Carolina was able to shift its entire mental outlook.

Both teams gave absolutely everything they had inside of them in New Orleans. It was so special to get to witness in person. I will truly never forget it.

At first I thought the answer here would be obvious. But context here matters, right? Because going to ... poop for the football and basketball programs are different things. For Duke, that would require missing multiple NCAA Tournaments, right? I mean, that's the baseline at this point. So let's say for Jon Scheyer, it's, like, one NCAA Tournament in three years. That's the absolute fastest I could imagine that happening. For football, it's tough because obviously it's going to take longer to build a team in Mike Elko's image and, well, it's Duke football. We all understand the sport that matters more at Duke. But don't mistake that for football not mattering at all. It does, and Duke likely worries it was a bit too slow to act towards the end of David Cutcliffe's tenure. If the Elko era is bad, Duke isn't giving it more than three years. They can't afford to let the program continue to fall behind.

Considering how Scheyer got the job in the first place, though, I see him holding on to his job a bit longer. So while I thought I'd say basketball at first, I think I might say ... football?

I was avoiding this one but I had to take it. I owe all of the NC State fans in my life that much. And ... I wish I had more good news to share. Look, I've been on Kevin Keatts' side. And I still am on his SIDE. I don't know that a lot of what has gone wrong was in his control and if it was, how much of it. A lot of it seems to me to just be bad luck. Ill-timed injuries, transfers not working out, incoming freshmen leaving early — you name it, it's happened in the last few years. And yet it's weird, right? A team with NC State's record should not be thought of as a team that had good moments last year, and yet IT DID! But we're all adults here. We all understand that as hard as NC State scrapped and clawed and fought, 11 wins is what it is. You are what your record says you are.

I guess I'd give you the same reason for optimism as pessimism — think about how you felt about this program in December 2020. That wasn't even two full years ago! Not even 18 months! We didn't have to reach for reasons to be optimistic. But it also seems clear just how far things have fallen off since then too, so I get that it cuts both ways.

Another reason? Keatts is clearly willing to do whatever he can to get things turned around, and he's not an overly stubborn man. He wants to win. And we all know in college basketball, you're a mere spin of the ole transfer portal wheel away from success. So until we know who NC State can bring in next year, there's no reason for pessimism at this point. That should be more than enough to get you back off that ledge, my friend. Cut ties from all the lies that you've been living in. (Sorry. If you would not want to see me again, I would understand.)

Official protocol, in this instance, I'm assuming means the thing as a society we've all agreed is the right thing to do, yes? I'm just clarifying because obviously no one is getting arrested for spilling your beer without apology, and that seems to be more than enough for some people nowadays to act like jerks.

Something kind of like this happened to me on Tuesday afternoon at the Durham Bulls' home opener, but the guy in question was far less at fault. He asked me to take a picture of his group, so I sat my beer down behind me and took a few. Like the clumsy oaf that I am, I turned around to get my beer and kicked it right over. The very nice man noticed and insisted that he buy me another one since I would not have spilled it without him asking for a picture. My self-sabotage instinct kicked in and rather than gratefully accept a free beer, I told the truth and said I would have been just as likely to spill it another way. He laughed and said no worries, he's got it. I was struck by how nice that was because I was under no expectation that I was owed another beer at all.

I do think there's a bit of a caveat emptor when it comes to ballpark beer-drinking. I have had some incredibly precarious journeys from the concession stand to my seat at sporting events with just one beer and if multiple beers are involved, odds are that I'll be wearing Eau De IPA the rest of the game. And that's if I'm walking somewhere WITHOUT navigating other people. I've been known to spill a quarter of a beer walking to my seat at a bar, much less navigating stadium steps and other people and the like. I guess what I'm saying is that there's an expectation that people are going to knock into you and things are going to be spilled.

My personal feeling on it is this: if someone is pushed into me or accidentally spills my beer during the course of a normal activity, I would not expect a replacement beer personally. But if someone is waving their arms around acting like a jerk or just blatantly not paying attention to their surroundings, I'll be annoyed if they don't at least offer. I realize this is an extremely subjective distinction, but I'm a clumsy person and I sympathize when someone does something by accident. I sympathize less with boisterous and rude people who don't take care to notice their surroundings.

On the flip side, if I bump into you and spill your beer, I'm at least offering to get you another. Probably after I awkwardly shove paper towels at you as you glare at me. Not that I'm recalling a specific instance where this has happened to me. Nope.

SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

It's really hard to hear any man, much less one like Cam Newton, reduce you to one dimension. That's what Newton's comments felt like, honestly. It is so stifling to feel as if your entire life and identity exist only through the male gaze, so to speak. Some of us women just want to live our lives without being burdened by expectations of the roles we are supposed to fill. Because we already put enough on ourselves as women, you know? We're already meant to be mothers and homemakers and wives and great friends and great career women (in some cases) and just have absolutely everything together at all times, for ourselves and everyone else around us. Sometimes it's OK to admit that we need help. Sometimes a boss b****, as Newton so eloquently referred to one type of woman, has prioritized her career over learning to cook and isn't deficient as a person because she didn't learn to cook. As Chris pointed out, does Newton himself cook? I'm actually willing to bet that he does, weirdly, but it's not because he has to or is expected to.

Being a woman who loves sports never ceases to be maddening. Every day there is either a new wound or an acute reminder of an old one. Or both. Every day we are reminded that sports are not supposed to be for us. If you looked for those reminders, you'd see them everywhere. If you don't look for them, you'll still see them. Dan Snyder. Deshaun Watson. But that's not even what I mean. If you were to sit down a significant portion of athletes and coaches, you'd likely get a set of views on women that skew closer to what Newton said than not. That's just the reality. Women like me watch and enjoy sports in spite of deep down simultaneously fearing and knowing that this is true. We separate the two things as best we can. And it is hard sometimes. It's harder when you interact with these guys on a professional basis and you wonder before you get to know them how many of them don't view you the same way as your colleagues simply because you're a woman. It's the very reason I spent years of my career hiding myself in press rooms in baggy clothing and staying quiet. Which is, I guess, what people like Newton would prefer.

So what Newton said is like a breaking of an unspoken covenant, one that I know I at least feel. It's like this: Hey, if your teammate gets in trouble for beating his wife? You might think what he did was too far but women need to know their place, but you don't have to say that to the press, right? Team exec in trouble for harassment? All I ask is that you can maybe not go to the media and say women should dress more conservatively in the workplace.

I know a lot of people not just in sports but in life have these views. We can still interact peacefully on a day to day basis, blissfully ignorant of one another. But my bar for enjoying sports and even individual athletes is simply that they allow me to do so by not giving me a reason not to. I will admit that I have liked Cam Newton as a player and often as a person in spite of myself for years and years and years, and that's in spite of him doing something that I don't like to a person that I care about. All I could do after that is exactly what she did — accept his apology and hope it was sincere and that he'd learned from it. Even though I knew he probably didn't. And, yeah. Clearly, he didn't. All he had to do was abide by the covenant. We know they probably think it. They know we won't want to hear it. So could they just, like ... not? COULD YOU NOT? ALL OF YOU. STOP IT. I AM LITERALLY JUST ASKING FOR ONE DAY FOR THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE TO NOT HAVE A STORY OR NEWS ITEM RELATED TO HOW MUCH IT DOES NOT CARE ABOUT WOMEN. PLEASE. I AM BEGGING ALL OF YOU FROM MY SOUL.

Speaking of the Panthers!

Short answer: no. End of Mailbag.

I'm kidding! Well, mostly, because I know none of the things that could excite me will actually happen.

It would require David Tepper having an epiphany that he's been acting in ways that the fanbase isn't wild about and vowing to change his ways, hand decision-making power off to the people he pays to do just that and apologize for trying to trade for Deshaun Watson.

Then I would at least feel like there is a plan going forward, or a semblance of one. What is the plan now? Whatever Tepper wants? That's what it feels like the plan is, and he's not talking. So while he refuses to build the facility in Rock Hill and is likely going to start getting greedy in Charlotte for a new stadium too, maybe it's time for him to start answering what exactly he's done to make the franchise and area around him better since he got here.

Why would I feel excited about a franchise that's run by a guy who treats it like a video game? I'm not excited by that, and I won't be until he finally breaks his silence and says that he's sorry and that he's had a change of heart. But he won't. So I won't.