Some of the fan reaction to The News & Observer\u2019s Wednesday story linking associate coach John Blake to agent Gary Wichard misses a key point. Many fans, in response, have pointed out that Wichard represents only one UNC player, Kentwan Balmer, who came up in the Butch Davis regime.<\/p>\n
That criticism overlooks the fact that Davis came into a program bereft of talent. Balmer was San Francisco\u2019s first-round pick in 2008 \u2013 UNC\u2019s first first-rounder since Julius Peppers and Ryan Sims in 2002. Hakeem Nicks was a first-round pick in 2009 and Richard Quinn went in the second round. In 2010, Carolina didn\u2019t have a player select in the top three rounds.<\/p>\n
The 2011 NFL Draft will be different, with multiple UNC players considered first-round picks. It makes sense that agent would want to position himself to represent those Carolina players – and the NFL prospects to follow. The N&O\u2019s story showed a pattern of communication between Blake and Wichard that follows their professional association, and the trip Marvin Austin took last summer to work out with Balmer, a trip that is likely an NCAA violation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some of the fan reaction to The News & Observer\u2019s Wednesday story linking associate coach John Blake to agent Gary Wichard misses a key point….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}