They miss WBT up in Maryland

The other week my old college roomie called from Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where he puts crooks in jail and maintains law and order when he’s not busy rooting for the Tar Heels and trying to find some decent barbecue.
He was hot under the collar because he couldn’t find the season’s first game on the radio station where he’d been tuning in for three decades.
“What,” he demanded to know, “have they done with WBT? And what are you going to do about it?”
He was just finding out what many other UNC fans up and down the Eastern seaboard have found out this year: Charlotte radio station WBT, which carried the Tar Heel Sports Network since the crust of the earth cooled (ok, since Dean Smith wanted his games on WBT in the 1970s), no longer carried the ‘Heels.
As the Observer’s Mark Washburn reported early last summer, the Tar Heel broadcasts shifted to station WFNZ AM 610 after WBT found the UNC broadcasts too often interrupted more lucrative talk radio programming such as John Hancock in the evening and Rush Limbaugh during daytime ACC tournament games.
Tar Heels fans up and down the east coast enjoyed WBT’s evening broadcasts of basketball games in the 1970s, 80s, 90s and halfway through the first decade of the 21st century. You could be a long way from Charlotte, but after dark WBT would come through strong and clear. Still, does, in fact, but not with the Tar Heels. Evidently the WFNZ signal doesn’t reach all the way up to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, especially with a local station on a similar frequency, and thus the Tar Heel Radio Network has at least one less happy listener as the season gets seriously underway.
Times change, of course, as they always do, usually for the better. But don’t tell that to the State’s Attorney in Talbot County, Md. He might just run you in on false pretenses, or something.