At first, coach Chuck Amato didn’t want to admit it. He shook his head no, and then moments later a big smile came across his face.

“He gave me a copy of it,” Amato said. “It’s in my CD [player]. I’ve heard it.”

The CD happens to be from his senior 6-foot-2, 305-pound defensive tackle, DeMarcus “Tank” Tyler.

Tyler is a rapper. And he doesn’t just do it for fun. He hopes and plans to make CDs in the near future.

Around the team

While not many players on the team know about the majority of the songs on his first CD, there is one track that has received a lot of attention — “Welcome to the Carter.”

“Welcome to the Carter — that’s the theme of the song,” Tyler said. “We are welcoming everybody, letting them know they are in Carter-Finley Stadium — we are locking the gates on them.”

Among all of his lyrics, including “Like a bunch of Mexicans, you know we running Pack tight,” and “Bottom line, all these other teams act hard, but what you gonna do when those wolves in the back yard?” Tyler refused to pick his favorite line.

“I think the song as a whole is a great song,” Tyler said. “I don’t know about the best line.”

Tyler admitted the team “needed to play it out there for the last game” against East Carolina on Nov. 25.

He said the song would get everyone pumped for the game.

“It’ll get the crowd, the team, everybody [into it],” Tyler said.

Amato mentioned Tyler had actually brought up the idea of playing it before the game as the intro song, but Amato wasn’t having it.

“Yeah, he’s proud of it,” Amato said. “He wanted to play it. I said ‘We ain’t playing that.'”

It turns out it wasn’t the first time a member of his team had made a rap song. Back in 1988, when Amato was an assistant at Florida State, his team made a song and played it all summer and before its season opener on national television against No. 1 Miami.

“The boys down there made a tape,” Amato said. “Deion Sanders led it — it was his class. The whole team did a rap song on it — ‘We do this, we do that and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.'”

He went on to explain how his Seminoles lost to the Canes 31-0.

Asked about the game more than 15 years ago, Tyler laughed and said it was a different situation.

“Yeah, that’s Deion Sanders though,” Tyler said.

Even though the track’s chances of getting played doesn’t look good for the senior’s final game against the Pirates, Tyler still hopes there will be a change of heart.

“It’s up to Chuck,” Tyler said.

How it all started

Since Tyler was 13, he has been rapping with friends — the people who he said inspired him to get into music.

He always worked on things here and there. But things really started to pick up this summer when he went home to Fayetteville.

“I’ve been wanting to do it,” Tyler said. “I just found enough time over last summer to lay it down and press it out — mix it and do everything else that needs to be done.”

Tyler wrote lyrics and one of his friends in Virginia did the beat. He said they worked different types of studio programs, and just played with songs and then really started to put stuff together.

His style?

“I got a dirty-south style,” Tyler said. “I was born in Arkansas. I got cousins in Memphis — so I got a dirty-south-southern slang.”

He keeps his CDs stashed everywhere — some where he lives, some in Fayetteville and some in the Murphy Center — not counting the one in Amato’s car.

While he said he expects to release his CD sometime around summer 2008 after he is out of college, in the meantime, he’s passing CDs out to anyone who asks.

“I’ve got a lot of music. I’ve been passing out some CDs,” Tyler said. “So if anybody wants a CD, they’ll come up to me and ask me for it. I’ll give it to them.”

While his expected release date is a ways off, he believes his draft status could help raise the notoriety of the CD.

“It’s a lot of publicity with me getting drafted,” Tyler said. “That will help up size the CD and everything.”

Redshirt junior quarterback Marcus Stone, who has listened to quite a few of Tyler’s songs, said Tyler is just “a smooth guy.”

“He can sit and rap about the season and the players — it’s funny and I like listening to him,” Stone said.

But rapping is nothing new for Tyler. It rewinds back to his middle school days where he got his roots — writing poetry. While he said his original intention with poetry was to impress the girls, it eventually started to play a role in his music.

“I write a little poetry,” Tyler said. “I used to write poetry to females all the time. That inspired me too.”

So much that he considers his music poetry.

“My music is poetry,” Tyler said.