Why is Lloyd Carr such a jerk?

Well, the easy answer is because he has to spend his days coaching a team that will just never be up to the same standard as THE Ohio State Buckeyes under the direction of coach/Senator Tressel. So, I guess that makes him a little testy. But really, is swearing at a reporter necessary?

Nerves are bound to be a little frayed this week. We are, after all, on the cusp of the Game of Three Centuries. Never in the history of what ESPN has declared the greatest rivalry in sports—which dates to 1897—has it been a No. 1-No. 2 matchup.

And Monday, in a closed-off room within the Wolverines’ practice facility, the pressure got to Coach Carr, who’s 6-5 in the rivalry but 1-4 since Jim Tressel arrived in Columbus.

After Carr’s weekly press conference Monday, he went off to tape a private interview with Lisa Salters, who does sideline reporting for ABC/ESPN’s college football broadcasts.

A couple other reporters lingered in a nearby lobby, hoping to get a couple more questions with Carr when he finished with Salters. What they got instead was the sound of the coach opening a can of Wolverine whoopass on the ABC folks.

Salters, a former Penn State basketball player, has no doubt heard salty language from a coach before but probably not at the conclusion of the kind of fluffy interview ABC inserts during a game when it’s second down and Brent Musburger can’t think of anything to say about the preceding play.

Jim Carty, a sportswriter for The Ann Arbor News, was one of three reporters who heard the commotion—but evidently the only one who saw fit to report on it.

“All of a sudden,” said Carty, “you sort of heard up the hallway the door opening in a louder, more commotion-y way than it normally would. You heard a loud, angry ‘Fuck!’ which was clearly Lloyd.”

“As he got closer, I heard him say, ‘What the fuck kind of questions were those?’”

Carr then stormed out the door to his SUV, Carty said. As the coach waited for the rest of his entourage to get to the car, the door opened and closed, and Carty picked up bits of Carr’s conversation with Michigan’s football spokesman.

“I heard Lloyd saying, quite irately, to Dave Ablauf, who’s the assistant director of media relations, ‘You go back in there and tell them…’ then the door closed, so we didn’t hear the rest of it,” Carty said.

It's too bad he has to take his anger over his mediocre team out on an innocent reporter. Typical, but too bad.