Michigan's Jim Harbaugh: I've got 'bigger fish to fry' than James Franklin's 'whining'
Michigan football is getting set to face one of its chief rivals, Michigan State, but in the middle of Jim Harbaugh previewing the game while addressing reporters Monday, he was asked about an altercation from the team's previous game against Penn State.
As the Wolverines headed up the Lloyd Carr tunnel to their locker room at halftime of that game, video shows the two teams jawing back and forth.
Michigan's dietician Abigail O’Connor even tweeted that multiple peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were thrown at players during the incident — Trevor Keegan told reporters last week RJ Moten said he was hit in the head by one of them.
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Penn State head coach James Franklin complained about the incident at the ensuing news conference and while he said he didn't want to focus on it in-season, it was an issue.
"I prefer to talk about these things in the offseason, but the one tunnel is a problem," Franklin said. "It's a problem and has been. To me, we need to put a policy in place from a conference perspective in my mind that's going to stop (it). We're not the first team to kind of get into a jawing match in the tunnel.
"For me, I want to focus on getting my team into the locker room and not jawing back and forth."
Harbaugh spoke Monday when he said he felt the Nittany Lions created the incident in hopes of preventing his team from getting inside the locker room.
"I've really got bigger fish to fry than coach Franklin's opinion on the halftime tunnel from a game ago," Harbaugh said. "I mean all they've got to do is walk into their locker room. I think you saw pretty clearly (on video) that they completely stopped, they weren't letting us get up the tunnel. It just seemed like such a sophomoric ploy to try to keep us out of our locker room, and he looked like he was the ring leader of the whole thing.
"But no, I've got bigger fish to fry than worry about that kind of whining."
Quarterback J.J. McCarthy and lineman Mike Morris addressed the incident after the game, when Morris said Penn State had "Twitter fingers" all week. The talking on social media let him know it would be a highly emotional game — as evidenced by PSU picking up a personal foul on the first play from scrimmage.
McCarthy said he wasn't there when it started, but believed it was Penn State's doing.
“How they were acting emotionally out there going into the half and how they were emotionally all game, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was them starting it," he said. "And we just finished it."