Plenty of press conferences have unusual exchanges, but even by those standards, a reporter asking about a result that didn’t happen is strange. That appears to be what happened Monday at Akron head coach Joe Moorhead‘s press conference.
The Zips are facing the Tennessee Volunteers Saturday, so it was logical to ask about what Moorhead anticipates from that opponent. But the “What are you expecting from Tennessee this week, given the way that they lost?” from an unidentified reporter was not it, considering that Tennessee beat the Pittsburgh Panthers 34-27 in overtime. Here’s video of that exchange, from A to Z Sports Tennessee writer Zach Ragan:
This reporter didn’t find out until Monday that Tennessee beat Pittsburgh pic.twitter.com/YTvPGJEeJV
— zach ragan (@zachtnt) September 13, 2022
“What are you expecting from Tennessee this week, given the way that they lost?”
“Tennessee? They ended up beating Pitt in overtime.”
“Did they?”
“Yeah, they beat Pitt in overtime. They ended up going to overtime and they won. They won 34-27 in overtime.”
“My mistake.”
Mistakes certainly happen, and this reporter is far from the first person to get a fact wrong in a press conference question. And much higher-paid and higher-profile people definitely get facts wrong on even larger stages from time to time. But this one is particularly notable because of how key it is to this question to the Akron head coach. (It’s also funny as at least the second prominent media blunder emerging from the Tennessee-Pitt game, following Todd Blackledge’s hot mic comment on Pitt’s “pedestrian offense.”)
If a reporter is going to ask about the upcoming opponent, it would seemingly be good to know how that opponent did. And there are even ways to fudge it if you don’t remember; this question would have been fine if it stopped with “What are you expecting from Tennessee this week?” But it didn’t. And so the world got a funny clip of a reporter finding out a game score from a different coach two days later. Even a telegram or carrier pigeon would have been faster.
[Zach Ragan on Twitter]
