The chorus of critics has been so busy blaming him and beating the pulpit for his resignation that it hasn't bothered to notice that the guy it wants out as Michigan's football coach already appears to be gone.
Oh, Lloyd Carr will still be on the sidelines Saturday in Ann Arbor when the Wolverines play host to Notre Dame on Saturday (ABC, 3:30 p.m. ET) in a matchup of proud and storied programs, which are both 0-2 simultaneously for the first time in history.
But the Lloyd Carr who's been savaged by the critics in the wake of a stunning upset loss to Division I-AA Appalachian State and a 39-7 evisceration by Oregon? That Lloyd Carr isn't around to answer questions.
The man doing that these days still looks very much like Carr, who's been in charge at Michigan since 1995. And he sounds like Carr, with that speech pattern featuring an ever-so-slight Jimmy Stewart lilt to it.
Beyond that, the words seem to come from a stranger.
After all, that couldn't have been Carr -- his team down by 25 at halftime Saturday, after Oregon did everything to embarrass the Wolverines short of throwing a bucket of confetti on them in mid-Washington Generals meltdown -- offering a comeback to Bonnie Bernstein's question as he headed for the locker room.
"Do you know what Chad's injury is?" she asked, referring to hobbled quarterback Chad Henne.
"Sure, I do," Carr said with a wry smile as he walked away.
Somewhere in Sideline Reporter Cemetery, there are six or seven corpses fatally stung by Carr's stare in the past, all wondering who that guy was Saturday in the Block M cap.
The same imposter showed up afterward, when someone asked why Carr's defense can't ever seem to corral a spread attack.
"Maybe," Carr said, making light of an Ann Arbor News headline from earlier that week, "the game has passed me by."
What's more likely is that Carr has adopted this Mark Twain-style approach because he strongly believes reports of Michigan's death have been greatly exaggerated.
"What I've done throughout my career every week is try to address where we are, the reality," Carr said. "We know where we are. The reality is that we very much would like to change that to become the team that we're capable of being, and there are fundamentals that are important in terms of achieving that end.
"So it begins with hard work. It begins with an attitude that I will not be denied. I am in charge of what I want to accomplish, and I will accomplish it. [It's] an attitude that is positive; an attitude that says, 'You know, we can. We will. We must.'"
You wouldn't expect anything less now, would you? Not from a coach with 28 years of experience on staff -- 15 as an assistant, now 13 as the head man.
.
