Jim Harbaugh slams James Franklin over tunnel spat

“There really should be a policy that the first team that goes in, there is a buffer. If not, this team starts talking to this team, they start jawing back and forth, and something bad is going to happen.”

One person who doesn’t agree with that sentiment is Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh, who pushed back on Franklin’s comments on Monday with a pretty harsh rebuke.

“Like you saw, pretty clearly, that [Penn State players] completely stopped. They weren’t letting us get up the tunnel,” Harbaugh said. “And it just seemed like such a sophomoric ploy to try to keep us out of our locker rooms.”

Harbaugh then called out Franklin directly, saying “he looked like he was the ringleader of the whole thing. I’ve got bigger fish to fry than to worry about that kind of whining.”

There were certainly a lot of strange claims to be made about the tussle, which apparently included some peanut butter & jelly sandwiches being left outside the Michigan locker room. We can certainly expect to hear more about this during the offseason and the next time these two teams meet inside a football stadium.