An occasional prankster himself, Pete Carroll was on the receiving end of a couple crank calls on Tuesday.

Conferences (and sometimes teams) hold weekly conference calls for reporters around the country to interview coaches. The phone numbers are confidential, but occasionally they leak out.

A clever joke would probably be appreciated, considering that coaches and people in the media can be subjected to a painfully similar series of Q&A (over, and over, and over). Unfortunately, these pranks always seem to be crude. Remember what happened in the SEC last year?

This week featured amateur hour in the Pac-10, when somebody posing as a reporter for a fake website asked Carroll to speculate on which players in the conference were "packing 10" in their shorts. Carroll laughed as league officials rushed to cut off the idiot, who insisted, "It’s a legitimate question!"

USC’s coach took it in stride, responding, "That’s worth coming on for. OK, what else we got here?

Fast forward ten minutes, and somebody asked UCLA coach Rick Neuheisel if taking showers before the game kept players from playing dirty.

Carroll didn’t stay amused during a different call,
where he was asked about rewarding players with sex with Britney Spears
or the Jonas Brothers. Thinking he misheard, Carroll laughed a bit
until he was asked about trading players for condoms (Trojans — how
original). At that point he got annoyed and hung up.

All the callers pretended to be from different websites, but hopefully that doesn’t reflect on people trying to do legit online journalism. They may as well have claimed to be with the Weekly World News.

Oh wait, there’s more! Knuckleheads come in threes. Another media staple, the post-practice gaggle, was infiltrated by an out-of-place "blogger" who committed multiple faux pas. If he’s reading (and actually well-intentioned with this whole blogging thing), hey, we’ve all been there. Absolutely!

— Adam Rose