It wasn’t the accommodations that made Lloyd Carr looking for a new campus to work on after two years as an assistant football coach Gary Moeller.
Forty years later, he still looks back fondly on his home life here.
“We lived at 1607 Mayfair — across the street from St. Matthew´s Church, where two of our children went to school,” he says. “It was a great play area for the kids and a great location to Assembly Hall, where the football offices were located, about a five-minute drive to work. I had a small garden in the backyard.”
What the man who’d later coach Michigan to the 1997 national championship wasn’t so fond of was the state of the Illini program.
“We loved Champaign and the house,” he says, “but there was very limited commitment to football.”
After one season at West Virginia, he arrived in Ann Arbor — first as a defensive backs coach, before being promoted to defensive coordinator, then head coach.
His most unforgettable return trip to Champaign-Urbana? That’s easy.
“One year as we were leaving the stadium after beating the Illini, I saw an elderly lady up ahead, off to the left of our bus. She was dressed in orange and blue. As we approached her, she turned around, pulled her pants down and bent over.
“She was not a Michigan fan.”
