Subject, Verb Agreement...for Pete's Sake

The University of Southern California's peppy coach, Pete Carroll was asked his opinion concerning the Trojans relatively low ranking in the first BCS poll of the season. Pete implied that the Trojans' upset loss to Stanford didn't help, but that other esteemed teams also lost:

"There's a lot of teams that lost last weekend that weren't supposed to lose..." he said.

Technically, Pete should have stated: "There are a lot of teams that lost..."

There is used in this sentence as an expletive: A word serving to fill out or occupy space in a sentence. OED. There is often used like it to serve as a "temporary subject" until the real subject appears later. In coach Carroll's sentence, the subject is lot which is a plural noun (a number of people or things). Therefore, There are...teams....a lot of them.

Yet, Pete is off the hook because There's is idiomatic* for there is, there are. "There's a lot of teams." (plural use). "There's my number one quarterback." (singular use). Uh, is it John David Booty or Mark Sanchez. We won't go into that just now.

*a phrase or expression peculiar to a language