ESPN Announcer Has A Crush On QB’s Girlfriend
Hollywood Reporter
Musberger’s Formula For Tweet Success:
(73-year-old leering sportscaster + 23-year-old beauty queen) X (30 million bored football fans/by a ho-hum football game) = 100,000 tweets in 12 hours.
Monday night’s BCS championship football game between Alabama and Note Dame might have gone into sports history as a blowout win for the Crimson Tide, save for one moment that upended the social media conversation about who emerged from the tournament as number one in college football. Nope, it’s not Alabama. It’s Katherine Webb, Miss Alabama 2012, and the girlfriend of Alabama quarterback, A.J. McCarron. And we have ESPN’s codgerly commentator, Brent Musberger, to thank or to blame for the sudden shift in message trends away from the action on the gridiron to what some viewers seemed discomfiting attention in the stands.
Eleven minutes into the first quarter—with Alabama leading 14-0, and Notre Dame’s future looking dimmer by the second—the sports’ network’s crowd-roving camera zoomed in on a female Tide fan in the stands. At that moment, there were two things Musberger, and his booth buddy Kirk Herbstreit could have done: 1) point out that the fan was McCarron’s girlfriend, Katherine Webb, who was seated next to McCarron’s mother, Dee Dee Bonner. It would have been okay to add that Webb was Miss Alabama 2012, and let the audience take it from there. Or, 2) Weird us out with a dribbling display of aged testosterone and geezerly gandering from a septuagenarian who should know better.
Opting for choice number 2, Musberger offered this, ”You see that lovely lady there, she does go to Auburn, but she’s also Miss Alabama and that’s AJ McCarron’s girlfriend,” reported USA Today. “You quarterbacks, you get all the good looking women. What a beautiful woman. Wow.” Musberger couldn’t leave it alone, tacking on, “If you’re a youngster in Alabama, start getting the football out and throw it around the back yard with pops!” To which Kirk Herbstreit added: “AJ’s doing some things right.”
It might be working for Hugh Hefner, but, please, Brent, keep the hot-tub reveries out of our sportscasts. As Steve Politi@StevePoliti, a USA Today commenter put it, ”Brent Musberger: Making college women uncomfortable since 1978.”
But that opinion is not shared universally—not by Webb’s fan base, not by Katherine Webb, and not even by her mother. As ABC News headlined it—“Katherine Webb Enjoys Web Fame After ESPN Spotlight”–from Webb’s Web point of view, it was thrilling. Within minutes of being the center of Musberger’s fawning focus, the Auburn student’s Twitterverse exploded, with new followers flowing in by the thousands. According to the L.A. Times, even Arizona Cardinals defensive tackle Darnell Dockett got caught up in the river of tweets, sending Webb his phone number in hopes of a hookup.
Fox News dug into the tweets and found this typical post: “By far the best part of the #BCS game and my MVP is KatherineWebb! WOW! Roll Tide indeed! AJ is #blessed!”
Today News’s Scott Stump tallied up the Twitter trend which had Webb—who began the game with 2,300 followers—gaining more than 130,000 new followers between Monday night and Tuesday morning. By late Tuesday afternoon, Webb’s fan count was nearing the 165,000 mark, with no end in sight.
ESPN has even been forced to issue a response. A network spokesman stated “We always try to capture interesting storylines and the relationship between an Auburn grad who is Miss Alabama and the current Alabama quarterback certainly met that test. However, we apologize that the commentary in this instance went too far and Brent understands that..”
As weird as Musberger may have sounded to some of us, to the Twitterverse, his mooning over a young woman of a grand-daughterly age was just a trigger for an Internet blowout—Roll Twitter, Roll!
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