Offsides with Christina

If you tuned into ESPN last Friday to watch South Carolina take on Florida State in the Chick-fil-A bowl then you watched Ron Franklin call his last game for ESPN.  Franklin was pulled from his next broadcast (the Fiesta Bowl) and was fired from ESPN yesterday.  Franklin was let go for calling one of his colleagues an a**hole.

Did I mention it was a female colleague?

Franklin, who has worked for ESPN for over 20 years, called Jeannie Edwards, a sideline reporter, an a-hole after she said she didn’t like it that he had said this to her - "Listen to me sweet baby, let me tell you something".

This is not the first time the 68-year old has referred to a sideline reporter with a cutsie name; in 2005 he called Holly Rowe sweetheart on the air.

What Franklin said was inappropriate and sexist and he's just some old guy who still thinks women belong in the kitchen and no where near sports.  That is non-negotiable. 

What the real issue here is sideline reporting – what’s the point?

It appears that the only reason sports has sideline reporters is to insert some ‘eyecandy’ into the broadcast, despite the networks saying its to get the breaking news from on the field.  No one takes these ‘reporters’ seriously.  Remember Suzy Kolber, how could you not.  

For the record, that woman knows more about football than 95% of all men out there.. 

Joe may have been drunk but he was right, no one cares and just wants to watch the game.  If there is breaking news then the producer will get in the ear of the play-by-play guy and say, ‘hey, so and so has a broken leg, or so and so has been taken to the hospital’.

And just the other night during the Orange Bowl, Stanford head coach Jim Harbaugh was grabbed by Michelle Tafoya following the win over Virginia Tech.  Unfortunately for Tafoya, Harbaugh knew what was coming, probably because he had already been asked the question he was avoiding by her before the game even started, but he's already planning his exit before she even gets her first word out.

Of course we can’t talk sideline reporting without mentioning the most famous one of them all – Erin Andrews.

And you can't talk about scandalous sideline reporting without mentioning one Jenn Sterger.

As a woman I know this is one of the only real avenues to get into sports, though once you get there you want to be taken seriously but can't because you aren’t doing anything important; it’s a catch-22.

If you watched a game and they never once went down to the sidelines would you miss it?  You probably wouldn’t even realize it wasn’t part of the broadcast until someone pointed it out to you.

So, in this new year, maybe it’s time to start by trimming the fat in the broadcasts, do we really need sideline reporters, isn’t that what Entertainment Tonight is for?