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By Root 2193 0

is that people who work for ESPN but don’t live there and aren’t at the compound every day get forgotten about to a certain extent. If I was really ready to pound my fist and say, “I want to do this story. There’s a story I really want to do. I feel really strongly about this,” and I chased and chased it, I’m sure they’d consider it and think about letting me do it. The diminished role on Monday Night Football is one reason they did come to me and ask me if I wanted to call play-by-play on college football. So that was one particular opening, but again, my desire to do that was not there.

HEATHER COX, Reporter:

The hardest part, I think, about reporting is you only get two, three, four questions at the most, so I really have to figure out what is the most important story line and what I want to hit home. If we could sit down for twenty minutes, I’d love to ask fifteen questions. But we just never have the opportunity to do that, and to develop a real in-depth, Barbara Walters–type interview. It just doesn’t happen in the format that we’re given.

ERIN ANDREWS, Reporter:

When I was younger, I would always come home on Monday night, and I would always love to watch Monday Night Football. I would always love to see what the sideline reporter was doing that night. I would sit there and critique them when I was younger, and it made me really, really want to be a part of it.

When I was at Florida I used to camp out for College GameDay. I always would try to get my picture with Kirk [Herbstreit] and Chris [Fowler] and Lee [Corso], and there’s a couple of times where my camera didn’t work and Kirk would come back and take another photo and Chris would too, and I just remembered how nice they were to stand and how great they were and how appreciative toward their fans. And I always try to remember that, because I think at the same time, when people are screaming your name and “We love you. We love you,” I just think to myself, “I’m the biggest dork. I sit on my couch and I’m watching NFL Live right now. I’m just a dork.” I guess I just don’t take it too seriously. I never have.

As the years started to pass, I started developing great relationships with a lot of coaches and a lot of athletes, and to be honest with you, they don’t give me inside information, and they don’t allow me to just call them up and ask them questions or help because of the way I look. They’ve got more things to do than worry about that. Within the last couple years, I’ve started to take pride in the fact that I can “up” Mac Brown. I can call Urban Meyer. I can call Pete Carroll and just say, “Hey, can you help me out with this? I’m working on a game and I need some stuff for this.” These guys, you know, they see pretty girls every day. They don’t care. They don’t have time for it. They know how hard I work. And another thing that’s helped me: I have great talent around me—Chris Fowler, Craig James, Kirk Herbstreit—and I think that these coaches see that I have a good relationship with them, and they trust me. “Well, gosh. If Herbie trusts Erin, and Chris Fowler does too, then she’s going to be great with me on the sidelines.”

LISA SALTERS, Reporter:

I watch the NFL and I watch how we’ve basically gotten rid of the sideline reporters—two of the best sideline reporters that are out there, we’ve just gotten ridden of them for Monday Night Football. I don’t understand how that happened. But it happened. And in college football as well, they’ve really trimmed down. Not all of the games have sideline reporters anymore. Thankfully the game that I do, the prime-time game with Brent and Kirk, we still do; otherwise, I would be not doing it anymore either.

I think it’s kind of unfair to kind of lump all sideline reporters in together when, to me, on any network there are some who are better than others. So I don’t want to be judged—I don’t want my work to be judged by the work of somebody else who I might think isn’t as good. Or I wouldn’t think that Michele Tafoya or Suzy Kolber would be judged by somebody else on another network who I would think, like—well,