Getting quotes from a coach or athlete as a sideline reporter can be a thankless task.
Primarily, of course, coaches generally don’t appreciate being asked questions by a pesky reporter in the middle of a tight contest. Athletes who have just finished a half or a game want to get to the locker room and either prepare for the second half or shower, stretch and start winding down. Fans love the novelty of seeing a reporter be called out for making a mistake or misspeaking, and those embarrassing moments often go viral.
Still, sideline reporters are tasked to stand in the way, power through the viral mistakes and collect those half-hearted quotes. On Wednesday, in an interview with Barstool Sports’ Pardon My Take, Charissa Thompson of Fox Sports and Amazon Prime’s Thursday Night Football admitted that at times when she was a sideline reporter, she completely made up things that a coach said to her.
“I’ve said this before, and I haven’t been fired for saying it, but I’ll say it again: I would make up the report sometimes,” Thompson said. “Because A, the coach wouldn’t come out at halftime, or it was too late and I didn’t want to screw up the report. So I was like, ‘I’m just gonna make this up.'”
Newsweek has reached out to Fox Sports by email for comment.
Photo by Cooper Neill/Getty Images
Thompson added that she got away with making things up in part because coaches give the same answers every time anyway, and putting believable words in their mouths wasn’t difficult.
“No coach is going to get mad if I say, ‘Hey, we need to stop hurting ourselves, we need to be better on third down, we need to stop turning the ball over and do a better job of getting off the field,'” Thompson said. “They’re not going to correct me on that. So I’m like, it’s fine, I’ll just make up the report.”
On one hand, Thompson might have done coaches a favor by inserting generic coach speak in place of real quotes, thereby letting them off the hook for interviews they almost certainly didn’t want to conduct.
On the other hand, Thompson didn’t do sideline reporters across the country any favors by revealing this information. The next time one gets an honest, “We just need to play harder, stay aggressive and be better on the defensive end” from a coach, fans might wonder whether they are getting the actual words of a coach or what amounts to a ChatGPT version.
Thompson’s comments highlight how difficult it can be to report live on a sporting event. Still, at a time when distrust of the media is high, reports like this won’t do much to help.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.