UNFORCED ERROR

Fox Sports Host Brags She Used to Make Up NFL Sideline Reports

Fake it ‘til you make it—or until your colleagues are calling your behavior out as “absolutely not ok, not the norm and upsetting on so many levels.”

Charissa Thompson, a co-host for Fox Sports and Amazon, admitted that she has invented comments from NFL coaches during her career as a sideline reporter. “I’ve said this before, so I haven’t been fired for saying it, but I’ll say it again. I would make up the report sometimes,” Thompson said in a recent interview on the Pardon My Take podcast, “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 going to make this up.’” The 41-year-old journalist said that she had believed “no coach is going to get mad” if she stuck to generalizations, like “‘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.’” Immediately irate with her admission, however, was much of the rest of the sports media world. Tracy Wolfson, a CBS sideline reporter, tweeted that Thompson’s behavior was “absolutely not ok, not the norm and upsetting on so many levels.”