It was a stunning admission from Fox Sports’ and Amazon Prime Video’s Charissa Thompson.
The former sideline reporter said this week that, at certain points during games, she “would make up the report sometimes because, A, the coach wouldn’t come out at halftime or it was too late and I was like, I didn’t want to screw up the report, so I was like, “I’m just gonna make this up.'”
“No coach is gonna 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,'” she added. “Like, they’re not gonna correct me on that. I’m like it’s fine, I’ll just make up the report.”
Obviously, that’s the opposite of what you want to hear from a journalist, and that was how other sideline reporters from CBS’s Tracy Wolfson to ESPN’s Lisa Salters came out to say after the quotes went viral: