A Vast Erin Andrews Conspiracy?

We’d never heard of the website Harmless Emissions until yesterday, when an alarm went off in our world headquarters urgently beckoning us to the “Erin Andrews Man Cave,” which is a $260 billion secure bunker located four hundred feet beneath our offices.

In case you’ve been living under a rock – or underneath Clay Aiken – for the last few years, Andrews is the super-smokin’ ESPN sideline reporter who recently caused a bit of marital friction between Mr. and Mrs. Sic Willie.

If the Harmless Emissions conspiracy theorists are correct, Sic’s may not be the only home Andrews is wrecking. From the shot heard ’round the sports world:

Even though I declared Virginia Tech at North Carolina my game of the week this Saturday, I don’t think many other people did, and especially not the people at ESPN.  But that’s where Erin Andrews was stationed.  Not in Tempe, and not at Auburn.  Not even in East Lansing.  The Hokie-Tar Heel game was so far down the ESPN/ABC chain that I can’t even tell you who the announcers up in the booth were.  The voices were familiar, but I don’t know the names.  That’s rare.

So what was Erin Andrews doing working that game?

Let’s start a week ago when Gameday was in Los Angeles.  I wish I could remember the exact scenario, but at some point in that broadcast, Chris Fowler described something in a certain way.  Hypothetically, let’s say he said “Maybe you could even say Ohio State will be straying a bit?”  Now when he said the word “straying” in whatever sense he actually said it, there was a certain emphasis on the word that I caught right away.  Then Kirk Herbstreit sort of dismissed that phrasing with this weird “Aaaaaa, I dunno about that” or something which I also thought seemed odd, like he was flustered by Fowler’s emphasis on “straying.”

I thought the exchange was a little weird, but trying to infer anything from it would be obviously futile, so I quickly forgot about it.  Until Erin Andrews popped up in Raleigh of all places this weekend.  I don’t know the exact extent of any rumors surrounding EA and Herbstreit, but he did refer to her on air one time as “Shmoopy.”  Who the hell knows why.  The normal rules of decency don’t seem to exist when she’s around.  See also: Brent Musberger’s creepy fascination with her during college hoops season.

It should also be noted that Gameday was at Auburn and Herbstreit bolted out of town after the broadcast to get to Tempe.  I think this has happened a couple times before, and I don’t know where Andrews was stationed in those instances.  But I would think it would have either been at that weekend’s equivalent of either UGA-ASU or LSU-Auburn, not VT-UNC.

Anyway, what we have here is a reference by Fowler to “straying” while Gameday was in LA and Andrews and he were in the same location and a hasty dismissal of the term from Herbstreit.  And then we have Andrews nowhere in the vicinity the next weekend, instead relegated to a second tier ACC game.  That’s all I’m saying.

Hmmmm … needless to say our analysts are studying the Gameday tape from last week like it was the Zapruder film, people. We may or may not have also called our gal Minerva from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil to work a little “magic” on Kirk Herbstreit.

Of course, we may or may not have called Minerva once already last season when Herbstreit sold out and pledged allegiance to college football’s ass-backward Bowl Championship Series.

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