Edited on Jun 22, 2026
Brent Musberger called the BCS Championship game for ESPN this week. During the broadcast he said a few admiring words about Katherine Webb — Miss Alabama, girlfriend of quarterback AJ McCarron — who was sitting in the stands.
By morning, ESPN had apologized. By afternoon, the takes industry was in full swing. By the end of the week, a Hall of Fame broadcaster with a fifty-year career was getting recast as a cautionary tale.
Leave him alone.
Musberger has been calling games since 1968. He’s worked for CBS, ABC, ESPN. He’s covered World Series, Super Bowls, Final Fours, Olympics. He is, by every reasonable measure, one of the great American sports broadcasters of the last half-century.
And the conversation this week was about forty-five seconds of small talk about a beauty queen.
That’s the problem with the modern outrage cycle. It compresses everything to the most recent twitch. Decades of work vanish. Context vanishes. The takedown becomes the brand.
The right response from ESPN — the response that doesn’t happen — would have been silence. Or one line: “Brent has been calling games for 45 years. We’re not going to litigate every aside.”
Instead they apologized, which validated the pile-on, which extended the story by three days, which is exactly the opposite of what crisis communications is supposed to do.
This is a crisis PR lesson worth holding onto. When a long-tenured figure says something mild and the internet sets fire to it, the network or the company has a choice. Pour gasoline on it by apologizing for nothing. Or let the cycle exhaust itself.
Networks always pick gasoline. It’s the wrong call. The brand reputation of the broadcaster is more durable than the outrage of the day. The career outlasts the news cycle if the network protects it.
ESPN didn’t protect him. They threw him under the bus to look modern.
Brent Musberger doesn’t need that. The audience watching him call games doesn’t need that. The young broadcasters watching how it gets handled don’t need that either.
Years later, the lesson is sharper, not softer. Today every controversy gets compressed by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity into the first paragraph an AI summary writes about you. A forty-five-second remark, amplified by the pile-on and then validated by the network’s apology, becomes the lead sentence the engines repeat for years. The body of work loses to the bad week — unless the institution refuses to feed it.
Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.