Amidst a chaotic offseason for broadcasters, Fox made sure it showed Erin Andrews it wanted her to stay.
Andrews appeared on the latest Sports Illustrated Media Podcast and discussed how the frenzy effected her. She said that with the news about Joe Buck and Troy Aikman leaving for ESPN, she wanted to go ahead and commit to her bosses for three more years.
“I signed a contract. I quietly did that,” said Andrews. “I figured enough was enough with the headlines for a while. My deal was up in August. Fox came to me pretty much right away and just said, ‘We wanna keep you here.’ At that point I was unaware of who I was gonna be doing the games with.”
Andrews said in the podcast that even though she was kept in the dark about the new plans, Fox always communicated with her throughout the process.
“They were great about it. That’s one thing I do have to say regardless of what other opinions are out there. My bosses at Fox, Eric Shanks and Brad Zager, were very upfront with me. Even upfront with me when I would call and be like, ‘What’s going on? What’s happening? What’s the plan? I just want to know what the plan is.’ And they would just say, ‘Hang on, hang on. I promise you’re going to be happy, just hang on.’”
She was on vacation when she heard that Aikman was leaving the network to join ESPN.
“It was winter break. We were just done with the Super Bowl, done with everything. … I’m standing here, and my phone rang. And I just looked at [my husband] Jarret [Stoll] and I said, ‘This isn’t good.’ I’d said Troy’s going to Amazon, and he’s calling to tell me, so I put it on speaker,” Andrews said.
“We just started b.s.-ing, and I told him I was on my way to go work out and we were in Montana, we were going to go skiing later, blah, blah, blah,” she continued. “And he just got right into it and he’s like, ‘Hey, I’m going to ESPN.’ I just looked at Jarret and I didn’t speak for five minutes. I tried to talk, but I started to cry. I just couldn’t believe that was happening. I think all of us on our crew thought it was Amazon. I was just like, ‘Wait a second. What?’ My next reaction was, ‘Who are you doing the games with?’ I was just trying to put it all together.”
That night, Andrews, who admittedly drank “a lot” of tequila after her call with Aikman would suggest something that eventually did come to fruition.
“I’m not gonna lie, I went out that night in Montana, and my husband and I went to our favorite bar and I consumed a lot of tequila,” Andrews said. “I then apologized to my husband because this was supposed to be the vacation we didn’t talk on our phones, but everybody’s just calling each other from our crew, we’re calling our bosses at Fox, we’re just like, What the heck?
At this point Tom was retired, I may or may not have put a text out there or a DM or whatever and just said, ‘Hey, what are you doing next year? You wanna be part of our crew?’ I just told him how fun it was and how great our crew was. I placed a call to one of my bosses at Fox and said, ‘Full disclosure, I’ve had a lot of tequila. Why not try to hit it out of the park here with Tom?’”
