Terry Bradshaw Complimented Erin Andrews' Outfit and Twitter is Less Than Pleased

If you started your day with Terry Bradshaw and Erin Andrews trending on your timeline and wondering if they've come out as a sort of Early May/Very Late December romance or something, they have not. (Though if they ever do, I call dibs on the couples name "Brandrews.") No, the real reason is that, after showing her conversation with Devin White, Andrews threw it back to Bradshaw and got this lively bit of TV banter in return:

“You got your Cowboy boots on and your shirt. You’re looking good. That was ni-- ... I enjoyed that interview”

Ruh-roh. There is the dictionary definition of "saying the quiet part out loud." And the social medias were none too happy, to say the least.

And even equating Bradshaw to the highwater mark of NFL Hall of Famer/TV reporter live on-air sexual harrassment:

Do what this what you will. Accuse Bradshaw of creeping on a co-worker, or believe he was simply paying a compliment to a respected colleague, just to be nice. Either way, the goal posts on these sorts of things has moved over the course of his long and distinguished career. The man broke into the league in 1970s, fercrissakes. Cut him some slack. Back then, the only woman you saw in a locker room was popping out of a giant cardboard novelty cake for someone's birthday. The first time he and his Steelers' teammates first saw a woman in business clothes holding a tape recorder, they probably thought she was Art Rooney's mistress and the old man was doing a little Watergate role playing. After all, he's been around so long he was eerily predicting future Hall of Fame QB events back in 1983, when female reporters were still barely a part of NFL life. 

But like all players of his generation, he adjusted. Obviously he has, because he's survived on TV since he retired almost 40 years ago. Which can't have been easy for a guy of whom it was once famously said, "Terry Bradshaw couldn't spell 'cat' if you spotted him the C and the A." So it shouldn't shock anyone if he relapses every once in a while. When he goes back to the default setting of saying what his 73-year-old libido is feeling. He's old; he's not dead. His internal editor was asleep at the switch and so he put into words what his overriding takeaway was, which was Erin Andrews' outfit instead of her insightful and penetrating look into one of the NFL's best players. Forgetting for a few seconds that it's 2021. And even if one of your co-hosts is wearing horse barn-appropriate clothes in a horse barn interview, you've got to save the "Hubba hubba!" and the wolf whistles for later, when you're away from the camera. 

So let's give Bradshaw some slack. Boomers are gonna boomer. And while he would've been better off restricting his comments to his internal monologue, he was being honest. She did look great. And maybe she's the least offended person of all, she hasn't said. He's just got to remember you can't say that stuff the way you could back in the 1970s.