It’s the fourth quarter, your team is trailing by four points, and your opponent has just put up twelve straight points to take the lead. You’d figure that in this hypothetical situation the most important thing would be to talk to your team, right?

Wrong.

The team can come second, as first off you have to explain to Erin Andrews, Nancy Lieberman, or someone else why you have just lost the lead. And after explaining that the other team was making shots and your team lost focus, the game begins again, and you just wasted a valuable timeout contributing nothing of interest to the game’s telecast.

Now although this situation doesn’t always occur, that’s the risk you run when all these sideline reporters swarm the sidelines thinking they are doing a service to the general public.

Sports at all levels consist of three groups. The players, the coaches, and the parents or fans. When you get into upper level athletics such as college football or Major League Baseball, you can throw the broadcasters into this mix. However, all these groups contribute something.

The players play, the coaches coach, the fans provide support and attempt to give their team an advantage, and the broadcasters allow the general public to know what is going on. There is no room in this for sideline reporters.

In fact, a sideline reporter will never say anything that the broadcaster or analyst doesn’t already know or is able to figure out. I understand the point of the job: to give listeners inside information on the teams. However, coaches are smart enough not to release any of it.

As a result, we see these women, generally, chasing coaches into locker rooms in their suit jackets and skirts, and asking them how they will change their strategy for the next half. And what do they get rewarded with?

“We need to try harder, or we need to stop (fill in the blank).”

Obviously a coach would never say anything that they were actually planning, in fear of releasing information to the other team, so these interviews never gain anything. Of course, after the one word answers, the coach leaves, and the reporter restates his/her name, sends it back to the studio, and is thanked as unenthusiastically as humanly possible by the broadcaster.

Now, would I rather see five minutes of Erin Andrews in high definition than Louis Scola? Of course. But that is not worth the brain cells she kills with mindless information.

Now let’s take a look at some of the impressive work these reporters do that ESPN considers to be high quality journalism: At a Lakers game, Nicole Richey says to a reporter that she wants to have sex with Kobe Bryant, two months after he was accused of rape. At a New York Jets game the same week, a drunk Joe Namath was interviewed on the sideline by ESPN’s Suzy Kolber, and spent the whole interview trying to make out with her. And my personal favorite, every interview Nancy Lieberman gives, she asks the coach how he can stop the player that is killing his team. And when I say every interview, I mean EVERY interview.

It is simply not worth a reporter climbing over glass to get into a hockey bench to interview a bleeding defenseman to gain worthless information. Sideline reporters will never be productive in a sports broadcast ever.

Major networks, take a clue, and get rid of this economy guzzling position.