In the first quarter of the BCS championship football game Monday night, Alabama's Eddie Lacy scored two touchdowns in the first quarter leaving Notre Dame's defense stunned. As the Irish tried to claw back before the half and with the game at somewhat of a standstill, commentators Brent Musburger and Kirk Herbstreit grappled for anything to keep viewers tuned into ESPN.
When cameras turned to Katherine Webb — who happens to be Miss Alabama and the girlfriend of Alabama quarterback AJ McCarron — Musburger, 73, found fertile ground for analysis, as little happened on the field.
"When you're a quarterback at Alabama… you see that lovely lady there?" Musberger said of Webb, who sat in the stands with McCarron's mother Dee Dee Bonner.
"She does go to Auburn, I want to admit that. But she's also Miss Alabama and that's AJ McCarron's girlfriend, OK? And right there on the right, that's Dee Dee Bonner. That's AJ's mom."
"Wow I'm telling you, you quarterbacks, you get all the good looking women."
"Wow!" Herbstreit said.
"Whoa!"
"AJ's doing some things right down in Tuscaloosa," Herbstreit said.
The video is below, with “good ol' Brent whacking it to Miss Alabama (and, sort of, McCarron's mom) in all its uncomfortable, awkward, heteronormative glory,” as Timothy Burke at Deadspin writes.
"So if you're a youngster in Alabama, start getting the football out and throw it around the backyard with pop," Musburger concluded.
Some viewers weren’t impressed with the comments, and took to Twitter to call out Musburger.
"Maybe we can get more face time for Webb tonight and let Musburger narrate it some more," Frank Schwab at Yahoo! Sports wrote of the exchange. "That was the most interesting thing about the early minutes of the Notre Dame-Alabama game."
One viewer agreed, to some extent.
By the end of the first half, Lacy had scored four touchdowns to leave the score at 28-0.
"You could almost hear television sets around the country flipping to other channels," the Associated Press wrote of the games, "a hugely anticipated matchup between two of the nation's most storied programs reduced to nothing more than the second straight BCS blowout for the Crimson Tide."