Sept. 5, 2005. Florida State versus Miami. ABC primetime. A routine camera shot of the crowd. A college student in a cowboy hat and bikini top cheering for her team. And one comment from Brent Musburger that changed everything.
“Fifteen hundred red-blooded Americans just decided to apply to Florida State.”
Twenty years later, that moment feels like it happened in a completely different era of sports media. Which, in many ways, it did.
Jenn Sterger was a Florida State senior planning to take her LSATs and attend law school. She was bartending earlier that day when someone spilled beer on her shirt, so she took advantage of having a bikini top underneath on a humid September night in Tallahassee. The cameras found her during a crowd shot, Musburger made his comment, and by the next morning, her life had completely changed.
This was 2005. No X. No Instagram. No TikTok. The sports blogosphere consisted mainly of message boards and a handful of websites that often used loosely related photos of scantily clad models to drive traffic.
Sterger went viral the old-fashioned way. Her popularity exploded on MySpace and an upstart site called Facebook. Sports Illustrated gave her an online show – one of the first in sports media. She parlayed that 15-second moment into modeling gigs with Maxim and Playboy, spokesperson deals with Dr Pepper and Sprint, and eventually a job as gameday host for the New York Jets, where she was allegedly the victim of sexual harassment by Brett Favre.
The cultural moment made sense for its time. Salaciousness sold in the early 2000s, and college football broadcasts weren’t immune. Brent Musburger wasn’t inventing anything new, either. He was following a playbook established decades earlier by Andy Sidaris, the ABC Wide World of Sports director who pioneered what became known as the “Honey Shot” – cameramen finding attractive women in crowds and directors making sure they got airtime.
But the Sterger moment marked a turning point in how these situations would be received going forward. The early sports blogs went nuts. Message boards exploded. This was happening right as social media was starting to matter, but it wasn’t powerful enough yet to create real consequences.
Eight years later, Musburger would make similar comments about Katherine Webb during the 2013 BCS Championship Game, calling Alabama quarterback A.J. McCarron’s girlfriend “a beautiful woman” and suggesting that quarterbacks “get all the good-looking women.” By then, Twitter had exploded from 138 million users to over 200 million. ESPN was forced to issue an apology the next day.
What once flew under the radar or was even celebrated in 2005 became grounds for corporate apologies by 2013.
And yet, Jenn Sterger herself has no resentment about the comments from Brent Musburger.
“If you take away any of those experiences, I don’t turn out the way that I am,” she said in a recent interview with Time Magazine. She’s since used her platform to give talks to aspiring sports reporters about navigating the industry’s potential minefields.
Musburger, for his part, has remained unapologetic. When asked years later if he thought his Sterger comments were inappropriate, he simply said, “No.” He’s dismissed criticism by invoking the term “woke,” though that wasn’t part of the public lexicon when the original incident occurred.
The Sterger moment represents a specific point in sports media history, the last era when these comments could generate buzz without immediate consequences. It happened at the intersection of old-school broadcasting culture and emerging social media, before the latter had enough power to create real accountability.
Looking back 20 years later, it’s remarkable how much the landscape has changed. The same comment that launched Sterger’s career in 2005 would likely end a broadcaster’s career in 2025. Whether that represents progress or over-correction probably depends on your perspective, but there’s no question the rules have fundamentally shifted.
Sterger parlayed her moment into a successful media career that lasted over a decade. She seems at peace with how everything unfolded.
But the world that made her famous doesn’t exist anymore. In 2005, Musburger could make that comment, and barely anyone cared. By 2013, ESPN was issuing apologies the next day. Today, it probably wouldn’t happen at all.
The shift happened fast. Social media gave people a way to push back instantly. Broadcasters realized that times had changed and things had evolved.
Twenty years later, Brent Musburger’s discovery of Jenn Sterger feels like sports media archaeology, a relic from an era when different rules applied and different behavior was acceptable. One comment changed everything.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.