ERIN ANDREWS: SCORCHIN' HOT GATOR BABE

Patrick Logwalking at Little Turtle Tuesday. Date stamp off due to emergency battery change...

It is 5:31 a.m. and 52.1 degrees. Patrick and Junior are asleep in his bedroom and the Boarder is in Room#4 with two cats.

ONE YEAR AGO TODAY:

It is 5:53 a.m. and 39.1 degrees and dark out. Patrick is sleeping in.

TWO Y EARS AGO TODAY:

It's 7:38 a.m. and Patrick got up with me and promptly went back to bed with Junior. Wouldn't want to miss his 20 hours of sleep a day.

I turned on my radio, in the middle of the night! Richard C. Hoagland was on!

More later.

YouTube clips can't tell story of Erin Andrews

Enlarge By Brian Spurlock, US Presswire Erin Andrews, shown interviewing former Indiana coach Kelvin Sampson, is quite possibly TV sports' first It Girl.

By Michael Hiestand, USA TODAY

Erin Andrews' stats are amazing. To pick one randomly: YouTube offers 71 entries on her, such as "Random photos of ABC/ESPN sideline reporter Erin Andrews" — that's drawn nearly 1 million views.

The online idolatry of her — not seen since Anna Kournikova's cyberspace heyday — runs along the lines of Wayne and Garth, from Wayne's World, saying if she "were a president, she'd be Babe-braham Lincoln."

But, as a reporter for about 90 ABC/ESPN events a year — including Wednesday night's New York Yankees-Boston Red Sox game — she's a working stiff following a long line of female predecessors who roamed sidelines while males called games from above. But, partly because she arrived as the Internet blasted off, she may be TV sports' first It Girl.

Go figure. As a kid growing up in Florida, she wanted to be a Sea World whale trainer, then a Britney Spears backup dancer. (Today, while an admitted "big reality-TV junkie," she's still a "huge in-the-closet Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake fan.")

But she was also a "ginormous sports fan" who grew up in television because of her father Steve, now a news reporter at NBC's Tampa affiliate. Which meant she got advice early on: "I was watching Hannah Storm host NBC's NBA show and told my dad, 'I want to do that.' He said, 'Everybody wants to do that. You have to be different.' "

She is. Andrews, while upbeat and a good interviewer, seems to have touched a nerve with others who grew up in a world where TV sports had created a separate universe of wall-to-wall talking heads who became sports stars themselves.

While attending the University of Florida, where she graduated with a telecommunications degree in 2000, she got up early when ESPN's College GameDay was on campus. ("None of my girlfriends understood.") She recalls the urgency in getting her first picture with an ESPN analyst she works with now: "My camera didn't work the first time I got a photo with Kirk Herbstreit and, oh my gosh, I'm freaking out." (She suggests such excitement has multiplied: "Walking around with him is like Justin Timberlake; you can't really go anywhere.")

While Andrews loves her job, she's not crazy about every camera. "Camera phones are the worst thing for anybody in the public eye. People are always watching and they'll go crazy on the Internet."

Like the "horrible" picture of Andrews eating a sandwich at a football game. "Dad said, 'Why did you do that?' " Then, there was the recent scare at Florida's spring football game when Andrews and Herbstreit were briefly locked out of their car, and Herbstreit threw Andrews a big bag of McDonald's food as nearby fans were already reaching for their cameras. She told Herbstreit: "Ten bucks this will be all over the Internet, asking, 'Why doesn't she eat better?' "

Off-camera, Andrews says she's a tomboy who doesn't "dress in real-life how I dress on TV." Sometimes after being asked if she's Erin Andrews, she'll answer: "No, she's much prettier than me."

Andrews doesn't have any career plans but says she loves "the job Kelly Ripa has done bringing hotness and a vibrant, kooky personality" to morning TV. And she is in no rush to move on. "People say, 'You can't do this forever; you'll get bored,' " she says. "Well, I won't. I love it."

GoGators!!