There is no doubt rapper Eminem (real name Marshall Mathers) made a complete fool of himself during ESPN’s coverage of the Notre Dame-Michigan game Saturday night.

The Bleacher Report and the blogosphere have gone nuts making fun of him after his ridiculous antics in the broadcast booth with Brent Musburger and Kirk Herbstreit.

How bad was it? On a scale of media disasters it was conservatively a 12 on a scale of 1-10.

The question that now must be asked is “How could that happen?”

ESPN and ABC are owned by Disney and it is likely Disney also has some connection to Eminem’s new music video. So some Disney braintrust likely decided to garner some free publicity by putting Eminem front and center during the highly rated football game on its network.

It was an awful decision. We often stress to clients that not all publicity is good publicity.

Not only did it come across as a shameless commercial for Eminem’s video, it also had no synergy whatsoever with the sporting event. Putting the rapper in the broadcast booth of a football game would be like having Mike Tyson speak at a Mensa conference. It just doesn’t work.

In media circles one might “assume” that Eminem could easily do a media interview. After all, he has been a rap star for years and is 40-years-old. However, that obviously was the wrong assumption.

There is a big difference between reading a script in a controlled environment with numerous takes and doing a “live” interview. That was proven Saturday night.

The only credit should go to the very professional Musburger, who very likely knew this was a complete interview disaster from the start. At first he and Herbstreit looked as if they thought Eminem was just clowning around.

After awhile it was obvious that they tried to interview him the way you would a special needs child. Herbstreit looked as if he was trying not to laugh out loud.

Sometimes things sound like a good idea in a meeting, but not in reality. Disney never should have put Eminem in that situation without a ton of media training.

In reality, he should have never even done the interview.