Erin Andrews and Charissa Thompson's 'Calm Down' Just Joined Colin Cowherd's The Volume

LAS VEGAS — Colin Cowherd keeps collecting. The Volume, Cowherd's digital media network, has added Calm Down with Erin and Charissa to its lineup, bringing Erin Andrews and Charissa Thompson under the same umbrella as The Herd. Under the partnership, The Volume will handle ad sales, production and distribution for the show.

The announcement, reported by Barrett Media, lands on a Thursday — fitting, since Thompson is spending tonight hosting Prime Video's Thursday Night Football, with the Buccaneers visiting the Cowboys. It is the kind of scheduling coincidence that tells you exactly how embedded these two are in the football week: one hosts the Thursday night desk, the other is the lead sideline reporter on FOX Sports' top NFL crew on Sundays, and in between they record one of the most durable conversation podcasts in sports media.

Calm Down launched in 2021 and has since crossed 400 episodes, built on a simple formula that turned out to be a durable one: two of the most recognizable women in sports television talking about sports, pop culture and relationships, with the guard down. The guest list tells you the range — Kevin Hart, Wayne Gretzky, Ken Jeong — and the longevity tells you the audience never left. Four hundred episodes is not a vanity project. It is a habit, for the hosts and the listeners both.

Cowherd, who founded The Volume in 2021 after his own long run in sports talk, did not hide his enthusiasm. He said he has known Andrews and Thompson for years and that "there aren't enough words to describe how smart and talented they are," calling them two of the most recognizable names in sports and entertainment. For a network builder, that is the whole pitch: recognizable names with their own loyal audiences, folded into a sales and distribution machine that can monetize them better than they could alone.

Andrews framed it as a creative fit, saying Calm Down has always been about real conversations with friends and listeners — and that The Volume gets that. Thompson, meanwhile, leaned into the reunion angle: she said she was grateful to be back in Cowherd's orbit, describing The Volume as "the podcast house you want to hang out in — the dinner party you want an invite to." That line is doing a lot of work. It positions the network not as a content factory but as a hang — which, for a show built on the chemistry of two friends talking, is exactly the right promise to make.

What the announcement does not say is nearly as interesting as what it does. The financial terms and the length of the deal were not disclosed, and it is unclear whether the show's format or release schedule will change under the new arrangement. That is standard for these deals — the press release sells the partnership, the lawyers keep the numbers — but it leaves the real questions open: does The Volume get a piece of the existing back catalog, does the show expand its episode cadence, and does the advertising get louder now that a dedicated sales team is running it?

Step back and the strategy is obvious. The move gives The Volume a direct line to a large, loyal female audience — a demographic the sports-talk world has historically talked about reaching more than it has actually reached. Calm Down is not a sports-debate show that happens to have women hosting it; it is a show where sports is one thread among pop culture, relationships and real life, and that is precisely why its audience trusts it. For a network still expanding beyond traditional sports content, that is not a side bet. It is the direction of travel.

It is also a reunion story in an industry built on them. Thompson's line about being back in Cowherd's orbit is a reminder that sports media is a small town: people work together, scatter across networks, and find their way back when the business case makes sense. Cowherd left the traditional sports-talk machine to build his own; Andrews and Thompson built an independent show with 400 episodes of equity; now the machine and the equity meet in the middle. Everybody at the dinner party knows each other already.

The open question is what changes for the listener. The best version of this deal: the show sounds exactly the same, the ads get smarter, the production gets slicker, and the audience grows because The Volume's distribution muscle puts Calm Down in front of people who should have been listening all along. The risk version: a 400-episode independent voice gets processed through a network machine until it sounds like everything else on the network. Thompson's "dinner party" line suggests everyone involved knows which version they are aiming for. We will know by the holidays.

More from our podcast coverage, including The Herd with Colin Cowherd, and the latest sports media news.