Samantha Ponder Said She Kept First Pregnancy Quiet and Stayed Home Because of Bad Encounters with Vikings Fans

Samantha Ponder is making the move to Sunday NFL Countdown host this season. (We reported that Maria Taylor will be replacing her on College GameDay.) She is, of course, married to Christian Ponder, the former first-round pick for the Minnesota Vikings in 2011. He never developed as a NFL quarterback (career 6.3 yards per attempt, 38 TDs to 36 INTs), and being a bust at the quarterback position can lead to some harsh treatment from the home fans.

Here’s Samantha Ponder talking to the Star-Tribune:

"“We were easy targets when we were (in Minnesota). And that’s not like a ‘poor us’ thing, but things weren’t going well. Things were rough in public. I had some really bad encounters and basically kind of stayed home for a while when we lived there,” she said. “It comes with the business. I get it. … It just got so bad when we were there that we decided, ‘we’re going to protect this.’ People can say whatever they want about Christian or me, but if we can protect my stress level while I was pregnant and our newborn baby, we were going to do that as much as we could. And it has been different since we moved.”"

Doesn’t sound like she reflects fondly on her time in Minnesota.