Miss Utah Marissa Powell: Blaming bad Miss USA Pageant answer on nerves?

Odds are, you’ve seen it already: The video of Miss Utah Marissa Powell completely flubbing a question during the final round of the 2013 Miss USA Pageant on NBC Sunday night. It’s a moment that has already caused quite a stir, as well as comparisons to that infamous answer by Miss Teen South Carolina that become a viral sensation years ago.

So why hasn’t Powell spoken out publicly about this just yet? The simple answer is that she is probably trying to process it all, and is also preparing for a chance to talk about this publicly. Given the network typically carries over coverage of the pageant, we expect a visit to “The Today Show” in her future so long as she still wants to talk about it.

For now, we at least have some sort of explanation as to what happened. According to TMZ, Powell suffered from what was a classic case of spacing out when the question was asked. Should she have asked for it to be repeated? Definitely, but for whatever reason, she didn’t. Instead, she decided to try to answer a question with just scrambled thoughts that didn’t go anywhere. It was mostly surprising given that she did not appear to be that absent-minded at any other time during the competition, and we’re still stunned that even in spite of this, she managed to finish in third place on the night.

Let’s just hope that she has a sense of humor about this, given that she’s probably going to have to wait until the next major beauty pageant before she can really start to live this down.

If you want to relive this entire ordeal we have it available for your viewing pleasure / pain, and all you have to do is visit the story over here.

Photo: NBC