Fred Russell (August 27, 1906 – January 26, 2003) was an American sportswriter from Tennessee who served as sports editor for the Nashville Banner newspaper for 68 years (1930–1998). He was a member of the Heisman Trophy Committee, president of the Football Writers Association of America and a member of several sports-related Halls of Fame. He served for nearly 30 years as chairman of the College Football Hall of Fame Honors Court, a group responsible for selecting College Football Hall of Fame members. Known for his sense of humor and story-telling ability, Russell authored several books about sports and sports humor. Over his career he wrote over 12,000 sports columns under the title, "Sideline Sidelights".

Russell was a long-time friend and protégé of fellow sportswriter and Vanderbilt University alumnus Grantland Rice. Vanderbilt established the "Fred Russell–Grantland Rice Sportswriting Scholarship" in their honor. For over fifty years, the scholarship has attracted some of the nation's top journalistic talent.

As a young reporter, he interviewed Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Lou Gehrig. Outliving most of his contemporaries, he counted as friends many sports greats of the twentieth century, including Jack Dempsey, Bobby Jones, Red Grange, Sparky Anderson, Bobby Knight, Bear Bryant, Archie Manning and George Steinbrenner. He died in 2003 at age 96.

Born in 1906, Russell grew up in Wartrace, Tennessee, about 50 miles southeast of Nashville, on the main line of the railroad to Chattanooga. His parents were John E. Russell and Mable Lee McFerrin Russell, who in 1920 moved the family to Nashville. John E. Russell Jr. was his older brother, who died in 1961. Russell's father started a newspaper, the Wartrace Tribune, but it was short-lived; he became a salesman for a wholesale grocery company and traveled the middle Tennessee territory with a horse and buggy in his early career. Russell’s mother was a music composer and author of the "Vanderbilt University Waltz". Russell attended Nashville's Duncan College Preparatory School for Boys, which was located at a site now occupied by Vanderbilt University's Memorial Gymnasium. Even from his youngest days, Russell had loved the sports pages. He wanted a job as a newspaper office boy, but it only paid three dollars per week and he could make much more by working at a soda fountain downtown at the United Cigar Store. One of his best friends around the cigar store was Phil Harris, whose father was a musician at the adjacent Knickerbocker Theater. Russell saved enough money over a year to enter Vanderbilt in the fall of 1923. He was a member of Kappa Sigma fraternity, and a varsity baseball player. He played second base and pitched. He attended Vanderbilt Law School, passed the state bar exam, and was listed in the class of 1929. He did legal work at a title company for 18 months and found out pretty quickly that "it was not the most exciting kind of work". He was offered a job at the Nashville Banner ; first writing obituaries, then working the police beat, then covering Vanderbilt football. Regarding the football coverage Russell said, “I got the luckiest break in the world in June of '29. . . in weeks, I knew that I never wanted to do anything else." The following year, he became the sports editor of the Banner, replacing Ralph McGill who left to go to the Atlanta Constitution. Russell would be a member of the Banner staff until the paper closed in 1998. Over the next 68 years, Russell wrote over 12,000 columns, most of them in his weekly column "Sideline Sidelights " later shortened to simply "Sidelines".

Russell's career began in the so-called Golden Age of sports—a period beginning about the 1920s when newspapers and radio were a prominent form of media and news. The events Russell regularly covered were: college football; amateur and pro baseball; the Masters Golf Tournament; the Kentucky Derby; championship boxing; college football bowl games, including The Sugar Bowl and The Rose Bowl; and The Olympic Games (1960–1976). Russell gained national exposure in the mid-twentieth century for writing a widely-read annual college football article, the "Pigskin Preview", for The Saturday Evening Post. His relationship with the Post began when the magazine wanted to do a story on the University of Tennessee's new football coach, Bob Neyland, who had in 1939 created arguably one of the greatest football teams ever assembled: undefeated, untied, and un-scored-upon in the regular season. The magazine wanted a southern writer, and chose Russell. His article, "Touchdown Engineer" appeared in the issue leading up to the highly anticipated 1940 Rose Bowl (Tennessee vs. USC) and put Russell on the national scene in sportswriting. The article's popularity led the Post to hire him to write the Pigskin Preview series each year from 1949 to 1962.

Grantland Rice was an influential pioneer of the sportswriting world and he was Russell's boyhood idol. They first met in the 1930s and remained longtime friends even though Rice was 26 years older. They were both raised in Nashville and both graduates of Vanderbilt University. Rice worked for about three years at the Tennessean from 1907 to 1910.

In May 1954, when Rice was in declining health, Russell recalled a memorable lunch with him at Rice's regular corner table at Toots Shor's restaurant in New York. With sportswriter Bill Corum, they swapped stories extending all afternoon until five o'clock with Schor himself in on some of them. When Rice died two months later, Russell and Corum developed the idea of creating a Rice scholarship and, in 1956, the Grantland Rice Scholarship at Vanderbilt was begun. Endowed by the Thoroughbred Racing Association (TRA), the scholarship is awarded annually to an incoming first-year student with an interest in sportswriting. The rules do not require recipients to be sportswriters; in addition, Vanderbilt did not have a school of journalism. From the beginning, Russell was involved in the administration and selection process of the scholarship. In 1986, after Russell had been closely managing the endeavor for 30 years, Charles J. Cella, a past president of the TRA, further endowed the scholarship with a $500,000 gift in honor of Russell, changing its name to the Fred Russell-Grantland Rice Sportswriting Scholarship. For over fifty years, the scholarship has attracted some of the nation's top journalistic talent coming out of high school. Some of the more well-known recipients have included Skip Bayless, Roy Blount, and Andrew Maraniss. The scholarship fell on hard times in the 1990s when the university reduced the award to $10,000 yearly to prolong the life of scholarship. With rising tuition costs, the later scholarship was roughly one quarter of the full package earlier recipients received.

For nearly three decades, Russell was the chairman of the National Football Foundation (NFF)'s "Honors Court" which oversees the College Football Hall of Fame. The organization was founded in 1947, and Russell became involved in it in the 1960s to become president in 1964. According to author Andrew Derr, the Honors Court is the most powerful group in college football. Russell served its chairman from 1964 to 1991, a role perfectly suited for him because he had, according to Derr, "an instinctive sense of fairness and prudence" along with significant experience in college football and relationships with the coaches and administrators. Derr said, "From Paul Bryant to Archie Manning, Frank Broyles to Lee Corso, Johnny Majors to Lou Holtz, Russell had relationships with all of them." A difficult decision came to Russell and the committee in 1959, when LSU's Heisman-Trophy winner Billy Cannon was scheduled to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, but pleaded guilty to a counterfeiting operation after FBI agents recovered $5 million in bogus $100 bills buried on Cannon's property. Russell chose to rescind the hall of fame invitation. Cannon was eventually inducted in 2008.