Did Dan Patrick DELAY getting news of Erin Andrews Death threats?

Sportscaster DAN PATRICK says that nobody dragged their feet when it came to letting ESPN reporter ERIN ANDREWS know that her life was being threatened.

Erin was notified late last week that "The Dan Patrick Show" . . . which airs on DirecTV . . . was receiving e-mails threatening Erin's life.  And it turned out that the e-mails started coming LAST SEPTEMBER . . . although at first, they were just sexual in nature.  They didn't start turning violent until last month.  Still, Erin was pretty upset that nobody told her about them until now. 

But on his radio show Monday, Patrick explained that the show wasn't even aware it was receiving these e-mails until one of his assistants opened one last week.  That's because the show receives HUNDREDS of e-mails a day . . . and most of them are never even opened.

But once the staffer discovered last week's e-mail, he brought it to Dan's attention, who passed it along to DirecTV.  They immediately took it to the police.

In the meantime, the staffer went back into the archive of unopened e-mails and found all the rest that had been piling up since last September.  After explaining that, Patrick said, quote, "I want to make it very, very clear:  We did not sit on any type of information that had to do with these death threats.  As soon as we saw it, we passed it on." 

Check out the video here:

http://www.tmz.com/videos?autoplay=true&mediaKey=d2336407-216e-4854-a87d-dffb88cebe30