At 10 AM on January 4th, you’ll turn on your radio or pull up the ESPN app and click on the “live radio” setting. What you will hear will be a 180 from what has aired in that time slot since 2015 that it may actually hurt your ears and your brain.
Mike Greenberg will take over the 10 am – noon slot that day. There’s nothing wrong with Greeny. He’s smart. He has a mastery of broadcasting fundamentals. If this were a broadcasting school, you would expect him to be the straight A student.
If Dan Le Batard and Stugotz were in that class, they would be the kids that never study, never pay attention, and somehow manage to pull off a C on every single test. It’s not that they aren’t smart or talented. They just aren’t interested in getting an A if it means they can’t do the things they want.
Teachers of literally any other subject would take a class full of Greenberg’s. Anyone that knows radio would look at Dan and Stu and say “I need them.”
What is disappointing about Le Batard and his Marching Band to Nowhere leaving ESPN Radio isn’t necessarily that the show will be gone. That group will pop up on another platform soon enough. It is that ESPN Radio will sound incomplete without them.
Every content factory, regardless of the platform, needs at least one difference maker. If you don’t have a person or group that the public can point to and say “they are special,” you’re just noise, and noise is usually ignored.
Sometimes that difference maker is a real pain in the ass for management. But ask yourself this, do more people want to tune in live or download podcasts of a host that’s willing to put a billboard up in Cleveland mocking the homecoming of the biggest star in American sports, call Major League Baseball’s commissioner a liar to his face, and beat up on some of their most high-profile colleagues or someone who’s smart, topical and delivers really good teases?
Dan Le Batard is a special talent. He is a unique thinker and he is utterly fearless. Stugotz is a special talent. Plenty of sports radio shows have an asshole. Stu’s the only person in the format that had mastered the role of the foil – more Disney villain than Stifler from American Pie. He’s the butt of the joke that he is in on.
ESPN can take my opinion with a grain of salt. There are plenty of people there more talented and more accomplished than I am. What I write here though, isn’t from Demetri Ravanos: Assistant Content Director of Barrett Sports Media. It’s from Demetri Ravanos: fan of radio. Without The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz, ESPN, I don’t think you have much to offer me.
I’m not from New York or Boston. I don’t care about X and O sports talk or car wash interviews. I want more from the shows I listen to than just not being offended. In fact, I would trade being offended half the time if I am laughing my ass off the other half.
Look, this was an amicable parting of ways. Well…maybe it’s best to say that both sides knew this was going to happen sooner than later. It’s not like any of the ESPN brass barged into a board room one day and shouted “THAT DAN LE BATARD IS TOO INTERESTING! HE HAS TO GO!”
It’s Rajon Rondo still in Boston to start the 2013-2014 season after the Big 3 left. Really good, a potential difference maker and über-competitive. It’s just that’s not really what we do here anymore.
ESPN Radio will be fine. It is still a valuable brand name, even if programmers and GMs look at the lineup and see fewer options that will play well in their local markets. The confidence in the network may be rapidly decreasing due to two big lineup changes in less than six months, but many of those stations will live with it because they want the World Series, NBA Finals, College Football Playoff, call-ins from ESPN’s talent, and use of the four letters.
Letting Dan, Stugotz, and their crew walk out the door, moving Greenberg into their slot, and filling the vacancy at noon with a show syndicated out of their local New York affiliate sends a pretty clear message to the rest of the country though: the Northeast is the center of the sports universe and stations in other cities can either deal with it or spend more money on local talent.
Le Batard and his crew are different. No one on the show holds a degree from Syracuse, Northwestern, an Ivy League school or anywhere else that predetermines you have a spot in the sports media. They were plucked from Miami. Their style isn’t polished. They’re open about the holes in their sports knowledge. It’s made them more like their listeners than any other show on national radio. It is a shame ESPN is letting that kind of difference maker walk away.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
