Some radio hosts are born into a family of sports junkies. Other hosts grow into being more sports-minded later in life. For Nashville host Buck Reising, it was the latter. He majored in political science and intended to go to law school. After all, his parents both worked in politics and government. Instead, Reising took a detour and now talks more about 3-4 defenses than defense spending.
Hosting a midday show on 104.5 The Zone is just one of the many hats Reising wears. He also covers the Tennessee Titans for A to Z Sports and hosts multiple podcasts including The Install with NFL analyst Greg Cosell. Reising talks about his unconventional path in the industry, how hosts need more than just terrestrial radio, and what an unpredictable menu of options might mean for his future. Enjoy!
BN: How did you make your way from Indiana down to Tennessee?
BR: Well, I didn’t have a job at the end of college. I didn’t really get into the broadcasting type of stuff. I was a Poli Sci major, but I just kind of ended up interested at the very end of my college career in broadcasting. I got an internship down here with the other radio station, 102.5 the ESPN affiliate, while I was finishing up a summer class. I got an unpaid internship with them. That ended up turning into a part-time job, where I was working overnights for pennies the way that everybody does.
They didn’t have anybody covering the NFL team in town, the Titans. I think there was a press conference where they had two first-round picks one year with Corey Davis and Adoree’ Jackson, and we didn’t have anybody there. I was asking, like, hey, would it make sense if we had somebody to go to practice on a regular basis and get audio and video from the football players since we have an NFL team down the street? That ended up turning into me being the Titans reporter for that station with zero experience whatsoever. It was all kind of a trip and fall into different experiences that I had no business or qualifications having, but got very, very early on. It was a lot of fun.
BN: What career did you envision yourself having years ago if sports radio wasn’t in the picture?
BR: I was going to go to law school. Both of my parents worked in politics and government. My mom was at a lobbying firm for a telecommunications company. Probably something along those lines. Sports are not really a part of my background, to be honest. And certainly I had no interest in or had no idea that this was something that people could make money doing. But then I figured out, yeah, it might pay you some money at some point if you stick with it long enough. It ended up being a lot of fun.
BN: How did you go from initially not being interested in sports radio to being a sports radio host?
BR: It beat the hell out of a normal job. [Laughs] I don’t think I’m cut out for typical office settings, I guess. I don’t necessarily know that I’d have the attention span. I just don’t think it would be a good environment for me to be able to be any kind of productive, and sports radio seemed interesting. It was something that people seemed to have a lot of fun doing. Certainly, it’s more of a playground than most people’s workplaces are. I think I was doing some yardwork or something like that with my stepdad. He said you can either go to college or you can work on a shovel, and this beats the hell out of a shovel.
BN: What’s your general approach when it comes to the different shows that you’re doing?
BR: I guess that depends because they’re all different. The radio show is just more general interest. It’s NFL, it’s SEC, Tennessee Volunteers, Tennessee Titans. We have the NHL down here, but we really don’t do too much hockey unless there’s a big enough story to warrant that. A little more ability to kind of like freelance, have a little more personality because it’s just three hours. It’s me and two producers, Lucas Panzica and Robert Walsh. I think we work really, really well off one another since they hired us maybe about two years ago.
The streaming show is a lot different. It’s on YouTube, it’s on Facebook, it’s just me and a camera and commenters for 25 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour and a half because I do it on Sunday nights after games. It’s almost like playing a trivia game with audience members, just question and answer type stuff.
The podcast with Greg Cosell is super film-oriented. I’m watching a lot more of other teams beyond the Tennessee Titans. I know Greg is very, very detail-oriented and I can’t just like lob him up questions for him to take generally because he’s going to ask me for specifics. I know I’m going to have to do my homework on that. There’s just a very different kind of audience for that kind of football discussion versus general quarterback rankings and things like that. Then the other podcast is just Titans media based. It’s just other members of Titans media coming on and talking about whatever’s going on with the team that week.
BN: You had a pretty good digital thing going on, what was it about local radio or the Zone specifically that was appealing to you?
BR: It was the biggest operation in town. The streaming company is something that I’m still fortunate to have. My agent, Shaun Wyman, is a rockstar and he was able to get a deal done to where I got to keep both.
I’d never done it before. It sounded like fun. The Zone has had a really good reputation and has the Titans, has the Vols. It’s the thing that everybody goes to here locally because they can’t get it nationally with a market size like this and a team like the Titans that doesn’t have the kind of star power that might warrant 20 minutes on NFL Live or something like that. It just made the most sense because it was the biggest platform, and if they were going to offer me a spot, I wasn’t going to say no.
BN: Listeners have compared you to Midday 180 because it’s the same time slot. What do you think of those comparisons and how did you deal with it early on, especially?
BR: Honestly, those guys are great. I still talk to [Paul] Kuharsky. Maybe not every day, but whenever we’re around Titans stuff. I asked those guys why they were leaving before I took the gig. You just want to just make sure you’re doing all your due diligence everywhere. I’m not from Nashville. Those guys are a Nashville institution. It’s nothing about them, it’s just I wasn’t consuming stuff like that. I didn’t really know how big they were to people locally, until it became a whole big deal, like, okay, I was going to replace them. I just really never thought about it that way.
They’re three dudes, I’m one. I’ve got two producers who are great. Obviously, it’s not just a solo show, it’s not Cowherd or whatever, but it’s a very different show. Those guys are probably 10, 15 years older than me. It’s not something that was necessarily going to be generationally aligned. It’s completely different stuff. I honestly respect the work that those guys do and that they did here. It’s hard to stay in any job for a decade the way that they did. But it just honestly was never a part of the issue for me.
BN: Listeners typically freak out about a new show. They’re like where’s the old show? This new one stinks. How long did it take for that tone to change and the feedback to be a lot more positive?
BR: Honestly, not to sound like a jerk, but I didn’t really get a bunch of shit. You have one or two or something like that. I think one of the first weeks I was on-air a caller told me to piss up a rope or something. I wasn’t prepared for it because I’d never done daily radio before. I didn’t know what the hell we were doing, or how to deal with callers, or that I have a tone problem sometimes or whatever. But yeah, I didn’t really have a bunch of bad feedback out the gate.
I think it might have helped that it wasn’t just midday that was moving on at the time. They had the Wake Up Zone that I think was on the air for something like 17 years. That had turned over. Everything was a transition, it wasn’t just me that was coming in new.
We were terrible for probably the first year and a half that we were on the air. It was not a good radio show. There’s still days that I’ll walk away and be like, I don’t know what the hell I just did, but I don’t think it was good. It’s definitely a lot better now that we kind of know what we’re doing, even though we don’t really know what we’re doing.
BN: What have you gotten better at as a host and where’s the biggest growth of the show overall?
BR: The biggest growth is that I’m not just talking. I thought that if I’m going to do a solo radio show that I’m going to just have to talk the entire time. That was something that I had to figure out, okay, I can incorporate audio and stuff like that from press conferences. I’m at every game so I’ve got stuff that I can bring back and guests that I can get. But my producers are very, very involved. They are essential to making the show sound listenable at all, because otherwise it’d just be me yammering the entire time.
That’s certainly a place that once I got more comfortable with it, then it just seemed to flow more naturally, more conversationally. I think it just got better, the more comfortable that all of us were because we all were new basically at the same time. I didn’t really know the guys that I was working with when they hired me. Then we all just sat in a room together and had to figure it out.
But definitely pacing. I talk fast. Letting things breathe was hard for me for the longest time. It’d just be me burying people. I was going 100 miles an hour; that’s how I do the streaming show because it’s internet, it’s a short attention span. I can physically see people coming in and going out of the show numerically. I just felt like I had to be talking fast to keep people’s attention. That, and interview style. I ask shorter questions now in ways that I could hear myself rambling really, really badly. I just had to get out of the way and let the guest talk.
BN: As a guy who does both terrestrial radio and podcasts, what would you say to a host that is only interested in doing terrestrial radio?
BR: You better figure out something else. I don’t think anybody’s making it just doing one thing, no matter what it is. But you’ve got to have options. You’ve got to be versatile. Whether that’s writing and radio, whether that’s podcasts and radio, whether that’s podcasts, writing, radio and streaming that I’m doing. I’ve got friends who do studio shows for the SEC Network on top of doing terrestrial radio.
You just have to make sure that you’re capable of doing a variety of different things because you never know what is going to be presented to you and what opportunities are going to end up where. You have to make sure that you are capable of handling all those things, if you’ve at least got a toe in a variety of different places to make you more than just a radio host. I don’t think anybody can exist as just anything in our industry at this point.
BN: How about for the future, is there anything you would like to do specifically or experience over the next five or 10 years?
BR: Sure, there’s a bunch of stuff. But I just think that’s such a hard question. Not even trying to cop out, I just have no idea what the media environment is going to look like in five to 10 years. What is Netflix and Apple and Amazon Prime now building out original content going to do to things like network jobs and stuff like that. I never did radio before this gig. I love radio. I want to do this as long as humanly possible. I think it’s a ridiculous thing that people get paid money to do. It’s fun to just have three hours a day to screw around with your friends and talk sports. It’s pretty unique that way.
And with the way that everything’s becoming even more fractured in terms of talent, where you’re seeing networks and corporations being willing to talent share in a situation like I’m already doing it at a local level with A to Z Sports and Cumulus with 104.5 The Zone. How many more opportunities does that present? I just think it’s a whole different menu item of options that’s evolving right in front of us.
I wish I could give you a more direct answer. I’d like to do more NFL games, more of different teams just for the sake of variety. The Titans have been hugely compelling while they’re down here. I’ve been really lucky with it, but something that involves more football because football is the thing that people can’t get enough of. As long as there’s football, there’s jobs.
Brian Noe is a columnist for BSM and an on-air host heard nationwide on FOX Sports Radio’s Countdown To Kickoff. Previous roles include stops in Portland, OR, Albany, NY and Fresno, CA. You can follow him on Twitter @TheNoeShow or email him at bnoe@premierenetworks.com.
