You ever fall down the YouTube rabbit hole? You know what I’m talking about. When you punch it up on your smart TV looking for the latest big movie trailer and somehow four hours later you’re watching an episode of Geraldo from 1988 where the skinheads end up throwing chairs at the audience. I fell down the sports radio YouTube rabbit hole recently, and it was fascinating.
When you get the YouTube algorithm tuned exactly where you want it, it feeds you. So you can’t blame me when an episode of ESPN’s Outside The Lines from 1995 profiling the rise of sports talk radio popped up in my recommended video’s cue.
I was enthralled — for a variety of reasons — with what I saw on the screen.
And the longer I watched, the more I was taken aback by how much of sports radio has stayed the same. Large personalities, strong opinions, and shouting for coaches to be fired for the slightest misstep. Outside of tweed sport coats, every single station being only on AM and shots of the World Trade Center, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference!
But then it hit me how much different the genre was compared to this moment in time. And rightfully so. Sports talk radio was just an infant in 1995. I’m not even sure if it was potty trained by then (and judging by the tone of some of the segments from Bob Ley and others, I’m almost certain they agreed the medium wasn’t potty trained).
One of the first segments in the hour-long episode was about the prevalence of callers, with one portion of the show dedicated to a specific caller into The Ticket in Dallas, and how hosts like Norm Hitzges and callers into the station became his virtual friends because he worked remotely (sound familiar?).
Today? Good luck finding many programs — outside of The Paul Finebaum Show and The Dan Patrick Show — that dedicate any real length of time to taking calls. I’m not going to call it a “lost art”, because I don’t know how many are clamoring to hear more from Jim Tom in Tuckesee, but it certainly is a drastic change.
Another difference noticeable was both the lack of diversity and the lack of former players on the air. The episode is almost exclusively filled with middle-aged white men as hosts, with former Chicago Bears offensive lineman Dan Jiggets serving as one of the few former players and only host of Color featured in the show.
Now? Sports radio hasn’t completely dealt with its lack of diversity issue, but it has gotten better, especially with Black and female hosts. But former players? Boy have they found a home on sports radio. Just look at 94WIP, for instance, each show is an iteration of “radio guy and former Eagle”. There are all too many familiar stories in major market drivetime shows around the nation. But in 1995? It was whoever could yell the loudest and be the most boastful.
Which brings me to maybe sports radio’s biggest change: the hubris has died down, and thankfully so. I was still watching Barney in 1995, so forgive my ignorance in not knowing if this was how the entire medium was or if it was just dudes showing off about how hip, cool, macho, and braggadocious they could be for the ESPN cameras, but my goodness. A word that starts with the letter “d” and ends with “ouchebag” came to mind several times while watching hosts brag about how they refuse to talk about “chick sports”, how they are “known as the coach killer” in town, and basically just Scott Ferrall’s entire 1995 personality.
Was it entertaining? Sometimes, absolutely. But other times it reeked of that dude who was in your friend group growing up, you weren’t entirely sure why, and his whole personality was to say things that were so outlandish or obscene simply to draw a reaction. We’ve moved past that as a medium, for the most part, and we’re better for it.
So many hosts were proud of how many coaches they got fired. I mean proud of their impact. And while I understand that many sports radio hosts still have large egos, I don’t know how many today would thump their chests about how many jobs they’ve torpedoed, careers they’ve upended, families they’ve uprooted, and friendships they’ve decimated. Again, the format is better for it.
But one of the things that hasn’t changed is the questions from outsiders. Even in 1995, one of the popular questions of hosts was “Is sports talk radio fair?”, which still pops up today. So often you’ll hear charges about the genre — and even the media as a whole — clamoring that this coverage is fair or this coverage isn’t. I personally have an affinity to “fair”, so when one of the first stories was about a radio station discussing the alleged infidelity of an MLB player, and then welcoming his supposed mistress on the air with absolutely no background info whatsoever, no, sports radio wasn’t fair in that instance.
Or when one of the OTL reporters pestered Ferrall about his comments on Michigan running back Tyrone Wheatley being a “wussy” — which is peak mid-90s lingo — before presenting the then KNBR host with evidence that the rusher had only missed two games in his college career, and finished with more than 600 carries in his college career, the host admitted it wasn’t fair, but he didn’t care because it was provocative.
My favorite nugget was the idea that in 1995, coaches, players, teams, agents, and front-office personnel were adamant they didn’t listen to the genre, while the hosts were insistent those same people were utilizing sports talk radio to get their message to the masses.
It’s still a prevalent opinion, but we all know that’s not true. No matter how often those inside the game tell you they don’t listen, we know they do, and they enjoy the discussions just as much as we do.
So…just how different is sports radio today than it was in 1995? In the best ways, its drastically different. The format has evolved and shaped an entirely new medium — podcasting. In other ways, it hasn’t changed one bit. And I like to think, overall, it is in a much better, more palatable for the masses spot than it was in its infancy.
Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing bi-weekly industry features and a weekly column. He has previously served as Program Director and Afternoon Co-Host on 93.1 The Fan in Lima, OH, and is the radio play-by-play voice of Northern Michigan University hockey. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
