Last week it became official that Ryan Hurley would take over running WFAN in New York. One of the other candidates for the position, it is now well known, was Jon ‘Stugotz’ Weiner and the subject has come up recently on his show.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz played clips of WFAN’s Sal Licata and Brandon Tierney butchering their names and saying Stugotz “wasn’t good enough” to come back to New York.
“Thats a classic sports radio move where you know their names, but you give off like you don’t know their names,” Stugotz said. “…[Dan] may not know who Sal is and I believe you when you say that. He knows very well who you are, and he knows who I am.”
Since finding out about the interest Stugotz had in the position, the cast of Le Batard’s show has joked several times about who he was going to fire and which air shift he would have tried to appoint himself to take over.
“Do they know that you wanted to fire them?” Le Batard asked in reference to Licata and Tierney. “Are they in a timeslot that you would want?”
“They’re in the midday timeslot,” Stugotz replied “…And no that’s not who I was going to fire, it was gonna be Evan Roberts,” he quipped.
Stugotz went on to say he is a WFAN fan and listener and had he taken the position it would have been because he loves the station.
“I will say this, all three shows do a great job,” he said. “It’s why I wanted to take the job. That station is incredible, where you could put any two people in a four-hour window and have them talk about a bunt and boom, ten shares. It’s insane. But they do a good show. So, I don’t know why Sal has beef with me. He always thinks I’m coming up to take his stuff, I’m not taking your stuff. I’m not taking your stuff. I was going to be your boss.”
Stugotz then, somewhat out of left field, said, “…If I did a remote, an appearance side by side against Sal and Brandon Tierney, by myself, with no promotion except a couple of tweets. I’m telling you I would outnumber their promotion by at least five thousand people. But I didn’t want their jobs. I wanted to help them become better at their jobs. That’s all.
“I was trying to take everything I’ve learned in the radio industry over a couple of decades and pour it back into a radio station that I love and hosts that I love. I do, I listen to those shows, I like those shows.”
