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NFL conversations dominate sports talk radio. But 93.3 KJR host Ian Furness believes there is room for other discussions, and doesn’t think it’s a good thing that hosts aren’t knowledgeable about anything other than football.
While appearing on the Kraken Reaction show from Davy Jones’ Locker Room, Furness — who serves as a broadcast host for the NHL franchise — said he believes its simple for hosts to carve out time to talk about things other than football and basketball, but many hosts don’t embrace other sports. And he views that as a problem.
“I never think it’s a great look for sports talk people, or just media people (to say) ‘I don’t know that sport.’ I’m done,” said Furness. “Listen, we have so many people in our business — you’re gonna get me on a soapbox — that think that they’re an all-22 guy in football. They’re not. They think that they’re an analytics person in baseball. They’re not. They think they’re a formation guy in soccer. Really, they’re not.”
He shared that former Seattle sports anchor Bruce King used to impress upon him that it’s important for sports media members to have at least some knowledge of every sport that matters to the local audience.
“You have to know a little bit about everything. You don’t have to know a lot about everything, or one thing, you have to know a little bit about everything. And I’ve always taken that to heart,” Furness continued. “So there’s nothing wrong with saying, ‘Hey, I don’t understand it,’ or ‘I don’t know it.’ When people tell me they don’t understand hockey, I do shake my head. it’s not really that hard. There’s five players on the ice, then a goalie, so six. There’s two goals at each end, and whoever puts the puck in the net the most amount of times wins the hockey game. It’s not hard. It really isn’t.
“Football is a hard sport to understand. Football is a really hard sport to understand, and even those who cover it on a daily basis, don’t really understand it because we never played it at the NFL level,” Furness said. “We do have a lot of phony people in our business that pretend like they know what’s going on. There’s some guys who didn’t play the game that can be an all-22 guy. I have a couple guys like that on my shelf. But stop it. It’s not some sort of badge of honor to say you don’t understand.”
