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In the mid to late 90’s I was co-hosting a morning sports talk show on KFNS in St. Louis. When I would drive to the studio oh so early in the morning, there were usually two things that would help wake me up and get me going. One was the gigantic Diet Coke I would have next to me and the other was listening to Steve Czaban on the One-On-One Sports Radio Network.
It’s always a good sign someone is enjoying your programming when they won’t get out of the car when they arrive at their destination because they wanted to hear you finish a point or a segment. I can’t tell you how many times I was in my car in the KFNS parking lot for a few extra minutes to listen to something finish on Czaban’s show. Then, I could get inside before the show came back from break. We even stole one of his bits for our show. Long live ‘The Homer Roll.’
So, I already knew that I liked Czaban’s delivery, liked his style and liked his energy when I thought this week I wanted to check in on Steve and see what he was up to. I found him at 97.3 The Game in Milwaukee and eavesdropped in on The Steve Czaban Show this past Friday.
In addition to One on One, Czaban has done national work for ESPN Radio, FOX Sports Radio and The Sporting News Radio/Yahoo Sports Radio/SB Nation outlet. Locally he worked in Santa Barbara, Chicago, Milwaukee, Charlotte and spent many years in Washington, D.C. at WTEM. In 2019, he took over the morning slot at 97.3 The Game in Milwaukee and hosts weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m.
Steve Czaban is really good at what he does, and he has done it for a long time. Looking back at the BSM Top 20 rankings since they began in 2015, you will find his name listed throughout no matter where he was broadcasting, no matter the time slot, local and national.
Czaban is joined on the show by one of the tallest co-hosts around, 6-11 Brian Butch, the former Wisconsin Badger and current radio analyst for the program. As the Friday episode started there was intrigue right away as Butch and some of the producers had tried to guess how Czaban would start the show with all of the various stories of the day. Czaban chose to start with the questionable officiating to end the Thursday Night Football game between the Cincinnati Bengals and Baltimore Ravens.
“That also means that I know you way too well,” Butch said when Czaban started out as that is what he predicted. “I’m driving home, catch the end of the game and I’m thinking, ‘oh boy here goes Czabes’…they are putting it on a silver platter for him.”
Czaban doesn’t hold back on his thoughts on the missed calls and even goes in on Al Michaels and goes as far as calling him, “terrible.” Czaban has the same criticism on Michaels as some did on Bob Costas during the baseball playoffs, which is that his energy no longer matches the action. Czaban would later add about Michaels, “You suck, retire.”
The show moves. With Czaban, Butch and Andrew Luddy contributing, others popping by, listener engagement and a guest when called for, there are plenty of voices that contribute. Czaban is the clear ringleader, and you never quite know when he may stray off topic for a moment, create a new, quick, fun topic, before getting back to the topic he started with.
It’s like when an artist all of a sudden stops one of their hit songs at a concert, covers someone else’s hit song in the middle of it, then gets back to their own hit. Just full of surprises, but you want more of it.
They have fun, they are funny and there is absolutely no lack of opinion on anything. Plus, Czaban isn’t afraid to break into song, in this case he covered a Christmas song and changed the lyrics to be about the bad officiating in the NFL.
Throughout the three hours, they covered all the pertinent topics to the market and covered them well. They ran through the highlights of the day and hit on the win for Wisconsin the night before in basketball and a rare win for the struggling Milwaukee Bucks.
Football is king in Milwaukee like it is everywhere else, however, it happens to be a bye week for the Packers and the Badgers, so this particular show has more open space to fill. The team does a nice job going back to the NFL from time to time for the new listeners.
The Thursday night game came back up later on, and the hosts gave some thoughts on how Joe Burrow has handled some of the Bengals’ challenges including the bad officiating. Czaban played a clip of what Al Michaels said about the officiating and said about Michaels, “He just pulled his pants down and took a giant dump on the NFL’s product. He said what announcers are not supposed to say.”
A Ravens uniform conversation would lead to a quick ‘Name 3’ getting thrown in, which in this case was Czaban asking each member of the team to name the three colors they would choose if they could only have three colors for the rest of their lives. This is where some of the brilliance of Czaban comes in. Some shows like to derail and end up spending 20-30 minutes on something, whereas some of Czaban’s bits are quick hitters, and they are back on the main topic within a few minutes.
Later the audience would learn ‘Czabes’ three favorite all time cartoon characters which was a very solid list of Foghorn Leghorn, Yosemite Sam and Daffy Duck. Soon after that, it was on to what Bronny James had done in a G League game the night before along with some banter about the breakup of singer-songwriter Zach Bryan and his girlfriend Brianna ‘Chickenfry’.
Czaban is a hard-core sports fan, he knows his stuff and even when he is doing local radio, you can tell his background in national radio as he is up to speed on seemingly all the major topics, teams and players in sports. He comes off as a guy who you would run into at the local Bar n Grill, wearing a team jersey, tracking several scores, eating a plate of wings with a cold draft beer. A sports guy. When Czaban talks point spreads and game totals, it comes out even more.
Later in the show there was quite a bit of time spent on going around the NFL and hitting on all of the games, the lines, the announcers, the key matchups and the hosts picks. One of their sister iHeartMedia stations in the market airs VSiN programming, so the guys had fun new liners made with Brent Musburger they had introduced. Throughout the show, they do a good job using drops and clips like they did with the new liners.
I enjoy the wagering talk, so I appreciated the thorough analysis and that it wasn’t something where someone just named a team. There were reasons given behind the picks and if anything related to the Packers it was brought up to localize it. The listeners, and I, learned about the term ‘rental tux game’ which was one I had never heard. Czaban used this to describe the Chiefs-Broncos game and the 7.5 points the Chiefs were giving up. He said like a rental tux, the game felt “very uncomfortable, the shoes hurt your feet, its itchy, it doesn’t quite fit right.”
They would later go very in depth on the Bucks and the horrible start to the season they have had under Doc Rivers. Trey Crosby, host of the Bucks podcast, Cream City Crossover, joined the show and dropped a ton of knowledge on things happening with the team. Another sign of a true professional sports radio host came across in this segment – Czaban let his guest talk. Crosby is clearly on top of the team and had several topics he was able to provide insight on, so they let him talk and didn’t try and spend the interview proving how much they knew.
Coming down the stretch, you could tell the week was coming to an end. The guys had a fun segment called ‘Let’s Go’s and Oh No’s’ where they asked each other and listeners to talk about what they were doing that weekend but also something they are upset about. Many of the fans chose the local teams not having football games as their ‘Oh No’s’ but it was a fun way to incorporate life into the conversation as people, including Butch, talked about their kids and different activities they would be doing over the weekend. It was a good bit that engaged the audience.
As Czaban himself said on the show, “this is what guys talk about, we talk sports – mostly – and whatever else we get into…everything seems to stem off of sports.”
Czaban started to list all of the various things they had talked about just on this episode alone. In response, Butch pointed out, “We don’t need two bye weeks, we can’t handle two bye weeks.”
Dave Greene is a former Editor and Columnist for Barrett Media. His background includes over 25 years in media and content creation. A former sports talk host and play-by-play broadcaster, Dave transitioned to station and sales management, co-founded and created a monthly sports publication and led an ownership group as the operating partner. He has managed stations and sales teams for Townsquare Media, Cumulus Media and Audacy. Upon leaving broadcast media he co-founded Podcast Heat, a sports and entertainment podcasting network specializing in pro wrestling nostalgia. To interact, find him on Twitter @mr_podcasting.
