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Originally Posted by GreenLantern2814
COVID has crushed that station.
They’ve never had the easiest time of it, post-Iggy. The fan base has never felt like it embraced this new group - between players not living up to expectations (Bennett) plateauing and sharply declining in their mid 20s (Monahan) or being perceived to perpetually have one foot out the door (Gaudreau/Tkachuk), the interest has always felt arms length at best.
Tough to run a radio station like that at the best of times - it can’t be cheap beaming 50,000 amps or whatever all day every day. There are only so many car dealerships to buy ad space.
If I think back to the golden years of the Fan, they had everything:
-killer morning show with Mike Richards - say what you will about him, he was funny. And funny enough to have his bits replayed during the day as commercials.
-prime time US syndicated show - Rome. Not gonna have another Rome fight, but 10-1 works best with a big American name - it just does.
-Afternoons with Joe Sports (RIP) and Rob Kerr - Rob was a community historian. He had a real great sense of what made moments special, even if he couldn’t capture them as a PBP man.
All of it anchored by a Hall of Fame PBP man, Peter Maher.
The single biggest mistake of Kirsch’s tenure was replacing Maher with Derek Wills.
We live in the age of “nothing matters”, where quality is secondary to affordability, where keeping your job takes precedence over being great at it.
Here’s the difference between Wills and Maher: I would listen to Peter read a phone book. Derek calls the game like he’s reading one.
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Sports radio was always terrible for the most part but it was competing with other radio stations as you had no other options to entertain yourself at work or in the car besides the radio.
The radio hosts were either guys screaming for whatever reason or older 'legends' who were phoning it in. And then you'd get people calling in suggesting awful trades.
Now they have competition in terms of podcasts and Spotify/Apple Music where you can listen to what you actually want to. Its a dying format.