Toronto Sports Media Morning Drive Lineups

Heard the Dan Patrick show again on TSNR this morning. Not sure if it’s for the rest of the summer, or a one off. I know there were problems with TSNR on Friday afternoon.. Not sure what happened . There was a lot of dead air, then the ended up rebroadcasting some of Richards show.

I think that’s a small town radio move from TSN Radio. Nothing against Patrick and in the middle of summer, especially with so little hockey news, that’s a reasonable call to do that, although I think Patrick soon departs this week for NBC’s Olympic coverage, or at least to get ready for it, so unless he’s doing his radio show from England for a few days, that experiment will be short-lived.

But no matter what anyone says or how anyone perceives the shortcomings of the Fan 590 hosts, let’s face it, if 590 decided to suddenly air a syndicated American program at 9am for a couple straight weeks because they were so short on adequate talent to put on the air, they’d get killed on these boards, and probably even in the mainstream media as well.
It’s another statement that TSN is just happy to be on the air and they’re fine with going with inferior talent because they’re not truly competing against the Fan and maybe they never were, given some of their very non-descript hires like McArthur and certainly their weekend hosts. Outside of luring Mike Richards to a fat contract and zero results away from Calgary, they’ve either hired in-house (Cybelski) or gone with relative unknowns in the market. If I recall they splashed on Richards, because Andrew Krystal was in mornings at 590 and maybe they thought they could take advantage of Krystal’s trainwreck of a show. Either way, they seem to have accomplished nothing but losing money so far, but they make so much on the TV side, maybe they don’t care. This is a sign that they’d rather not even spend an hourly rate to fill the 9-noon when a host is on vacation.

I get that it’s very slow with sports news, and if you don’t like the CFL, then wow, it’s only baseball that will catch your fancy for another month until NFL exhibition season starts and other fall sports start up, but running a syndicated show during the daytime basically says “we give up”.

Lost on Friday about the McCown contract chat was whether the 6 years is guaranteed. Silly to ask, I guess, but kind of like an athlete, doesn’t that take Bob until he’s 66 or almost 67 years of age. A lot can happen in those years, and as dominant as he’s been lately against competitors, I’d think some credit goes to the station simply sounding younger and whether it’s been Tim and Sid or Brady bringing younger listeners around to listen, and Bob sharing his older listeners with those shows, it would be interesting to know (TSM?) if Rogers has an out or whether they guarantee him all 6 years.

I’ve heard two things about the radio and TV biz, one that those guaranteed contracts are rare but do sometimes happen, but most smart companies give themselves at least some wiggle room to get out. It’s easier to get guarantees if you do play-by-play because those spots do seem harder to fill, meaning to get someone real good that the audience will buy into right away. I agree with all those posting that if McCown quit tomorrow (and now we know he won’t), the vast majority of the audience would stay because they feel comfortable listening to that station in that timeslot.

Nice post, Julian. I agree on all counts.

As a contrast, The Fan is using Elliotte Freidman as PTS fill in host this week. Looking forward to hearing that actually.

I agree with Julian’s comments even though I am a fan of the Patrick show and would much rather hear it than the local show 1050 has been airing in the mid-morning timeslot

Hayes is away for the next two weeks and they have apparently imported a guy from the States to fill in for him…………..today he has talked a lot about the TiCats pulling the plug on the air conditioning in the Argos dressing room……………..in other words, the dog days of summer are officially here for Toronto sports radio

Julian has said several times in the past that Friedman is not entertaining enough to be the host of a sports radio show…………if he is the fill-in host for PTS this week I guess we will see how he does…………..I think if you gave him the right co-host(s) he has the potential to be a good host, maybe not as entertaining as McCown but definitely more informative

I hope Rogers is paying you well Julian.