BSM Writers
This May Be Jason Martin’s Shot To Do Something Special
“In terms of giving up on the movies, television and all of that pro wrestling, which I worked in for 10 years, not going to happen. The reason I got the job It’s because I offered something unique.”
Nashville hates you right now.
That was the sentiment Jason Martin heard from some listeners on what was supposed to be the most exciting week of his radio career. For eight, long years he worked tirelessly for the opportunity to host a daily show. Finally, Martin was given one of the most sought after shows in all of Nashville – mornings at 104.5 The Zone.
Sports radio listeners seldom like change, especially if a show has been around for a long period of time. That was certainly the case in Nashville, after The Zone let Kevin Ingram and Mark Howard go after 16 years in morning drive. The duo had been a staple of the city’s morning commute for several years and the move was met, as it always is, with some resistance from the locals. Instead of being instantly accepted, Martin became the embodiment of change that nobody ever wants.
“We’re replacing a show that was on the air for 16 years,” said Martin. “Very few shows get that kind of run and they were very beloved guys. They just became a part of people’s routine and both of them were great to me. It was bittersweet for me when I found out exactly what was happening. I knew they were going to be doing more with me but I didn’t know specifically what that was going to look like until the last second. It was kind of tough to deal with, because, those guys had become a routine for people… nobody likes change at the time and I was the embodiment of that change.”
Martin found the transition to be incredibly difficult in the infancy of the new show. He saw what people were saying, including a couple of fan articles that he didn’t read, but he was told expressed disappointment or anger. There was never a second to celebrate the moment he had worked so hard for. Instead, the position he had waited so long for, was sucking the life out of him.
“Criticism always lasts in our minds. Affirmation doesn’t. Even if it’s a small amount of the former and a ton of the latter. It’s how humans are built unfortunately,” said Martin. “Sure, there’s always someone who’s not going to like your opinion, but not like this. It was just kind of like Nashville hates you. I’ve never thought that stuff bothered me until the last four weeks. It’s been a tough transition, especially, considering the first few weeks were just me doing solo radio for three hours. I’ve done solo radio for Fox and others, have my own show now for them… but it’s not where I think I’m best. I’ve always wanted a partner in crime. I was in a role where people already didn’t want to like me, and even if I was good, which I’m not saying I was, it really wasn’t going to matter.”
The old saying is ‘tough times don’t last, but tough people do.’ Granted, hosting a morning radio show isn’t exactly suffering, but the negative attention was really starting to get to Martin, even to the point where he thought the industry might not be for him anymore. He was second guessing himself. But everything turned around once he started searching for his new co-host.
Martin knew he wouldn’t have the final say on who his partner was going to be, but he confided in people he trusted in the market, hoping to at least point management in the direction of people he thought he’d work really well with. That’s when someone he trusted told him the name Ramon Foster.
“Ramon’s name is the first one that came out from, probably, the guy I trust the most,” Martin said. “So I looked online and watched the 20 questions video (A Pittsburgh Steelers production) on him with my wife and as soon as it was over, she just looked at me and was like, you got to get him. It was so patently obvious so I went to our new program director the day after and said, hey, have you heard this guy? He had, because another person (the same one that had put him on Jason’s radar as a matter of fact) had mentioned it to him a few months before, but once I mentioned it, it really kind of made him say, ‘we really need to make this happen.’ He talked to him like a day later and revealed that he fell in love with him 30 seconds after they first started talking. That’s apparently the effect this guy has.”
Normally, it takes two hosts weeks or even months to find their groove with one another, But with Martin and Foster, it was found almost instantaneously. So much so, that Martin and his producer, Jonathan Shaffer, looked at each other after one of the first shows with Foster and said, wow, that’s one of the easiest shows we’ve ever done.
“There’s just something about our flow,” Martin said. “Something about us in that room, where, today we sounded like we’ve been doing the show for months, not like we just started. I know when he’s going to stop talking, I know what his gesturing is and it’s just all about letting him be him and creating space to allow him to become a star. Him coming now, I mean, good Lord. Just in the last two days, yesterday, he was able to talk about his memories of playing against Von Miller and what Mike Tomlin said about him in the locker room. Then, Ryan Shazier retires. He played with him, so to open the third hour, I was like, hey, I don’t want to go into an emotional spot you don’t want to get into, but what do you wanna say about your teammate? He just let it all out over the microphone and I just sat back for about five minutes because I knew nobody was turning that off.”
To say Martin has a totally different feeling about the new show since Foster joined, is probably the understatement of the century. In fact, the talk now is more about the realization the show can turn into something truly special.
“I just look at this and say, we have an opportunity,” Martin said. “Maybe the only opportunity that we may ever have, my producer said it this way, he goes, ‘this might be the only shot you and I ever have to do something special.’ During his 20+ years he said we have a chance to do something special. Ramon is a superstar in every way when it comes to preparation, caring about this job, being active and committed. He’s just awesome. I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone more instantly likable. Guys and gals sometimes never find that magic partner. I think I hit a home run on our first swing. He’s a blessing.
“The Covid era means you’re getting 35-40% of the audience that you’re used to. People are just now starting to get back in their cars and the numbers might be starting to rise. We’re starting a show where the engagement level was down. That’s just how it’s been in a lot of local radio markets. We were able to get reps in without a full house. By the time people are really engaged and starting to come back, which, I’m starting to imagine is very near, we should be more polished. In our first two days together I felt more chemistry that I even thought possible, and we don’t even know each other yet.”
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Tyler McComas – You worked for Clay Travis at Outkick the Coverage for a while. What’s one thing you learned from him and implemented in your career?
Jason Martin: One thing Clay does really well is there’s a lot of shows, especially on a national level, that feel they need 20 topics throughout the show. They’re going to run them down like it’s television and not going to let anything breathe. The beauty of radio is that you can let something breathe until it dies its own natural death. You can sense when it’s time to move on, but if people are reacting, whether it’s on social media, phone call or you just know that story matters, then you don’t get off of it.
What Clay will do is he would call me in the morning before each show and say, what’s important today? He would go over those two or three things and that would be our show. We would throw out a couple little things here and there, but instead of going 20 topics, we went three topics. One thing Clay does great, and always has, is he has a sense for what people want to hear. He knows what his audience wants and he feeds it to them and he’s articulate and unique in the way he presents it. He has a fearless nature to it, as well. That’s happened to me, in some regards, to just, I can’t try to please everybody, because if I start to do that, I’ll lose the people that do like me.
TM: You’ve done a lot of pop culture content in the past. Do you think you’ll do more of that on the radio show?
JM: In terms of giving up on the movies, television and all of that pro wrestling, which I worked in for 10 years, not going to happen. The reason I got the job It’s because I offered something unique. It’s like putting out a podcast, I’ve had people close to me say, how can I make my podcast work? I tell them that you just have to keep doing it. You have to outlast the other guys, because even if yours is the greatest television podcast anyone’s ever heard, there’s 7,000 other ones. How are they going to know who you are and how are they going to find you? It ends up being attrition. If I get away from pop-culture entirely, if I go away from something that gave me a different sounding voice, then why do they hire me? It’s like they drafted a running quarterback and told him not to run. But there has to be some balance.
TM: Was there a lightbulb that went off when you realized what the identity of the show was going to be?
JM: Jason Romano came on the show a couple of weeks ago with me, he’s got a new book, and one of the chapters talked about Pete Carroll coming in for the Bristol car wash. That day George Steinbrenner died. Everyone is having to change everything on the fly, there’s breaking news, and Romano is having to apologize to Carroll over and over again for getting bumped. Carroll just said, ‘Hey, hey, don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it at all. I understand This is more important and if I don’t end up on the air today, it’s fine.’
The lesson Romano took away from that is the way to be a leader, and the way to be successful, is to realize you don’t have to be a thermometer, you can be the thermostat. Meaning you can set the temperature in the room. When we heard him say that on there, my producer comes in my ear, and I have the exact same thought, he said I think we just found the vision for the show.
TM: I’ve heard you talk about your producer a lot on this call. He sounds like he really knows what he’s doing.
JM: It’s interesting, because I didn’t know him particularly well, his name is Jonathan Shaffer. He’s been a program director, I think four times and been in radio for over two decades. Throughout my radio career I’ve mostly worked with people, who have become, or been at the time, a close friend of mine. Two groomsman in my wedding were guys I worked in radio with. One of the things that presented was too much agreement on the radio. We got along and everything. We rarely disagreed and never really had any arguments, things like that.
One of the things Shaffer told me very early was my job always is going to be to make you as comfortable as possible doing your job. Whatever that means, having audio ready, booking guests, keeping me aware of time, just taking as much off of my plate so I can focus on hosting the show. From there and I think the challenges of last month, dealing with audience, that either bailed and is coming back or had something to say that was mean behind their five Twitter followers, whatever it was that was bothersome, I’d go to him and say, hey man, I really hate Twitter. He’d say, don’t let them bother you.
During the process of all this, as imperfect as it was, we discovered we can rely on each other. I realized I can trust this guy to know that he’s going to know exactly what I need and what the show needs to have success. Now we’re in a situation where, here comes the third piece, but the other two of us are already working in the right kind of tandem. He can play a piece of audio without telling me about it and I’ll know why he played it. Or why he’s coming back with this bumper music, or why he makes a certain suggestion, or why he puts out a certain poll on Twitter, and he’s like that. He’s just a guy that understands what radio is supposed to sound like, as well as how it supposed to be put together. I certainly feel incredibly blessed that he’s the guy that ends up producing the show, because Ramon will tell you the same thing, you can just tell this dude knows what he’s doing and he’s 1000% committed to making the show successful
BSM Writers
Marcus Spears is One of One
“His laugh is infectious. His facial expressions are memorable. He just makes for good TV.”
Paychecks for the likes of Stephen A. Smith and Troy Aikman make headlines. The hiring and promotion of Pat McAfee started an industry-wide conversation. They all matter to ESPN, but none of them are as valuable to the network as Marcus Spears.
If that was something you didn’t know, it should be clear after last week when he took an entertaining moment on First Take, and turned it into the central conversation on social media just by naturally reacting to Chris Russo’s weekend plans.
Sports media is the entertainment business. Knowledge and insight are great, but they are useless if you are not interesting enough to hold the audience’s attention. Even the most successful and seasoned veterans in our industry can lose sight of that reality. Spears never does and more importantly he regularly delivers in both areas.
Marcus Spears’s strength is his emotion. The man has absolutely no pokerface and that’s a good thing for the audience. His laugh is infectious. His facial expressions are memorable. He just makes for good TV.
Coaches and producers are looking for the same thing. They need players and performers that are difference makers. They are stars and they can make stars out of the men and women around them. That is Spears to a tee.
For a man who earned a spot in the NFL Draft and banked millions by making quarterbacks’ lives hell, Spears has been heaven sent to the quarterbacks at ESPN. His partnership with Dan Orlovsky on NFL Live is the heartbeat of the show. Sure, Mina Kimes’s breakdowns are awesome and Adam Schefter’s information is what makes the show essential for so many fans, but it is the interplay between Spears and Orlovsky that makes the show entertaining.
Spears is a Louisiana foodie from Baton Rouge. Orlovsky drinks red win with ice in it and thinks any spice beyond salt and pepper is too much. The fact that they not only get along, but genuinely love one another, makes the frustration Spears can feel for Orlovsky better than anything else in ESPN’s day time lineup.
The first time I met Spears, it was on the set of Thinking Out Loud, the show he did on the SEC Network with Greg McElroy and Alyssa Lang. Within five minutes of his arrival on set (he was dressed like Kiss’s Gene Simmons for the show’s Halloween 2018 episode), it was easy to see that he was the glue.
I’m not the world’s biggest McElroy fan outside of game analysis, but Spears softened him and made the former Crimson Tide quarterback downright likable. That was the emotion shining through. Spears is insanely likable and he is fun to be around. You don’t have to be in the same room with him to know that. It comes through your TV screen when he is on. If he is cool with Greg McElroy, then the audience knows it can be too.
My mom adores Marcus Spears. She wants him to come to her home in Alabama so she can cook Greek food for him and listen to his stories. I told Marcus this when we met in 2018 and he responded “That’s not a surprise. Mamas love me.”
It was maybe the second or third thing we said to each other after “hello” and he already had me laughing and feeling like we were best friends. Not just anybody can do that.
But Spears does so much more than just make people feel good. Look at this clip of him on NFL Live in 2021 talking about the video of Urban Meyer receiving a lap dance from a woman that is not his wife at a restaurant in Ohio.
Spears drew on his experience as a player in the league and on the opinions he had of the Jacksonville Jaguars, who Meyer had coached to an 0-4 record at that point, to deliver a scathing take down of a guy that is rightfully remembered as the worst coach in the history of the NFL.
His thesis was clear. He was careful to note that he took his time to arrive at his conclusion, and his belief could not be shaken. That is then kind of conviction I want from a talking head demanding a coach should be fired.
Few people can communicate the way Marcus Spears can. He is clear with his opinions and finds the right balance between boldness and brevity. He is willing to answer any question you ask, but he answers in a way that is easy for the audience to digest and remember.
I just think the world of Spears as a TV presence. There are some people that are so entertaining as their authentic self that I could listen to them talk about anything and be captivated. Most of them are comedians. In the sports media world, Spears is one of one.
Demetri Ravanos is the Assistant Content Director for Barrett Sports Media. He hosts the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas. Previous stops include WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC. You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos and reach him by email at [email protected].
BSM Writers
Chad Johnson Won’t Make Inside the NFL Sound Like Algebra
“The chemistry is much better when you’re working with people you have certain things in common with and the fact that we all played makes it that much easier.”
Peter Schwartz has been involved in New York sports media for over three decades. Along the way he has worked for notable brands such as WFAN, CBS Sports Radio, WCBS 880, ESPN New York, and FOX News Radio. He has also worked as a play by play announcer for the New Yok Riptide, New York Dragons, New York Hitmen, Varsity Media and the Long Island Sports Network. You can find him on Twitter @SchwartzSports or email him at [email protected].
BSM Writers
Tricia Whitaker Will Find The Story That Matters
“My role is to really bring the viewers down to that level of the dugout and into the clubhouse.”
Derek Futterman is a contributing editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Sports Media. Additionally, he has worked in a broad array of roles in multimedia production – including on live game broadcasts and audiovisual platforms – and in digital content development and management. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. To get in touch, find him on Twitter @derekfutterman.
