Ryan Clark Returns to Radio Row, Stars in New Super Bowl Ad
“You can see how excited everyone is… to at least almost feel normal. Other than the masks, we get to move around and convene and have different events like we normally do.”
As Super Bowl Sunday draws closer by the minute, various sports radio stations from around the country have taken their broadcasts on the road to Radio Row to interview guests, catch up with old friends, and feel the anticipation and excitement before kickoff.
This year’s matchup between the Cincinnati Bengals and Los Angeles Rams marks the first time the city of Los Angeles has hosted the Super Bowl since 1993 when the Dallas Cowboys won the championship at the Rose Bowl. Additionally, the Rams will try to become the first Los Angeles-based team to win a Super Bowl since the John Madden-led Los Angeles Raiders took home the championship in 1983.
With some signs of normalcy beginning to return throughout society, the buzz in the “City of Angels” is quite palpable both inside and outside of the area. Ryan Clark, a former NFL safety and current analyst on ESPN, joined The Pat & Aaron Show on 95.3 WDAE Tampa Bay, and spoke about the atmosphere not only surrounding “The Big Game” on Sunday, but also that of the week as a whole.
ESPN’s Ryan Clark says being back at the Super Bowl restores some sense of normal 📻 pic.twitter.com/XobRmtLWHD
“It’s absolutely bonkers – it truly is,” said Clark, who won a Super Bowl championship with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2008. “You can see how excited everyone is… to at least almost feel normal. Other than the masks, we get to move around and convene and have different events like we normally do.”
Clark has always cherished the week leading up to the Super Bowl for the opportunities it gives people to see one another and reconnect. However, as a player, the focus is squarely on what happens on the gridiron Sunday. The game brings about conflicting interests. That is, a cultural phenomenon with league events, media coverage, and parties surrounding the most meaningful and decisive football game of the year.
“It’s about getting chances to see people you haven’t seen in years, or see people you haven’t seen in a year, and really enjoy what this is,” explained Clark. “It’s the biggest sporting event in the world. We have seven games in the NBA Finals, you have seven games for the World Series, but this is only one chance, one opportunity, and you got to savor every moment.”
On Thursday, Clark visited Radio Row himself, taking place at the Los Angeles Convention Center, to experience the plethora of live broadcasts and to be interviewed by other stations.
“[There are] so many different people from so many different countries and [so many] opportunities to get athletes on,” said Clark. “It was really good to get back in that type of atmosphere.”
Clark, along with NFL legends Dan Marino and Eli Manning, recently starred in a new advertisement for Stella Artois titled “The Stella Substitutes,” in which they give bartenders tickets to Super Bowl LVI in exchange for filling in for the bartenders’ scheduled shifts.
“Tyrone is a bartender out here in L.A., [and] I got an opportunity to surprise him with tickets,” said Clark. “What we’ve gone through the last two years, people [have] not [been] able to truly enjoy life like we’re used to. We want to make sure that people are getting opportunities to share great moments with the people that they love, and so he’s going to get an opportunity to go to the Super Bowl.”
Ryan Clark on the beer-drinking capabilities on some of his ESPN colleagues 🍺 pic.twitter.com/9dAOF8GHXN
Show co-host Pat Donovan was curious to know how many beers Clark’s ESPN colleague Mike Greenberg could drink “before he would be in the tank.” His response:
“A half a beer. [Greeny’s] one of the softest humans I’ve ever been around. I’m pretty sure Greeny would be one of those people that says beer has too harsh of a taste to actually drink and enjoy. He’s more like a very light dessert wine kind of guy.”
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.
Chase McCabe Named Director of Operations & Sports Programming at Cromwell
“Our owner, Bud Walters, opened the door for me almost 12 years ago as an intern and I’m honored to continue to be a key member of the Nashville leadership team.”
Congratulations are in order for Chase McCabe. He is adding a new title to his already full plate at Cromwell Media in Nashville. He has been promoted to Director of Operations & Sports Programming at the company.
“I’m very fortunate to have been to be able to grow into this opportunity under one roof,” McCabe said in a press release. “Our owner, Bud Walters, opened the door for me almost 12 years ago as an intern and I’m honored to continue to be a key member of the Nashville leadership team. I am forever grateful, but none of this could have happened without the great group of people we have here at Cromwell Media.”
McCabe has spent his whole career with 102.5 The Game and its sister station, now called 94.9 The Fan. He was named Program Director and Brand Manager of the stations in January of last year. He has maintained an on-air presence as well. He hosts Chase & Michelleweekdays at 9 AM on The Game.
“Chase and I have developed a great working relationship in the two and half years since I’ve joined Cromwell Media,” Fort said. “We share similar visions on how to create compelling sports programming all while driving revenue growth. I’m excited to have Chase as my right-hand man as we move forward together with this new chapter of leadership at Cromwell Media Nashville.”
The Denver Nuggets took to the National Basketball Association’s largest stage on Thursday night as they defeated the Miami Heat for the organization’s first-ever NBA Finals victory. Early reports reveal that the game had a 2.21 demographic rating between people ages 18-49, attracting a total of 7.62 million viewers on ABC. The figure is considerably lower than the audience for Game 1 between the Boston Celtics and Golden State Warriors last year – which averaged 11.9 million figures across ABC and ESPN2. Ratings for the alternate NBA in Stephen A’s World broadcast Thursday night on ESPN2 have not yet been released by Nielsen Media Research.
Sports fans in the Denver market have felt as if the play of the Nuggets was largely being neglected by the national media throughout these playoffs. Now that the team is the last one standing in the Western Conference, there is no one else to focus on and their play is beginning to be realized by basketball fans throughout the country. It is a narrative that Denver Sports 104.3 The Fan’s Mark Schlereth and Mike Evans felt was especially obvious by watching the press conferences after the game. The duo was able to deduce as such through the questions posed to Nuggets players and head coach Michael Malone by members of the media cohort.
“The national media – it’s like, ‘Oh, wow. We’re just kind of becoming aware of how these guys play,’ and they keep asking the Nuggets about their unselfishness and how everybody is willing to share the ball,” Evans said. “Nikola Jokić [is] being asked about not taking a lot of shots, and they’re all just kind of shrugging their shoulders like, ‘Yeah, this is who we are. We’ve been doing this for a long time.’
Schlereth was curious to find out the ratings from the game last night because he watched the game from a sports bar in Chicago. He is away from Denver, Colo. to help his son’s family move there for the summer and surmises there were about 50 people in the bar with him. What he noticed was that their interest was fixated elsewhere.
“I’m the only person that was watching the Nuggets,” Schlereth said. “There was not one group of people – they’re all in there together – that was paying attention to the NBA Finals.”
“Their loss,” Evans pithily replied.
Denver ranks 19th on Nielsen Media Research’s metropolitan market size list, but the Nuggets have been a contending team for the last five seasons. Most media analysts expect diminished ratings for the NBA Finals this year because of the lack of a storied franchise, even with the Miami Heat as the team’s opponent.
Amid concerns regarding the future of AM radio, Nielsen Media Research has unveiled a list of 141 markets where at least 20% of consumers regularly listen to programming on the medium. The list is reflective of the percentage of monthly total radio listening being funneled to AM as opposed to total radio listening as a whole. The top three markets are all in the Great Lakes region, and Westwood One has found large proportions of these listeners are derived from the upper Midwest.
Buffalo-Niagara Falls leads the list with 56% of its audience tuning into AM radio in a month. It is a figure that makes sense based on the variety of AM stations, including leading news talk outlet WBEN and leading sports outlet WGR. The city of Chicago is ranked second, complete with 670 The Score, WGN and WLS. Nearby Milwaukee, Wis. ranks third on the list, another city with various AM stations such as WTMJ and WISN.
In a recent survey, Nielsen Media Research found that AM radio still reaches over 82.3 million Americans on a monthly basis – a measurement that equates to one-third of AM/FM radio listeners as a whole. Fifty-seven percent of the audience listens to stations in the news and/or talk format, utilizing the public service the outlets provide to learn of breaking news and other concerns.
There is a wide variety in market size represented throughout the list, but a trend of markets with undulating topographies tends to have larger shares of AM listeners because of the challenges the landscape presents to FM signals.
The full list compiled by Nielsen Media Research can be found below:
Metro market rank
Market name
Percentage of radio audience that listens to AM radio
