Portland’s 1080 The Fan is an ESPN Radio affiliate. The Fan also features the morning show Dirt and Sprague which airs immediately after ESPN Radio’s Keyshawn, JWill & Max. So it might’ve been surprising to hear the Portland morning team kick off their program today questioning if ESPN cares about their radio product anymore.
Keyshawn, JWill & Max had a segment discussing voice exercises with Jay Williams and in it they captured one of Williams’ guttural attempts at that feat. The show ended with several minutes of the clip being played often. Then Dirt and Sprague came on the air and the guys were aghast.
Andy “Dirt” Johnson started almost immediately by saying “Should we just start yelling like the last show? Is that how we should start today? [mocking guttural scream] Just start screaming. That’s my homage to them. Continue to make some random noise over, and over, and over again as they continue to not care about ESPN Radio anymore.”
The show then began a discussion of when they thought ESPN lost emphasis on the product.
Brandon Sprague said he believed it was when Dan Le Batard left the network.
“Someone would probably say when Colin left, I would say when Le Batard left,” Sprague surmised, “but there seems to be a real ‘less than interested’ feeling from Bristol on their radio situation”
“I’m not even 100% what their lineup is,” Sprague added.
The show attempted to remember the lineup and then when prompted with the programming, struggled to recognize the hosts. They then continued to wonder when ESPN left radio behind.
“It would probably be when Colin left,” Sprague offered, “you would say ESPN Radio, and how they feel with their own entity [changed] in that way?
Johnson retorted that he thought when ESPN lost three programming pillars, their focus began to wane.
“I would say the splitting up of Mike and Mike was involved in that too. That was their morning staple for a long time,” said Johnson. “You had the Mike and Mike split-up, you had Le Batard leave, which was only a matter of time until he left, and then Colin leaving. Those were their three radio monsters especially in the morning. When they were all gone it was like “where do we go from here?”
“So now they’re just punting on it,” said Sprague.
“Based on the last segment we heard,” began Johnson, “they are punting on it because it was just yelling for five straight minutes”.
Sprague also said that if ESPN prioritized radio, they would allow their radio talents to do radio and not be removed for other priorities.
“They also drag them off live radio to do TV hits,” Sprague mentioned.
Johnson asked, “Could you imagine if we did that on something? Like, ‘Hey Sprague. I’m going to have to take twenty minutes off in the eight o’clock hour because we got a Twitch stream thing to do that’s more important than our radio show”.