As the losses continued to mount this season, so did the phone calls on the Houston Texans postgame show. Furious phone calls after a loss is nothing new to sports radio, but it was still somewhat of a relief for Sean Pendergast to see Texans fans still engaged and angry late into the season. No, he’s never questioned the popularity of the NFL in Houston, but after another bad season for the Texans, he was glad to see the passion of the fans hasn’t wavered.
Pendergast is both a pre and postgame host for the Houston Texans, as well as the co-host of Payne and Pendergast on SportsRadio 610, which serves as the flagship for the team. The Texans are a combined 11-38-1 in the past three seasons. Needless to say, it hasn’t been glamorous covering the local NFL team.
So how has Pendergast handled his coverage of the team? Especially since he has so many relationships within the Texans brass.
“First of all, you don’t not criticize them, you are honest with your audience,” said Pendergast. “That’s the biggest thing. I think the biggest thing, aside from being honest, is to do it in a way that’s opinionated but respectful. My rule has always been, don’t say anything on the air about somebody on the team, coaching the team, running the team, that you wouldn’t say to their face if you saw them at a press conference, in a game or out in public. I’ve never said anything on the air, regarding the Texans, where they called me afterwards to tell me I was out of line.
“The team has been very good about keeping me and others at the station informed on things. As bad as they’ve been on the football field, they’re actually very great to work with, from a media standpoint as the flagship station. We’ve got a great relationship with their media relations department. Nick Caserio the GM comes on my morning show at least once a month, which never used to happen with any previous GM’s of the Texans.”
Pendergast is honest and he knows that’s what the audience deserves. It also sounds like the Texans understand a lot of that, too. Again, Pendergast doesn’t get personal and make sure his criticism is fair, but he says it’s not awkward when he has to be critical of the people he sees within the organization.
“Not for me,” said Pendergast. “The Texans are a team that’s hard to find grace for right now and hard to find praise for over the last three years other than some very specific things. We’ve spent the better part of three years criticizing them, but I see the people I criticize face to face a fair amount.
“I saw two of them yesterday at the press conference the Texans had for Lovie Smith’s firing. It’s not awkward for me and I don’t think it’s awkward for them either. I say this in a way where I’m praising them, I don’t think they’re desensitized to the criticism, because they’ve been doing a lot of things the last couple years that have tried to re-engage the fanbase. But I don’t think they take the criticism personally. I think they believe I treat them fairly.”
BSM posted an article on Tuesday that showed the fall ratings book for several major markets. Houston sports radio was included and Pendergast’s morning drive show with Seth Payne had the highest ratings in the city.
“I told my boss Parker Hillis I was getting ready to do this interview and he said, oh, it’s funny you mention Barrett Sports Media and he pulled that article up,” laughed Pendergast. “It never gets old. We had a great fourth quarter. Seth and I in October and November had the best two months of morning sports radio in Houston probably in like the last eight or nine years.
“We were up in the 4’s and in the Top 10 in the market, which, for Houston, is crazy. There will be people who heard what I just said in Boston or Philly and say ‘Wow, a four. I would get fired’. It’s different in different markets. Houston is a very transient city with fans all over the place.”
There’s some interesting things to take away from the numbers for Payne and Pendergast. First it shows another bad season for the Texans didn’t have a negative impact. In fact, the numbers were very good for a show that likes to focus heavily on the Texans and the NFL.
Second, the numbers were still really good despite competition having the flagship rights to the Astros on their way to another World Series title. Pendergast thinks that’s an interesting note, especially for a morning show, because as people were getting in their car the morning after an Astros game, they still flipped their dial from the competition to Payne and Pendergast.
“I’m happy that we’re in a place where Seth and I have certain numbers, where regardless of where the competition is, we’re not happy if we’re above that,” said Pendergast. “The higher we go, the more disappointing it is to be below that the next month. That’s just the nature of the business, you can’t go higher every month. Those two months are interesting, because the Texans were the worst team in the NFL, certainly they were in October and November, and that was while the Astros were in the World Series, where our competition is the flagship.
We were proud of the fact we won by such a wide margin, where on paper, some people would say we’re supposed to be losing during that time. I think we did a really good job of covering the Astros. There were shows that were pure Astros right in the middle of football season.”
Pendergast is hoping better days are ahead for the Texans. Simply, it’s just way more fun to cover a winning team. But he can’t deny how crazy and unpredictable it is to do a postgame show for a team that’s not winning. It’s been a wild ride over the past three seasons for Pendergast after Texans games.
“Pregame is very cookie cutter, formulaic, scripted segments, a lot of sponsor reads, no callers and it’s all stuff we’ve been talking about for five days,” said Pendergast. “Postgame is the opposite. You’re getting a reaction to it, you’re getting emotion from fans, emotion from me and Clint Stoerner I like the fact that’s it’s live, there’s no scripted aspect to it at all and the rundown is basically, we play Lovie’s press conference, give our thoughts on the game and then it’s time to let ‘er rip with people leaving the game or just got done watching the game. I like that aspect of it.”
“I would prefer to cover a winning team but the postgame show on a team that people are angry about is a really fascinating ride. I want them to get good again, but the Texans won three games this year and we had full phone boards for every game afterwards.”
The good news about the wild ride is Pendergast saw first hand that Texans fans are still engaged. Granted, there were moments where half of NRG Stadium in Houston was filled with Chiefs fans, but the hunger for Texans content is still there, especially with the NFL Draft coming soon.
As far as the ratings, Payne and Pendergast seem to have taken on the ‘inner scoreboard’ mentality. It doesn’t matter what the competition necessarily does, they want to be consistently rising. There’s no immediate plans for an FM signal to help boost those numbers even further, but an AM signal seemingly hasn’t affected Pendergast’s numbers in the morning.
The podcast numbers for Payne and Pendergast are phenomenal and have the highest downloads in the cluster. That’s very encouraging to Pendergast when he looks at the future of sports radio and how the AM dial fits in with digital content.
“I think the demise of terrestrial radio is probably very exaggerated,” said Pendergast. “I’m not too worried about still being on the AM dial but I do understand the importance of where the digital space is moving towards.”
