Curious Hair wrote:
Having spent this summer dabbling in the wonderful world of sports radio, doing remotes and live events, in addition to what I've heard on 670 in the past, I don't think Murph's schtick is exactly falling on deaf ears, if you catch my drift. Your average sports talk listener doesn't want to be talked down to by what they see as "some smart-ass college kid." You can only talk down to the regular schmucks that listen to sports talk for so long before you alienate them.
We're not representative of Mike Murphy's daily audience. We're not representative of anybody's audience. We're not exactly atop the ivory tower that the hosts themselves are in, but maybe we're just kinda hanging around the lobby. We're a hundredsome people who are clearly too invested in a comparatively underperforming subsection of the Chicago radio industry for one reason or another, whether it's an interest in pursuing a career in sports radio, a fanatical obsession with Terry Boers, or something in between.
Lots of us a very hard-core, I agree. Of the Score's hosts, Murph has, in my opinion, the most "general-appeal". Which is why I thought his getting the drive-in shift a few years ago to be the best use of his talent.
The flip side is, Murph gets very wound up when under time constraints. In the morning show, he had to "hit" the windows for the traffic & news updates. That works against him.
He basically has his segments timed out for a 4-hour show. The 2-hour show works against him because he tries to run all the same segments. Instead of the comfortable leisurely pace, everything feels rushed. He's sort of like a character actor who has his lines memorized (and your's too, so he knows when your lines end) -- if you don't follow the script directly, you throw him off. And of course, some character actors know how their characters would "really" say something, and ad lib the actual dialog. Naturally, these two groups of actors don't work well together...