If the executives at Entercom were smart, they would bring back someone like Julie Kahn, Tom Baker or Tim Murphy to run WEEI along with a wide cast of the personalities that they use to have on the show.
I would try to lure back Meter, Mustard, Wallach, Stearns, Lenny and of course Ordway, Pete while moving Mike Adams to the 10 to 2 slot or have Meter in that slot.
I would still run D & C from 6 AM to 10 AM
I would run Meter and Merloni from 10 AM to 2 PM
I would run the Big O, Pete and his show from 2 to 6 PM
and I would run Mikey from 6 PM through the end of the night.
And then I would continue with the same format that was kicking ass in the 1990s and 2000s. This is the lineup that EEI needs and if this is what happened, I would start listening again and back in the day, I was a big fan of what EEI was doing.
Thank god Wolfe is gone. He was a bonehead. I don't remember who was running with the Big O back in the day but whomever SHE was, they had it going on (memory recall, it was Julie Kahn). They knew what they were doing. Their ratings were great back then and their ad revenue was just tremendous.
The problem wasn't the personalities or the shows but it was the natural evolution of the programs.
D&C went from sports with an editorial edge to political/current events talk almost over night. Then they tried to turn it back to "water cooler" talk, integrating sports and politics. However, they couldn't recover the lost listeners, nor could they keep people who had tuned in for the sports talk from tuning out when the slightest hint of political talk swung back.
They were losing listeners to T&R even when they were on WBCN. Keeping them is a losing proposition.
THe midday show is a cluster. I like Mut, but he was not ready for primetime (hosting his own daily show in this market). Dale Arnold was the perfect type of person for midday sports talk. He is not reactionary, he is thoughtful, uses stats to back up his asertations, and knows enough about each of the four teams in the market to speak intelligently on them. Heck, when he would have a college sports guest on, for example, he clearly had done enough research to not need to go the bombastic route.
The afternoon drive could not go back to what it was. Glenn, while I liked him a lot, became too big for the show. His personality had taken over. The Big O, and by extension his program, became too important and had to always have the last word. The ignoring of callers and their points, the talking over each other, etc, was all just too much to handle.
I listen to a lot of sports talk radio through TuneIn and other radio apps. The nature of sports talk radio has changed since WFAN kicked it all off in the 1980s. It is now an audio only version of these BSPN "debate" shows. Trumped up controversy, planned arguments, and scripted programming. It is not as organic as it once was, anywhere. For that, we are all losing out.