Sports radio is a form of entertainment featuring a cadre of loudmouth dickheads yelling about sports and reading shitty ads.
But there’s more to sports radio than just loudmouth dickheads yelling; it’s an art that can only be mastered by the loudest of yelling dickheads. If you’re an aspiring LD who is considering a career in yelling, you should set your beady eyes on sports radio. With a little luck, if you continue being aggressively unpleasant to be around and follow these 7 rules of sports radio, you may one day prosper as a local loudmouth dickhead.
1. Always overreact
In Week 1 of the 2021 NFL season, the former first overall pick and perennial disappointment Jameis Winston had an impressive debut as the New Orleans Saints starting quarterback.
The following Monday, Winston was extolled on sports radio as having been reborn in New Orleans thanks to head coach Sean Payton’s gift as a quarterback whisperer.
Winston’s clear pattern of inconsistent play could not have deterred a sports radio host from proclaiming Winston was a sure-bet MVP candidate. That's because any host worth his neck fat must take the concept of “living in the present” to the extreme. The one game sample size is all the data the host needs to make a categorical statement; much like likeability, nuance is not the host's friend.
Which brings us to the second rule.
2. Extinguish nuance
You don’t ascend the ranks of sports radio by hedging your arguments, offering caveats, and otherwise injecting nuance into a topic. Whatever side of the argument the host embraces, he must plunge into it boldly.
In a way, a sports radio host is like General George Patton, if instead of being a shrewd tactician who favored aggression, Patton was an impulsive cretin ordering his troops into battle just because.
And what happens when the host’s battalion of fallacies is slaughtered by the phalanx of rational thought, as when Winston shit the bed in his second start with the Saints? Read on.
3. Never admit you were wrong
Since sports radio hosts are wrong all the time, they could theoretically spend the entire show going over every idiotic prediction they made that failed to materialize. To avoid the overrated path of taking responsibility, the deft host adopts a strategy whereby he never admits he was wrong about anything.
A host who so much as hints that he may have overshot when he predicted the Jaguars would go undefeated under Urban Meyer, might as well enroll in elevator operator school. To excel in the industry, the host must relentlessly scorn accountability. As he strains to show off his best radio voice with each over-enunciated syllable, punctuated only by poor-health induced grunting, he must never surrender to the decent human quality of admitting error.
4. Practice false humility
Sports radio hosts may be dickheads, but they’re not sociopaths. Leveraging the shred of emotional intelligence that hasn’t yet escaped through their sweat pores, hosts understand that listeners appreciate a dose of humility sprinkled on a mountain of unearned arrogance.
But there is a problem.
Because sports radio hosts hate humility, they can only express the false type of humility recognizable in every pompous prick you’ve ever met. This false humility manifests itself in these common refrains:
“Despite what people may think, I am not always 100% right.”
“I am big enough to admit it’s possible I could be wrong.”
“My wife reminds me I am not perfect.”
The last example is one you will hear from every married defiler of the radio waves. That’s because most of them are single or soon-to-be-divorced, and in the rare case that a host finds himself in a relationship that’s not imminently doomed, he will be sure to advertise it to his listeners.
Sincere humility violates every crass value the host stands for and must therefore remain an anathema.
5. Treat callers with contempt
If repetitive drivel is the heartbeat of sports radio, then callers are its red blood cells.
Without angry sports fans calling in to argue with the host, sports radio would be a shell of its insufferable self.
Given the importance of callers to the viability of the sports radio cesspool, you would think hosts have an incentive to treat callers with a modicum of respect— or at least artful condensation.
Instead, the blabbering multi-chins treat callers with the utmost contempt.
Fancying themselves infallible experts, hosts bristle at any caller who challenges them on any point, no matter how trivial or subjective.
If a host predicts that the Red Sox will win between 80 and 90 games, and a caller suggests they can win over 90, indignation-fueled spittle will machinegun from the host’s mouth.
“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!” he’ll spew, oblivious to the fact that the difference between the predictions could just be one win.
Always mathematically challenged and hideous to all six senses (the sixth sense being the soul), the host’s fragile ego cannot withstand a different opinion.
The second the host realizes that the caller has a slightly different take, he will hang up on him, thank him for his call in the most overtly disingenuous manner imaginable, and spend the next 10 minutes doubling down on whatever argument the cliché wheel he spun landed on to compensate for every insecurity he has ever bottled.
The host’s superiority complex relative to the callers is all the more odd considering that the host has no special training in sports. There’s literally no plausible reason for why a loudmouth fuck yelling into a microphone is more knowledgeable than a loudmouth fuck calling the show. And yet, the implied hierarchy is sacrosanct, and the host will never concede a point, be swayed, or display any conciliatory gesture whatsoever. He will always castigate the caller for being wrong.
6. Have zero fucking shame
As I’ve documented previously, shame is humanity’s common denominator. It’s the one thing that separates us from animals and drivers who honk at you to move when you’re about to parallel park.
Yet this distinctly human trait is foreign to the sports radio host, who can vomit the most outlandish things without ever catching himself, experiencing regret, or changing course.
The sports radio host is utterly shameless, raising the question as to whether this condition follows them once they waddle out of the studio to go play Keno or if they shed their douchebag cape and revert to a decent human being.
This is both unknown and unknowable as sports radio hosts don’t have any friends or acquaintances, so there are no witnesses who can shed light on their out-of-the-studio personality.
7. Contradict everything you drooled the previous day
This final rule is arguably the defining quality of the beast before us.
The funny thing about being arrogant, is that the more arrogant a person is, the more likely they are to have wrong and shitty opinions as they get older. That’s because as we gain more knowledge and wisdom with age, we also become more aware about how little we actually know. In other words, as our knowledge increases, our estimation of how much we think we know shrinks— a humbling inverse relationship.
But a 40-year-old arrogant prick doesn't think he's accumulated more knowledge and wisdom because he assumes that he was equally wise and knowledgeable at 20. So as others around him grow, the arrogant prick stagnates intellectually— resulting in shittier opinions relative to the opinions of people who’ve grown.
And because the sports host never admits he’s wrong, is utterly shameless, and is too arrogant to realize there’s shit he doesn’t know, he has no problem contradicting everything he said the previous day.
Whatever vapid point the host beat to death on Friday is exhumed Monday in a dramatically different form— only to be mercilessly beaten, reburied, and re-exhumed again. A cycle known to physicists as “beat, bury and exhume”.
If Friday's declaration that “The Patriots defense is awful” is belied by the Patriots’ solid defensive play on Sunday, the depository of blather will ensure listeners that he always knew the Patriots defense was topnotch. Of course, if the Patriots stink the following Sunday, the host will brazenly brag about how he criticized the defense two weeks ago.
Incapable of not spewing whatever impulsive opinion his brain triggers, the host will never wait long enough for more data to emerge that can confirm or reject his hypothesis. The opinion has to be delivered immediately, with zero caveats.
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The greatest joy in life is listening to sports radio in a city that just suffered an epic loss or some other form of humiliation. The angrier, the more boorish the city the better. And that’s the one time when sports radio relinquishes the undesirable traits discussed here in favor of the more endearing human traits of self loathing and despair. The rest of the time, you can expect hosts to strictly adhere to these 7 rules.