Six years in, WFAN's Boomer Esiason and Gregg Giannotti remain at the top
Boomer Esiason, left, and Gregg Giannotti have hosted the "Boomer & Gio" morning show on WFAN since the start of 2018. Credit: Brittainy Newman
Sports talk radio is a stale genre whose late 20th century glory days are long gone, back when powerful and obnoxious hosts learned they could out-yell newspaper columnists and fans learned they could get their voices heard, too.
Much of that now has been replaced by social media and a country overwhelmed by hot takes, none of which existed when WFAN went on the air on July 1, 1987, before the World Wide Web was invented.
How long ago was that? The Mets were reigning World Series champions. Really. Ask your parents.
All of which is an indirect way of getting to our primary discussion topic for today, which is this: Happy anniversary, Boomer and Gio, and congratulations for finding a way to buck the larger trend.
On Jan. 2, 2018, WFAN’s new morning show premiered, featuring Boomer Esiason and Gregg Giannotti, a pair of generationally mismatched Suffolk County guys.
It was a move born of a station crisis – the resignation of Craig Carton, Esiason’s successful partner of 10 years, who was arrested on federal fraud and conspiracy charges and eventually spent about a year in prison.
Ten years before that, Esiason and Carton had been brought together by another station crisis, the firing of Don Imus in the spring of 2007.
Somehow it all has worked out for WFAN, thanks to smart moves by executives and a cast of familiar characters that continues to click.
When Carton left, Esiason, Jerry Recco, Al Dukes and Eddie Scozzare kept the ship afloat through the autumn, then added Giannotti seamlessly that January.
Six years later, the numbers speak for themselves.
The show is a consistent hit, most recently completing the autumn ratings book No. 1 among all New York stations regardless of genre among men ages 25-54.
(Plenty of men over 54 and women of all ages listen, too, but they do not count in the data traditionally of most interest to advertisers.)
On average last fall, 12.1% of people in the advertiser's key demographic who were tuned to a radio from 6 to 10 a.m. were listening to WFAN. That’s a lot.
Some of you likely wonder about the judgment of these listeners, because it is the nature of the beast that not everyone is pleased by a given host.
Giannotti, in particular, is not everyone’s cup of tea, with some sharp edges to his personality in addition to his wit and his facility with voice impersonations.
But he is less volatile than the mercurial Carton, and he also has allowed Esiason to get in more words than he did in the Carton era.
It is a more balanced show now, and Esiason continues to flourish in his role even at age 62, when most former NFL MVPs presumably would have long since gotten tired of the morning show lifestyle.
Esiason now is the single most important and visible personality at WFAN.
Why does the show work? Primarily because it has threaded a needle that has impaled many recent sports talk shows.
The genre is evolving by necessity from straight, old-fashioned sports talk to a mixture of that and general life topics – what some refer to as “guy talk” – and not everyone can pull that off. Most cannot.
These guys have, and now they are expanding their brand into live (and sold out) programs, such as the one they did at The Paramount in Huntington last month.
Is there a future for sports radio? Probably, at least in some form. The newspaper columnists whose heyday WFAN helped end in the 1990s still are at it.
There always will be a place for interesting voices and, yes, interesting takes.
Six years in, Boomer and Gio and friends are proving that.
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
