There’s a version of Brandon Tierney that never made it.
The one sitting in his parents’ basement, recording a demo on equipment that made him sound like he was calling from inside a tunnel, then mailing it to every sports radio station in the country from Arkansas to Wyoming. He got two responses back, both were rejections. But one came from a TV station in Denver, and he was so excited to see the call letters on the envelope that it still gave him fuel.
That story matters because of where it ends up. Tierney eventually got to WFAN, the station he’d been listening to since it launched in 1987, the one whose afternoon drive show he grew up with, the one whose names were so big they barely needed last names. And when he got there, it wasn’t what he’d imagined. Not because the station had changed, but because the world around it had.
On Monday’s BT Unleashed, Joe Benigno’s recent comments came up, specifically Benigno’s assertion that WFAN will never be what it once was, the era of Don Imus, Mike and the Mad Dog, the Benigno-and-Somers overnights, Steve Somers schmoozing his way through 34 years on the overnight shift while Jerry Seinfeld called in as Jerry from Queens. Tierney agreed the heyday was over. What he couldn’t let go of was the why, the idea that what made those voices so massive was purely about talent.
“Back then, being a star on WFAN was pretty easy,” he said. “It was pretty easy because there was nowhere else to go. That’s just the reality of it … Back then, if you were on the air, you were almost by default a rock star. You were a persona that is almost impossible to replicate today.”
Which is why, when people invoke Francesa and Russo as the standard that today’s hosts can’t measure up to, Tierney wants to push back. Take Babe Ruth, for example. You can look at the numbers and make the case that Ruth was the greatest of all time, and maybe he was, but he also never faced the full pool of competition. Minorities weren’t allowed to play. The field was smaller. Tierney wasn’t saying Francesa and Russo weren’t great. He was saying they were also working in conditions that no longer exist anywhere, and conflating the two does a disservice to everyone, including the legends themselves.
“If you’re going to be the best player of all time, and you’re going to be a rockstar, and you’re going to have a superhero persona, don’t you think you had to kind of go against everybody to really have that tag?” Tierney said. “I do. But now, you shouldn’t be victimized when you were born. In a lot of ways, those guys were lucky. You know, think about it.”
The irony is that the very fragmentation Tierney is describing has touched the WFAN legends themselves. Francesa called his own comeback a mistake, admitting he should have stayed retired after his December 2017 sendoff rather than returning four months later. The Sports Pope, who once held an afternoon drive in New York as a personal fiefdom, went over his boss’s head to get back on the air, took a significant pay cut, and ended up losing to Michael Kay in the ratings. Even the biggest rock stars in the station’s history couldn’t replicate what the station once was, because what the station once was had more to do with the moment than the men.
“The Fan will never be what it once was,” said Benigno, who still hosts a weekly Saturday morning show for the station. “The heyday, we’ve all seen the heyday of the Fan and sports talk radio in general.”
The station that launched nearly four decades ago and turned sports radio into a religion in New York, the one that made Francesa and Russo into something closer to civic figures than broadcasters, the one where Imus held court every morning, and Benigno and Somers kept the city company through the night, that version of WFAN is not coming back. The audience it once owned has scattered across a thousand podcasts, YouTube channels, and streaming platforms, each one pulling a little harder every year. The medium itself has changed too fundamentally. The hosts who have broken through in this environment — Stephen A. Smith, Pat McAfee — did it by being everywhere at once, by treating every platform as a launchpad, by making themselves impossible to avoid regardless of where you were looking.
“Each year, you get a little sliver of revenue chiseled off, and you get a little sliver of relevance chiseled off,” Tierney added. “It’s less relevant than it’s ever been in my lifetime. That is a fact. And people can protest that. That’s fine. Just look at the numbers from revenue, and just open your eyes and see what’s going on in the world in terms of content. And that’s the only answer.
