Sports Conquers "Love" On FM

Corporate logo of Cumulus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Cumulus Media chose the start of the baseball season--which also happened to be April Fool's Day--to convert the Love 105 stations (WGVY 105.1, WRXP 105.3 and WGVZ 105.7) to Sports Radio 105 FM The Ticket.  Some listeners and radio observers are probably wishing this was a joke.

The Ticket, the third sports talk station in the Twin Cities and the second on FM, replaces Love 105's adult contemporary sound that had been in place for about a year since WLTE (now KMNB 102.9) went country and forced its listeners to go elsewhere.  Now the only time you'll hear the word "love" on this station is in reference to tennis.

Programming for The Ticket consists of talk shows from the CBS Sports Radio network, a joint venture of Cumulus and CBS Radio that's a few months old.  Its top draws are John Feinstein and Jim Rome, who's hosted shows before on various networks and syndicators.  If this were any other sports radio station, most of this stuff would be running overnights and on weekends.

The Ticket starts out from behind the eight-ball.  There are no local hosts (yet), no local rights to major pro sports teams (if there were, Cumulus would have given them to KQRS 92.5), and they need three low-powered FM signals just to cover the Twin Cities area.  That has been a problem since the Rev 105 days of the 1990s.

The Ticket sounds like it's intended for "jock around the clock"--no politics or pop culture, just sports.  But politics and pop culture are what's working for Dan "Common Man" Cole and Dan Barreiro on KFXN (100.3), and Joe Soucheray and Patrick Reusse on KSTP (1500 ESPN AM).  The Twin Cities aren't a heavy-duty sports area like New York or Philadelphia, unless you count the Vikings.

Atlanta-based Cumulus, who's in business to wring as much profit as they can from an increasing amount of stations they own to attract a decreasing amount of listeners, is typical of what passes for today's radio.  They have little sense of localism, having sent many personnel to the unemployment line in favor of DJs broadcasting from the (insert sponsor's name here) studios somewhere else, while making life miserable for those that remain.  They're into "branding", such as the deal with CBS for sports stations, "Nash FM" for country formats, and filling the rest with nothing but syndicated product.

So let's recap.  A radio behemoth changes one of its Twin Cities stations from Light Rock to Jock Talk, fires its local staff in favor of a national lineup, then expects to compete with well-established sports stations with a weak signal.  Yeah, that's The Ticket, all right.