John Kincade starts at 97.5 the Fanatic on Monday, January 4th. It’s the 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. shift with Eric “Coach” Camille stepping in as producer, but featuring morning show mainstays Bob Cooney, Jamie Lynch, and Pat Egan.

One of the things we repeated during our speculation/reporting of the Kincade morning takeover was the fact that John’s show is atypical for the Philadelphia sports market. What that means is that he doesn’t lean heavily on listener phone calls and instead leads a show with more pointed discussion. There’s more of a focus and less meandering, if that makes any sense. It’s the model you’ll find in sports talk radio outside of Philadelphia and New York.

At Philly Voice, Joe Santoliquito did a really good interview with John, telling the story of his hometown return and how the whole thing went down. You should give it a read when you have a moment.

For our purposes, I wanted to pull and highlight these two paragraphs, about the expected style of the show:

Kincade was also adamant about this: “This is show is not about rattling cages for the sake of rattling cages. It’s going to be thoughtful. If I’m ripping a general manager, I’m more about making my case to the audience and looking for the dissenters. We don’t just take callers. If callers add to our discussion, we’re taking them. It’s not open phones America. We’re not Larry King. We want callers who want to join in the conversation that we’re having.

“It’s not about a caller saying, ‘Here’s my Phillies’ point; here’s my Sixers’ point; here’s my Eagles’ point.’ You will never hear that on our show. It will be we’re having this discussion right now, and you call up with a great point that’s dissenting, or adding to the conversation, then you can join our conversation. I would say it’s a more discerning approach. We want to be interactive. It’s going to be a far different show than what people are used to.”

This is music to my ears. We need to raise the level of discourse in sports talk radio and elevate ourselves beyond the lowest common denominator approach in the Philadelphia sports media. Too often it’s entertainment without education.

Nothing against Butch from Manayunk, but he’s one of many automatic channel changers on the FM dial. Callers add very little to sports radio shows because they’re just repeating the same dumb things we’ve heard a thousand times before, like this:

Host: Bobby from Birdsboro, you’re on the air.

Bobby: hello?

Host: Yeah go ahead.

Bobby: oh hey, let me take you off Bluetooth

Host: Okay.

Bobby: can you hear me?

Host: Yes, just turn your radio down

Bobby: Okay, yeah I want to talk about Doug Pederson.

Host: yes, go ahead.

Bobby: I don’t think they should fire Doug Pederson.

Every day with these phone calls. There are some fantastic people who call in, but a vast majority add absolutely nothing to the broadcast and only serve to kill off brain cells.

If John’s show does not rely on Bobby from Birdsboro, or Mikey from Mayfair, or Paulie from Paulsboro, then we will tune in. It may or not be successful, but it will be interesting to listen to a different type of show.