Mike Missanelli is no longer with 97.5 the Fanatic, as you know, but he’s continuing in the sports talk space with his still-relatively-new podcast.

Recently, he had Fanatic and WIP colleague Anthony Gargano on the show, and he revealed something NOBODY HAS EVER HEARD BEFORE. Not even Cuz. He revealed that he once pitched a Missanelli/Cuz afternoon show to Beasley management:

Mike, in part:

“A couple of years ago it became evident that WIP was just a monster. I proposed to them that you and I do a five-hour show. And I proposed that Tyrone, who was my producer, do the midday show. You and I would do five hours from one o’clock to six o’clock… I went to them and said ‘listen, if you really want to make a dent and save this station, here’s the best strategy to do it.’ And I could not believe they weren’t receptive to it…. I was willing to sacrifice whatever I was doing in the afternoon to make a really good show, to make the station (as) viable as possible. And I thought us doing it from 1 to 6 would have done that. They were so not insightful that they didn’t even blink at it.”

Wow. That’s quite the revelation.

“A couple of years ago” would put us in the time period of the Mike/Tyrone/Natalie Egenolf lineup, right? Those were the good old days, when we were all bitching at each other about unpaid internships. Anthony Gargano was doing middays at that point, having moved off the morning show in 2018, which was given to Marc Farzetta. I’d assume that’s the ballpark time frame Mike is referencing here.

But yeah, you wonder if a Mike/Cuz tandem would have defeated Jon and Ike at WIP. When Marks and Reese began, PM drive was initially very competitive, and the books were pretty much split between the shows. Then Jon and Ike started to gain momentum and were winning handily by the time Mike departed and The Best Show Ever? replaced him from 2 to 6. In the fall book, TBSE got hammered by Jon and Ike, who put up one of their biggest numbers ever.

Wonder what Beasley’s thought process was here. To be fair, we ask that question frequently these days.