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Mike Missanelli, Who Refers to Joe Giglio as “White Urkel,” Talks About the Challenge of 97.5 the Fanatic’s “Make the Switch” Campaign

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Dec 19th, 2025 · 12:06 PM EST

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I was listening to the most recent OnPattison podcast, which features Mike Missanelli alongside Crossing Broad alumnus Anthony “Sherlock” San Filippo. About 40 minutes in, after an interview with Jim Salisbury, they turned to the topic of sports talk radio, explaining what happened last week with Jon Marks calling out Joe Giglio before Merrill Reese and Mike Quick took a shot at their WIP colleagues for doing shameful Jalen Hurts rage bait:

Here’s a partial transcription:

Missanelli: Jon was a little steamed at the take of his counterpart at the other radio station, WIP, from Joe (Giglio), who I call “White Urkel.” (laughter) Or “Nerdface McGee,” take your pick. Whatever you want to call him. He’s the one who lit up this whole Jalen Hurts thing, that you were going to give him one more chance and if he didn’t play well against the Raiders, he was going to bench him. And Marks countered by saying “‘if you want to say no to this kind of radio, give me a try, I like Joe G, he’s a good dude but this is embarrassing. He doesn’t believe what he’s saying. It’s deliberate and calculated. Fake take radio at its finest.”

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The other station is doing it the exact opposite way. I worked with Bill Colarulo, he’s now doing evening drive, saying ‘make the switch’ because we do real sports talk radio here. Marks is now doing the same thing. They’re so far behind though in the ratings that there’s no way they can possibly catch up, doing even what they do. So where do you draw the line? WIP is giving people the outrage they want to hear, whether they want to hear it or not, because they’re listening to that station anyway.

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At this point, the Fanatic would have to hire an airplane and drop little parachutes down, saying this is what we do now. Because the message isn’t getting heard by enough people. The people Jon Marks is talking to, saying ‘make the switch,’ are people listening to his show anyway. He’s not lecturing to the WIP audience because he’s not getting to the WIP audience. How does he get to the WIP audience? By word of mouth? Little parachutes coming down? That’s what I’m talking about. That’s why you can’t win.”

It was a good conversation, and I have to say that I agree with the general thought. It’s one thing to ask people to make the switch, but Colarulo and Marks need to penetrate the firewall somehow. They need to reach the WIP listeners who don’t have 97.5 on the dial in the first place. How do you do that? You can make noise on social media, go take out a billboard on I-95, or do the figurative parachute thing Mike is talking about, but even then, you don’t have the Eagles rights, you don’t have the Phillies rights, and Beasley is a thrifty owner that has done nothing but trim and trim at 97.5 and their other Philadelphia stations for years now. If the Fanatic was even a shell of what it used to be 10 years ago, they wouldn’t be getting walloped in the first place.

As annoying as some of the WIP hosts can be (not all, some), that station has a strong and identifiable brand inside of a parochial market. They are going to put a former Eagle on every daypart and talk about the Eagles until your head explodes. They will do performative rage bait because it gets people calling and talking. They do low-IQ radio for the low-IQ portion of the fanbase, which is robust. They know exactly how to program sports talk radio in this region and they’re been doing it for decades now. It’s the blueprint that Angelo Cataldi and Howard Eskin used to originally sway all of the nitwits, morons, and dopes of the Delaware Valley.

The Giglio thing makes me laugh because he is indeed a good dude. But he’s not a Philly sports fan. He’s a Monmouth County/Ocean County guy who grew up rooting for the Giants and started his sports radio career at WFAN. He didn’t start picking up part-time shifts at WIP until 2013, and was writing for NJ.com at the same time, penning stories about the Yanks and Mets and shit like that. Eventually Joe got the evening shift after Chris Carlin went back to New York. And if you recall, the radio he did from about 2013 to 2017 was not the same radio he’s doing now. It was solid, knowledgeable, solo night time radio, not fake take rage bait daypart radio. I genuinely enjoyed Joe’s show during that time period. In fact, I blame Spike Eskin for corrupting Giglio in the same way Jack Fritz and Ike Reese are currently corrupted and stricken with Stockholm Syndrome. I think if Spike left the station you could wash the flip floppy hot take stink off Giglio and save him.

Now, we play the song: