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Some Thoughts on Jon Marks Admitting that He’s a Bandwagon Flyers Fan Who Doesn’t Know Who Quinn Hughes is
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Let’s get it back to hockey around here. A Flyers fan called Jonny Marks on Monday’s 97.5 the Fanatic midday show, asking about Quinn Hughes:
Here’s the clip itself. There’s not a lot to it:
“This isn’t a fake show where I give you fake analysis… of course I’m a Flyers fan and I want them to win. Haven’t been locked into the season, Ray is probably the biggest Flyers fan on the show…“
This is honestly really straightforward.
Marks was at 94 WIP from 2017 and 2023. WIP is not the Flyers’ rights holder and none of their full timers give a flying fuck about hockey or know anything about hockey. That’s why they have Brodes come on the afternoon show to give his hockey minute or whatever it is, because Ike Reese, Spike Eskin, and Jack Fritz also don’t know who Quinn Hughes is (he’s a 2x All Star defenseman and Canucks captain who played for Rick Tocchet).
People will say that Marks “has a sports show” and therefore should know this, or know hockey, but the Flyers are not part of WIP’s programming strategy. The hosts are not required to be knowledgeable about a sport the station doesn’t talk about to begin with.
So naturally you’d give Marks a grace period here. Going from non-rights holder back to rights holder, he’ll have to learn enough about hockey to at least take a phone call like that one. As he says, he hasn’t followed the Flyers “in a really long time” and in my mind it’s admirable to be honest instead of adding more fakeness to one of the fakest sports media jobs there is.
But here’s the thing –
The Fanatic has always been lukewarm to hockey, and sometimes outright hostile, even as the rights holder! We’re all old enough to remember Mike Missanelli not caring about the sport, and telling Jason Myrtetus to stick to hockey and all of that. That’s because radio is about “playing the hits.” Even if there’s high-level hockey talk on one or both of the stations, it’s never going to overtake Eagles, Phillies, or Sixers talk, because football and baseball are bigger than hockey and the NBA is more dramatic. So they program accordingly and hockey fans (and soccer fans) get only two things – jack and shit.
The other thing is this, and don’t be offended, but hockey talk is granular and oftentimes dense. It doesn’t interface very well with radio, which thrives on boisterous claims and rage bait. We can yell for the quarterback to be benched and the offensive coordinator to be fired, maybe call Joel Embiid a fatass who should get down in the low block. Asking if Tocchet should have his fourth line out there against the Avalanche just doesn’t move the needle very much. Talking about Matvei Michkov’s ice time or doing Quinn Hughes trade speculation doesn’t stir debate as much as trying to sit Jalen Hurts for Tanner McKee. There’s less to yell about, while talking about guys like Jett Luchanko and Nikita Grebenkin brings us into an esoteric forum.
Hockey is the 4th sport in a four-sport town. I don’t necessarily agree with how they program each station, but I understand why they do it and accept it as reality. And at the risk of not stating the obvious, it certainly doesn’t help that the Flyers have been total butt for a long time. When they get out of this rebuild you’ll hear more about the team because they’ll actually be worth talking about.
Here’s the hockey situation in these parts:
A lot of Flyers fans know that they’ll never get much time on sports talk radio, so they don’t listen. They read Charlie O’ Connor and Kevin Kurz and maybe listen to that show that Anthony and Russ do. What’s it called? Show the Goalie? Something like that. There’s a bit of a chicken and egg thing going on here, where you ask yourself if the radio doesn’t talk about the Flyers because hockey fans don’t tune in, or if hockey fans don’t tune in because the radio doesn’t talk about the Flyers. It’s probably both, if that’s possible. But whatever the case, this isn’t anything new, and nobody should be surprised. Expecting high-level hockey talk on sports talk radio is like expecting WMMR to not play Pearl Jam every fucking hour. Terrestrial radio plays the hits and has always played the hits, and hockey just isn’t a hit at this particular moment in time.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com