Edmonton’s Sports Myopia

A couple of years back, The Team 1260 was born…an all sports station…all sports, all the time. It seemed like it would be Valhalla. And it was…if your concept of Valhalla is the whining myopia known as Edmonton sports fans (in which case the Norse probably aren’t fond of you…and I wouldn’t screw with the Norse. Remember them? The Vikings? It’s a good rule of thumb to be nice to any peoples who travel in a horde).

The ratings remain so low as to be barely measurable with anything but a micrometer. The cuts to the ‘talent’ (that has to be taken with a grain of salt when you’re pulling ratings that don’t quite reach a single point on a regular basis) have begun, but even those don’t seem to make a lot of sense. They release Jake Daniels from their morning show but keep Brynn Griffiths from the same show. The reason…he’s also the station’s Program Director. Uhhh…considering the BAD programming (I realize early morning weekends are not ‘big ratings’ periods, but food and wine shows, investment advice and religious programming? Really???), shouldn’t him being the guy BRINGING in that material make him MORE fire-able??? The rumor is that they wanted to cut loose the absolute Oiler homer that Daniels was in order to set themselves up for a bid for the radio broadcast rights to Oilers games. Now, did Daryl Katz become rich by being stupid? No. Why would he possibly move broadcast rights from the #1 station in the city (across the board…CHED often finishes atop every other station across the radio spectrum in the same ratings that put The Team firmly within the crapper’s bowl) for this rinky dink little shit heap? Unless Katz also BUYS The Team so as to control the network broadcasting the games of his team, there is ZERO chance of The Team ever attaining Oilers rights. However, these cuts to station staff really don’t mean a lot, because the true culprits when it comes to the consistent lack of listeners…are the core listeners.

See, Edmonton has Oiler fans, not sports fans. The radio station can’t pull ratings bigger than little Timmy McGonagle and his friend Spence get whilst speaking to one another through their ‘radio system’ known as tin cans on the ends of a piece of string, and it’s because no rational human being wants to talk about the goddamn Oilers IN THE MIDDLE OF JULY. There is literally NOTHING to talk about…the draft is over, no moves, NOTHING. And yet for every painful hour of local material it’s nothing but the same 45 retards and their one trick pony brains, rambling on and on and ON about the fucking Oilers. No football, no baseball, nothing but the Oilers. And I don’t see the station ever doing all that well because the fans are incapable of focusing on anything, you know…good.

Has the craptitude of the hockey franchise sucked every fan’s warped brain down in to a vacuum of awful? Is that why fans of the team are unable to discuss anything else? Is it some sort of penance…or perhaps Oiler fandom is one of the circles of Hell? I’ll have to read Inferno and find out…

Why would anyone WANT to discuss this mess of a team? Who’s the President…oh, right, the idiot who assembled this roster of overprices midgets in the first place! Yep, better promote THAT GUY to bigger and better things…now he can completely Fubar the business prospects of both the Oilers AND the Oil Kings! Meanwhile, Steve Tambellini (otherwise known as ‘you poor bastard’) gets to try and deal overpriced garbage like Fernando Pisani or Dustin Penner or Lubomir Visnovsky to another team…if he wants to get anything BACK in trade besides a slap across the face, he may need to explore deals with the Short Bus Academy of Lloydminster. Not only that, but the usual idiocy from the fans demands a Cup contender NOWNOWNOW. And I simply cannot get enough of the airheaded blatherings of Oiler superfans, throwing Robert Nilsson under the bus as a talentless blob of flesh in the first sentence, then insisting they could definitely trade him straight up to Atlanta for Ilya Kovalchuk in the second. Of course, they have made one signing…the ‘immortal’ (when he feels like it) Nikolai Khabibulin. And he feels like it when he’s playing for a new deal, so…well, I guess you’ll see him play well in 3 years. That isn’t so far off, right?

Is it any wonder nobody wants to listen to this? I can only absorb so much stupid in a given day, and too much ‘Oiler fan’ takes me in to Danger Will Robinson territory. And the last thing I want or need is some giant robot flailing his hooks around while my expedition’s head scientist tries to set up myriad ways to get some ‘alone time’ with a 10 year old boy! Too much Oiler Fan Radio is like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters…you don’t really know what it does to you, but you’re sure the blood dripping from your ears and increasing cranial pressure are not signs of anything positive for your well being. Of course that’s nothing like that ever happened to the Ghostbusters, so let’s just pretend I’d made some sort of allusion to gigantic puffy confection monsters bursting everywhere and move along.

Attention Edmontonians! You have a professional baseball franchise (though I will readily admit it just isn’t the same as the Trappers AAA team, where you got to see guys on their way to the major leagues)! You have a professional football team! You have a professional lacrosse team! You have a minor league hockey franchise! You are allowed to discuss things that happen outdoors, and you are in fact permitted to experience the sun once in awhile! Shut the fuck up about the goddamn failure of a hockey franchise for a couple months…Hell, you might even SMILE for once! Until that happens, this city is going to remain a huge gamble for any other sports team (eventually that will include the Eskimos as the crowds keep getting grayer and grayer in the stands for their games), and the sports station is going to remain a barely listenable garbled mess of bitchy morons and 8 hours a day of the same discussion ad nauseam like some sort of torture device.

Oh, and before someone starts getting up in my grill about me gloating now that my Penguins have won a Cup, I DO remember the days before Sid and Evgeni…you try cheering for Tom Kostopoulos and Konstantin Koltsov ON YOUR FIRST LINE. Shut your cry holes!