Do you agree with @MikeMiss975 that Flyers fans should not have shown up and rooted for the Flyers in their last game?
— 975TheFanatic (@975TheFanatic) April 10, 2017
We don’t really spend a lot of time talking about the everyday bullshit that goes over the airwaves on sports talk radio in this town, but … well, the season’s over and I’m bored and pissed off on a Monday. So let’s talk about Mike Missanelli.
I guess I’m glad the show took five minutes in between breakdowns of middle linebackers from South Central Louisiana State University to talk about the Flyers today, but what the fuck is this? Missanelli is basically saying that Flyers fans shouldn’t have gone to Sunday’s season finale against the Hurricanes? We should just stop showing up because the team has had a disappointing year? Or that if we do show up we should stop cheering for the team as some form of stupid protest?
I don’t know exactly what his argument is other than what’s expressed in this tweet because I refuse to listen to Mike Missanelli’s show. If I’m going to kill my brain cells voluntarily, I’ll do it by drinking bourbon or something else I actually enjoy. It’s pretty clear though that whatever the hell he’s arguing, it’s just inane bullshit that serves no purpose other than to fire people up. (Congrats, Mike, it worked!)
That’s pretty much all sports talk radio in Philadelphia is worth these days, but it’s even worse when it comes to the Flyers. I fully understand that that this will always be an Eagles town first — and as an obsessive Eagles fan myself, I don’t even mind — but we have next to nobody on the airwaves in this city that’s capable of having an intelligent conversation about hockey, the NHL, or the Flyers.
Off the top of my head, I can think of one guy at 97.5 with the ability to talk hockey, and it’s Jason Myrtetus — who just so happens to host the pre-and-post-game shows for the Flyers. Yes, the flagship radio station for your Philadelphia Flyers has just one person who can talk about the team in a way that doesn’t make you want to bash your head into the ass end of the Gary Dornhoefer statue in the Sports Complex.
Speaking of that, do you think Missanelli could — without Google — tell you the importance of that goal scored by Dornhoefer that’s memorialized forever in the Sports Complex? Do you think he knows what year it happened? What decade? Do you think he knows who Gary Dornhoefer is? Can he spell Dornhoefer?
How many Flyers games do you think Missanelli watched this year? Do you think he knows anything about the 2016-17 team other than the major narratives? Anything about the sub-plots we’ve been following on this site since October? Why Flyers fans are annoyed with Dave Hakstol? Do you think he could tell you why the name “Chris VandeVelde” gives Flyers fans hives? Could he tell you why Wayne Simmonds is such a special hockey player without using the word “gritty”?
I’m not sure if he could answer these questions or not — like I said, I’d rather get on an overbooked United Airlines flight than listen to 97.5 FM in Philadelphia between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays. But I’m pretty comfortable guessing he can’t.
This is not the guy who gets to argue that you, the Flyers fan who’s watched 82 games of this crap, should stop watching or root against your team. If you come to that conclusion on your own, fine. I think there was at least a small part of all of us that were happy this season finally came to a close last night.
But what Missanelli proposed here is not really how being a fan works, of course; particularly not when you’re a fan of a team like the Flyers that has been to the conference finals more times in their history than they’ve missed the playoffs.
Results on the ice aside, you know that being a Flyers fan is more than just about the wins and losses. It’s about the people you sit around at games, the friends you meet up with to watch games with at the bar, the total strangers-turned-best-friends you’ve met on Twitter because you’re both obsessed with the Flyers. It’s about the way the Flyers bring your family together, in good times and bad. You know that all of these things only become stronger when the Flyers are having a down year.
You get all of that. Missanelli just needs to be loud on the radio for a few hours. He doesn’t get it.
97.5 The Fanatic has done nothing to earn your time aside from pay the team more than WIP did to broadcast games. Mike Missanelli has done nothing to earn the title of “the outright leader in Philadelphia sports talk” like his navel-gazing Twitter bio claims.
Anyway, we’ll be here with you all summer. We might not have the ability to broadcast Flyers games or reach every car in the Delaware Valley with a radio signal, but we sure as hell won’t insult your intelligence like Mike Missanelli did today.
