Greg Cote doesn’t think Dan Le Batard and Stugotz are getting back together, and on Monday’s edition of his eponymous podcast, the longtime Miami Herald columnist — one of the few people who knows both men well enough to speak candidly about what happened between them — explained why
“It’s an awkward situation, partly because of the hesitancy from both sides to really open up about the real story,” Cote said. “I feel bad for both parties. I know both guys very well, obviously, and this thing did not end well. I’d be hard-pressed to call the parting ‘amicable,’ and that makes me sad. Dan publicly and I think even privately, Dan leaves the door open for some level of reunion, but I think that ship has sailed, I’m sad to say.”
The comments came less than a week after Le Batard announced on his show that Jon “Stugotz” Weiner’s name would be removed from the long-running Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz as part of a broader rebrand, a development that had been visibly coming for months but that Le Batard framed as something he had spent considerable time trying to avoid.
The split between the two traces to last May, when Meadowlark Media inked a new licensing agreement with DraftKings that left Stugotz’s solo shows — God Bless Football and Stupodity — out of the arrangement, prompting Stugotz to step back from the show in the weeks that followed before making his final on-air appearance in late August, after which he rebuilt his career largely outside the Meadowlark orbit — signing a FanDuel endorsement deal and launching a national afternoon show on Fox Sports Radio — making any potential return to Meadowlark a logistical tangle on top of whatever personal friction remains.
The back-and-forth between the two has been playing out from their respective airwaves since January, when Stugotz announced his Fox show and revealed he still owed Meadowlark nine appearances under his existing contract, which he said he would fulfill under one unstated condition that Le Batard and Meadowlark never agreed to meet.
In May, Le Batard broke months of silence on his own show, describing the stalemate as “crushing” and reiterating that a role remained available for Stugotz whenever he was ready, a framing that Stugotz pushed back on forcefully, telling his radio audience that Meadowlark had asked him to appear on a couple of “test shows” to demonstrate he would cooperate before they would agree to discuss any extension — a condition he called insulting given the length of their partnership.
“Twenty-plus years, I’m not agreeing to show up to do a couple of test shows because you guys want to see that I’m nice,” Stugotz said. “Get the hell out of here.”
He also disclosed that he believed he was Meadowlark’s second-largest shareholder and said that unless things changed soon, he was “pretty close to giving up.”
Cote said the name removal was long overdue, noting it had become increasingly untenable to keep Stugotz’s name on a show he had not appeared on in over a year. He stopped short of assigning blame to either party, though he made clear he believed the path back ran through the personal relationship first, not the business one.
“All I can do is hope that the two friends get together,” Cote said, “because the two friends getting together is what’s going to enable the business partnership to maybe get together, as well.”
Stugotz has reserved the right to tell his version of events if he feels the narrative isn’t being accurately represented. Given what Cote laid out Monday, that version may still be coming.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.