After WFAN’s Brandon Tierney and Sal Licata hung up on Carl Banks last week, the New York Giants legend won’t be calling in again.
Wednesday afternoon, during what was supposed to be Banks’ weekly spot on WFAN, Licata announced the former Giants linebacker decided to end the segment in the wake of their recent blow up over Kayvon Thibodeaux. While Banks “resigned” from his paid weekly segment on the station, he will continue his role as the lead analyst on Giants radio broadcasts, which air on WFAN.
Banks has been the Giants lead radio analyst since 2007 and he’s been a weekly guest on various WFAN shows for most of that tenure. And in those hundreds of paid segments, none of them have been newsworthy, but that changed last week. Banks took exception with WFAN’s midday show after they labeled Thibodeaux a bust, with Licata specifically claiming the former fifth overall draft pick “stinks” and “his body looks work.”
“If it’s not your job to find out what the kid does right, then it should not be your job to call him a bust,” Banks said after blasting the hosts’ “weird” and “unhealthy obsession for finding what is wrong with Kayvon Thibodeaux.”
By that point, Licata had enough. With Licata and Banks talking over each other, the radio host eventually told his producers to drop the former Giants linebacker, which they did, ending the segment abruptly and awkwardly. Because of it, Banks decided to end the segment going forward.
“Usually in this spot, we have Carl Banks on. Last week we had a testy debate with Carl. Right on the air afterwards, I came on and apologized for the way that it ended, kind of cutting the call short there after 20 minutes,” Licata said on Wednesday. “I also called him during the week and also apologized. He said all was good. But Carl just doesn’t want to do the spot anymore, so we move on.”
“Yeah, we move on,” Tierney added. “Listen, things are gonna happen in this medium, when you bring a lot of passion to a topic, as certainly we did that day, and hopefully every day. And Carl did that day. When things go awry, as they sometimes do, you gotta own it. And I think we did. And I think Carl did as well.”
Tierney reiterated that he’s known Banks for a long time, noting that they spoke on the phone for 15 minutes earlier this week. But the conversation wasn’t enough to salvage Banks’ long relationship as a weekly guest on WFAN.
About eight hours after Tierney and Licata announced Banks would no longer be a weekly guest on their show, Gary Myers tweeted the announcement as “breaking news” adding that the Giants analyst was “completely disrespected” by the hosts. And although they had Banks on for 20 minutes before the interview went off the rails, hanging up on him was disrespectful.
After nearly two decades of uninterrupted weekly segments during the NFL season, is it a bad look that Tierney and Licata, in their first year as co-hosts, couldn’t last more than seven games with Carl Banks? Absolutely. Does the radio station care about that? Probably not.
The sports media industry does not reward hosts for providing fair, measured and astute analyst. It rewards hosts and personalities who garner attention. And usually, hosts garner attention by ticking off half their audience. For nearly 20 years, Carl Banks’ weekly spots on WFAN garnered absolutely no attention. If Banks’ departure somehow leads to a surprising drop in ratings (which it won’t) for WFAN’s midday show, then the station will care. But it’s much more likely that having the names “Tierney” and “Licata” plastered on headlines across the internet, because of their “beef” with Banks, will have more people tuning in.
[WFAN]
