After Carl Banks resigned from his weekly appearances with WFAN’s midday show, don’t expect him to resurface on their morning program.
On Wednesday, WFAN’s midday hosts Brandon Tierney and Sal Licata announced Banks decided to stop his weekly segments on their show following a tense exchange over New York Giants linebacker Kavon Thibodeaux last week. During the exchange, which came at the end of a 20-minute interview, Banks and Licata began talking over each other, prompting the radio host to hang up on the Giants legend.
Licata has since apologized for ending the interview abruptly, and both radio hosts acknowledged having cordial off-air conversations with Banks following the blow-up. But Banks still didn’t want to continue the segment.
Wednesday night, former New York Daily News columnist Gary Myers tweeted that Banks resigned from WFAN’s midday show after being “completely disrespected,” which sparked mass social media reaction. And Thursday morning, WFAN morning host Gregg Giannotti weighed in, categorizing Banks’ weekly spot as one of the station’s worst segments.
Rubbing salt into the wound pic.twitter.com/V8JpCHeqLn
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) November 2, 2023
“Carl is still gonna be on the radio station,” Giannotti noted. “He’s still gonna do the pregame show stuff. He’s still gonna be calling the games on WFAN. And he did a weekly spot for 20 GODDAMN YEARS HERE THAT WAS BORING AS HELL!
“So him resigning from WFAN really means nothing to us! And for anybody that’s sitting there going, ‘Man, what a loss for WFAN,’ stop! No one really liked that spot. The only reason it was still on is because there was an sales play attached to it. That’s it! Nobody wanted it! The hosts didn’t want it! They didn’t want it! Management didn’t want it! Nobody wanted it!”
Giannotti claimed that Banks deserves some blame for the tense exchange with WFAN’s midday show last week. “The was disrespect on both sides,” the morning host said. While Giannotti agrees Licata shouldn’t have ended the segment so abruptly, he thinks Banks was wrong for belittling the hosts’ ability to have an opinion.
“And by the way, for all the folks out there that are saying, ‘What a terrible look for WFAN,’ there’s two guys right now in the midday that are making noise and making stories in a slot where that generally doesn’t happen,” Giannotti noted. “So, if you think that’s a bad thing, you don’t understand the business. Those guys took what was the most boring 15 minutes of the day and turned it into a news story.”
Banks has been the Giants lead radio analyst since 2007 and he’s great in that role, willing to provide blunt and critical analysis. Banks has also been a paid weekly guest on various WFAN shows throughout most of his tenure with the station. And in those hundreds of paid segments, none of them have been newsworthy.
To Giannotti’s point, In the history of Awful Announcing, this is the fourth article we’ve written about Carl Banks. All of them were published in the last week. The midday show is not going to lose any listeners in the wake of losing Carl Banks. If anything, they might gain a couple from the millions of people who reacted in some way on social media.
[WFAN]
