Dan Patrick says the quiet part out loud about the state of sports radio
In the same interview with Barstool Sports’ Pardon My Take in which he revealed he nearly had Who Wants to Be a Millionaire before Regis Philbin, while alleging that ESPN ran a smear campaign on his way out, Patrick offered a blunt assessment of where sports talk radio stands in 2025.
And if it feels broken, that’s because it is.
For someone with as much credibility and tenure as Patrick, it means something when he hits the panic button. And he did just that by speaking candidly about how the metrics of success have changed in ways traditional radio simply can’t keep up with.
“I never really looked at, like [Pat] McAfee with YouTube,” Patrick said. “Those numbers, that’s really all that matters. And I’ve been with terrestrial radio all my life, and you keep thinking of those ratings, those ratings, those ratings. Now? Nobody cares about that. They care about social media, what went viral, the number of people watching clips. And that’s what you guys have been able to do. You know, McAfee’s been able to do that, as well.”
What Patrick is getting at is that sports talk is no longer judged by how many people tune in live. It’s now about how many people share it afterward. That’s the terrain where Pardon My Take and The Pat McAfee Show have thrived. For better or worse, that’s the game now.
The game is viral reach, its comment sections, and how fast a segment moves on TikTok. Whether you think that’s good for sports media or not, ultimately lies with the beholder. And while purists might cringe at the theatrics or absence of journalistic standards, that’s not what trends in an algorithm-driven landscape.
That shift in value — from audience size to shareability — has left legacy voices stuck in a system that barely makes sense anymore. The traditional ratings model is opaque at best, outdated at worst. Even someone as established as Dan Patrick admits he’s flying blind when it comes to how his show is actually judged.
“I still don’t even know,” Patrick said. “They just tell me. Like, one day they’re going to say, ‘Hey, come here, bring your playbook, you’re done.’ And it could be something random like that. We’ll be in a market and they’ll go, ‘You’re killing it, but they want to go local.’ And I’ll go, ‘What does that mean?’ So then you’re not an affiliate in Portland, Maine. Meanwhile, you thought you were doing great in Portland, Maine.”
But it’s not just the ratings that frustrate Patrick. He also takes issue with the people interpreting them. He takes aim at management types and decision-makers, many of whom, in his eyes, are out of touch with how the job actually works. The people evaluating talent often haven’t done radio themselves, and that disconnect, he says, leads to decisions that make no sense on the ground level.
“I don’t like being beholden to that because, face it, you have a lot of people who are in radio who [are] your bosses, who probably haven’t done radio,” he said. “And I think it’s unfair, sometimes, when they project to what you should be doing or, why aren’t you doing, or why didn’t you ask? When you’re in the chair and there are live bullets, it’s just different.”
And that’s the problem right there: decisions being made in boardrooms by people who’ve never had to fill dead air.