BREAKING: 97.1 The Freak Fires On-Air Crew, Will Return to Rock Radio Format

Sixteen months after making a major splash on North Texas radio, talk radio station 97.1 The Freak will stop freaking.

Citing anonymous sources only, Athlon Sports' Richie Whitt (also a frequent Observer contributor) appears to be the first to report the change in direction for the station, which will soon be known again as 97.1 The Eagle, the moniker it held for decades before the fall of 2022.

Mike Rhyner, one of the hosts of 97.1’s The Speakeasy weekday show, said he and the rest of his on-air crew, including Julie Dobbs and Jeff Cavanaugh, were fired today. According to Rhyner, he and the rest of The Freak crew were told that the station will revert back to its rock music programming as 97.1 The Eagle beginning on Monday, April 29.

“I could be standing at the New Mexico border and still see this coming,” Rhyner told the Observer over the phone on Friday. “It’s a feeling that I and plenty of others at the station had been getting for some time now. iHeartRadio is a music company that really doesn't do that much talk radio, and the talk radio they do is not local or locally originated, and they got caught into something [97.1 The Freak] they didn't know anything about, and they were kind of overwhelmed by it, and they decided that ‘this is not our bag.’”

The Athlon Sports report cited “lagging ratings” and “high overhead costs from multiple hosts on multiple shows” as two reasons for the change, but the format of the station that Rhyner referred to was unique in Dallas, and certainly, in the tightly programmed world of the iHeartRadio empire. Since its 2022 inception, The Freak proudly claimed “we say what we want.” Even with a number of popular former sports talk hosts from 1310 The Ticket, including Mike Sirois and Danny Balis, topics on The Freak ranged much further and wider than what the Cowboys were up to. A message left with iHeartMedia, iHeartRadio’s parent company, was not returned.

The biggest coup the station staged when it began was bringing Rhyner on board. The Texas Radio Hall of Famer had retired from his starring role at The Ticket in early 2020, and his return to the airwaves on 97.1 ruffled plenty of feathers at his former radio home. Rhyner was unsure about the employment status of the other 97.1 shows, including the Downbeat and The Ben and Skin show, but he ventured a guess.

“I know that everyone on our show is gone,” he said. “I’m not sure about the others, but I would imagine the same thing holds true for them. Like I said, this was a thing where that radio company, especially the branch of it here in Dallas-Fort Worth, is not well equipped to handle us and what we did, and they really weren’t into it at all.”

Although the meeting called on Friday was a surprise, to Rhyner, the purpose of the meeting was anything but.

“I’ve seen this coming for a long time,” he said. “We all have. We’ve all known we were dead men walking for a long time.”