In September 2022, a retired Mike Rhyner, who founded The Ticket, announced plans to return to the airwaves alongside “The Ben & Skin Show” and others.
DALLAS — Eighteen months after the news broke that Mike Rhyner was returning to the airwaves on 97.1-FM to join an upstart talk station called The Freak, that new station’s run has come to an end.
Rhyner was among a number of on-air Freak personalities let go by the station this week, sources confirm to WFAA.
It was a weird day for the 97.1-FM airwaves, to say the least.
The channel aired its usual “The Downbeat” morning show with Danny Balis, Mike Sirois and Kevin Turner from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., then switched to syndicated programming instead of the regularly scheduled “The Ben & Skin Show” with Ben Rogers, Jeff “Skin” Wade, Krystina Ray and Steve Shackleford from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and “The Speakeasy” with Rhyner, Jeff Cavanaugh, Julie Dobbs and Michael “Grubes” Gruber from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Over-the-air ads still ran promoting Freak-related content on Friday, but it was tough not to read the writing on the wall, with the switch-up in programming seemingly confirming earlier, anonymous source-citing reports about the station’s demise.
Rhyner himself only added to that speculation, pulling up a 97.1 The Freak sign from a yard and saying “Thanks, y’all” to the camera in a video shared to Facebook that was captioned “very difficult goodbye.” He further fanned the flames with a post on X that promoted his colleagues Turner and Cavanaugh’s NFL Draft coverage on YouTube as “a little goodbye kiss from the Freak.”
Rhyner was a little more direct about the situation in an interview with the Dallas Observer on Friday, in which he confirmed that he’d been let go by The Freak’s parent company, iHeartRadio.
“I could be standing at the New Mexico border and still see this coming,” Rhyner said. “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.’”
Reports about the station’s run coming to an end came to light mere hours before the Dallas Mavericks’ 7 p.m. tipoff against the Los Angeles Clippers for Game 3 of their first-round series playoff series. The 97.1-FM frequency in North Texas has served as the official radio home to the NBA team since 2021, dating back to when the station was still primarily a rock station branded as The Eagle. The Mavericks’ Game 3 broadcast still went ahead and aired on 97.1-FM on Friday night as planned.
Exactly what iHeartMedia has planned next for the 97.1-FM frequency is unclear.
A source close to the situation said the station was likely to revert back to a rock radio format. It’s unknown at this point, however, if any of the station’s on-air personalities will join the channel in its format flip.
For its part, “The Ben and Skin Show,” which in many ways was directly responsible for The Freak’s inception as a brand, issued the following statement about the end of The Freak, and the changes to come on 97.1-FM moving forward:
“We are heartbroken that the station that we worked so hard to help build is changing directions. We loved being a part of The Freak. The best part of the last 18 months was coming to work everyday with some of our closest friends and favorite DFW radio personalities. Nothing will top that. Although it was short-lived, it was far and away the most fun we’ve ever had in radio.”
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