That is a good question. How many are crippled by FCC rules and station censorship, terrible co hosts and holes, poor guests if any at all, instructions to do terrible bits like War of the Roses, no financial freedom so they have to toe the line, etc? What if you gave 10 jocks at random a good chunk of money, say 1 million dollars, and a satellite radio gig? I'd have to imagine that some of them would be good. The entire industry cannot be duds.

With a few exceptions, the show mostly just bashed the shit over how hacky terrestrial radio is and made fun of how it had to be presented by the awful hosts. Most of the hosts would be fine if they didn't feel like they had to put on an act and could just be themselves. That's why we enjoyed O&A for the most part because they were just being themselves and never felt forced by the station to do stupid shit.

The PDs are the ones that really fuck up radio IMO because they're the ones that approve things and make all of the decisions. If these stations could say "fuck" I don't think it'd matter as long as they were still forced to do all of these hack bits. Like you said, the whole industry can't be duds, they just have virtually no freedom to do what they want so they're limited in how they can present themselves.

but Opie is proof that you could take a dud, give them everything to succeed, and the dud would still suck.

Yeah but we all though Scott Shannon was a dud until we heard him on O&A. He was just held back by his partner and format.

Yeah but Patrice and Opie had a weird bond. Its odd when people say Patrice hated Opie when Patrice often gave Opie huge respect.

On the other hand, radio-wise the combo of Patrice and Anthony was unbeatable. "With clean hands" alone makes me wish they had a fuckton more years to chill

People bitch about Opie a lot, but you got to give him credit for helping create the radio environment that made the show what it was. Lots of comedians had to do shitty raido shows just to plug their gigs, With O&A you could just talk whatever and hang with friends.

I never really had a problem with Opie until the split up. If Patrice had been introduced to the show as O&J in it's current state, I wonder if he would still take a liking to him.

Opie delivers the funny!