FAYETTEVILLE – For those who think the “Voice of the Razorbacks” feels compelled to be an institutional mouthpiece off campus, Chuck Barrett wants to provide some background: he landed his job as the Arkansas football play-by-play announcer in spite of his hot takes, not because of them.
In 2007, Barrett was coming off 12 years as the host of the widely popular “Sports Rap” talk radio show in which he’d perfected the art of holding forth with a microphone, with regular guests like Clay Henry and Dudley Dawson but not much else.
“We had no bells or whistles,” Barrett recalled. “We had a guy down there [in Little Rock] who didn’t even know how to get a phone. He was barely able to get the callers in the line, much less call a guest. So what we had to do was we had to talk to our people.”
Frank Broyles, the legendary former Arkansas football coach and athletic director, certainly didn’t enjoy being on the listening end. Barrett’s opinions spanning what he saw as the good, bad and ugly with the Razorbacks grated on him. “Coach Broyles hated every minute of talk radio. He hated every minute I was on the talk show and he had no problem telling me that.”
Barrett’s “Sports Rap” successor, Bo Mattingly, followed a similar trajectory. He and his team built a monster of a show, with Mattingly becoming one of the state’s most well-known sports talk hosts alongside Randy Rainwater. After that run ended in 2019, he too went to work with the Razorbacks. In his case, it was through his documentary and podcasting business Sport & Story and helping to launch Hogs+, the UA’s in-house media production arm.
Over time, Barrett and Mattingly both came to miss the give and take of live radio, however. Barrett had been doing a regular guest spot on “The Morning Rush” sports show with Tye Richardson and Tommy Craft on ESPN Arkansas, but felt the itch to do more. One day in the early summer, the 61-year-old called Mattingly to talk shop and learned Mattingly was considering returning to radio as well.
“I’ve kind of gone through it through a couple of business changes, personal changes, got divorced a couple of years ago,” said Mattingly, age 48. He’d decided now was a good time to get back into an area where he’d excelled.
The result: Monday’s debut of the “Chuck and Bo Show,” which will air weekdays from 6 to 9 a.m. across multiple Arkansas radio affiliates.
What to Expect from the “Chuck and Bo” Show
As far as format, expect a hybrid from Barrett’s “Sports Rap” sans call-in guests and Mattingly’s guest-heavy show that aired in the afternoon. The co-hosts will of course expound on the news but also sometimes break the news themselves. They will sprinkle in relevant guests throughout. None are more timely than Arkansas football coach Sam Pittman, who’s scheduled to appear on Monday.
During our conversation on Tuesday in his studio off of College Ave., Mattingly had just finished interviewing Pittman for Hogs+. That means he will have interviewed the Head Hog twice in exclusive settings in less than a week. Barrett is similar in that he interviews the head football coach before and after all games and for the Razorbacks’ weekly radio shows in football and basketball.
This kind of access is highly unusual in a media landscape where one-on-ones with local reporters are diminishing.
But Mattingly and Barrett will keep covering the Hogs while working with the UA directly, leading some fans to think their status as “insiders” will jeopardize their ability to do talk radio well.
Shills for Arkansas Football?
“Barrett and Mattingly are two company shills,” wrote a user named “Tenderizer” on the message board Hogville, that pristine font of reasoned thought. “Don’t expect anything the least bit critical or negative coming from them.”
Surprise, surprise: this axe hurl hits something of a nerve.
Barrett sits at a conference table, his left arm in a sling as he heals from shoulder surgery, but that doesn’t stop him from pointing out a few things.
“There’s lots of the time when someone says you’re a ‘shill,’ it means you have an opinion they don’t share,” Barrett says. “If they’re pissed, you’re not. They want somebody fired. You’re smart enough to understand that’s not how it works.”
Or the opposite dynamic can play out, where fans interpret glowing reviews of a new coach as blind loyalty. Mattingly knows that many Arkansas football fans still think he was too pro Chad Morris around the time of his hiring in late 2017.
He’s taken a shot from one fan, for instance, who insisted “I shoved Chad Morris down Arkansas fans’ throats, and I kept them from hiring [Mike] Norvell.”
Mattingly added that his main focus after the Morris hire was to get people who knew him best on the show. One such insider was Dabo Swinney, the head coach of Clemson when Morris excelled at offensive coordinator there. “And of it happened to be all glowing which, by the way, is how somebody gets hired.”
That hire, of course, didn’t work out. But hindsight is 20/20 and at the time no national columnists were yet referring to Morris as “Costco Dabo.”
(Mike Norvell, meanwhile, isn’t anywhere near the clearance aisle given Florida State’s 13-1 record last year. But you can bet his reputation has taken a hit after his team’s close loss to Georgia Tech on Sunday.)
Keeping The Human Touch
As Mattingly sees it, it’s only natural to want to get to know the Razorbacks he discusses on the daily. They aren’t merely flickering images on a smartphone screen to him; they are flesh and blood people he will have to look in the eye again and again.
“I’ve never understood anybody that covers a team that doesn’t want to have relationships and get to know the people they’re working with,” he says. “Sure, that could influence you, but just like you want to get to know somebody to understand them more, that desire, you have to take that same professionalism and apply it to how you handle the information. It doesn’t mean just because I got to know you, that then I can’t ever tell the truth.”
Barrett and Mattingly are in full swing now. If there are any questions about how two dominant personalities will share the mic, those are in part answered by the way they deftly go back and forth on this topic. It’s like a test run for Monday’s show, they joke.
Barrett, like Mattingly, prizes providing perspective to the listener and swimming against the current of popular opinion every now and then. They both say that they have never been asked by anybody at the UA to keep critical opinions to themselves. “Nobody’s ever told me what to say on here, that I couldn’t say anything on the air,” Mattingly says.
The co-hosts are eager to jump back into the business they know so well, to provide something that moves listeners across a spectrum of emotions while teasing out the signal from the noise in what has become such a saturated market.
“What people are going to get from this show is probably better information than they get anywhere else on the Razorbacks,” Barrett says. “Also, a perspective and depth that I know they don’t get anywhere else, and it’s going to be hopefully provided in an entertaining fashion.”
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