Dan Dakich fires back at ‘uptight and insecure and nuts’ KU fans on KC radio station

photo by: Scott Chasen

ESPN announcer Dan Dakich reads not

Normally, the conversation between a fan and announcer is one-sided.

Fans can bark at their TVs, but the announcers will never hear them. Announcers can talk on the broadcast waves, but the fans can’t really respond.

Thanks to Twitter, we now know what at least one announcer would say if he could hear what was being said.

ESPN announcer and personality Dan Dakich was on the call for the recent KU drubbing over Omaha. Almost instantly, fans erupted on social media with tweets and posts voicing their displeasure. The tweets became so plentiful, in fact, that they were addressed on air in a segment called, “Not so mean tweets.”

Here are some of the actual tweets they used in the segment:

– @TheFoyeEffect: Dan Dakich is impressively stupid
– @BallmanMcG: I hope Dan Dakich never announces another basketball game ever again.
– @BradLoganCOTE: Who is Dan Dakich? I’m dead serious.

Dakich responded on air, joking back and forth with the users. Then he took it a step further, retweeting and responding to several users on Tuesday.

That just so happened to be the perfect opportunity for one radio host.

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Joshua Brisco, host of (Almost) Entirely Sports on ESPN Kansas City, was spending his Tuesday broadcast discussing the Kansas City Chiefs when one of his friends told him another was “Twitter sparring” with Dakich.

Brisco then took to Twitter and engaged with Dakich, ultimately leaving the phone number to his show as an open invitation.

“I didn’t expect him to call, but I thought there was a chance,” Brisco told the Journal-World. “There was another national broadcaster — who shall remain nameless — who declined an offer to come on the show in a similar circumstance, so I figured that Dan would do the same thing just to avoid a potential ambush. He had no idea who I was or what my agenda was.”

The ensuing segment was filled with plenty fireworks.

You can listen to it in full by clicking here.

Dakich didn’t back down from any of his comments on the broadcast — more on that in a second — but he did say he expected some of the heat he got from KU fans.

“I catch hell every time I do a game,” Dakich said on the show. “And everybody knows, like everybody in the world knows, that, with all due respect, very few fan bases whine more than Kansas.”

Dakich referred to a conversation he had with Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski on Tuesday about how fans tend to hear only what they want.

“I must have said 8,000 glowing things about Kansas, because I really like Kansas basketball,” Dakich said. “Like I really like Bill (Self).”

Still, it was another comment about the coach that stuck in the minds of KU fans.

After praising Self and KU’s streak of 13-conseuctive Big 12 championships, Dakich took exception to a no-call on a drive by an Omaha player.

Specifically, Dakich said “there’s nothing more disgusting” than the disparity in officiating between big and small schools, adding that the referees are paid differently depending on the game, and thus they want to keep coaches like Self happy.

Some KU fans were upset by that comment.

“That’s all I’ve heard today is, ‘You can’t say they’re in Self’s pocket,’ ” Dakich told Brisco. “I can say it, I’ve said it and I’ll keep saying it because they’re in (Tom) Izzo’s too. They were in (Bob) Knight’s too when I was there. It’s just the way the world works.”

The basis of that statement appears to be accurate. In 2012, Syracuse.com’s Mike Waters wrote a story about the wear and tear on officials.

In it, he noted an official can earn “roughly $3,000 for working a Big East or Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC)” game, compared to smaller conferences like the MAAC, in which that total might drop to about $1,500.

“I did say, and this is a fact — this is every coach that coaches at a mid major — when you play at a Kansas, you know you’re going to get screwed,” Dakich said. “I was an assistant at Indiana for Bob Knight I used to tell him, like if we’re playing Central Michigan, ‘Coach, you’ve got to stand up and change the game.’

“Look, officials make about $2,000 doing a Kansas game and about $750 doing an Omaha game. So who the hell you think they’re going to try to keep happy? It’s human nature.”

Dakich’s comments didn’t stop there.

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Aside from defending his own words, Dakich picked a fight with quite a few KU fans.

One user tweeted at Dakich to tell him “Malik (Newman) and Svi (Mykhailiuk) probably have more talent in their pinkies than you ever did.”

Then Dakich responded, calling out the user and comparing her hair to “lettuce.”

“You guys are so, like, uptight and insecure and nuts, so I wanted crazy lady to know that I was just kind of joking around,” Dakich told Brisco. “I would imagine (that my reasoning) escaped her. That’s why I did that, because she seemed to be a very hateful person.”

Dakich also called out several people who didn’t even tag him on the platform.

He said he got into the habit of searching for his own name because former NFL punter Pat McAfee warned him to do so. Dakich noted that he has now caught someone trying to falsely use his name for publicity on four separate occasions.

“I was one of those 6 a.m. to midnight guys,” Dakich said. “Now I work three hours a day so hell, I’ve got to fill my time. And what the hell? It’s what I do.

“I love getting people to the point where they’ve got to swear at me. And then I kind of laugh and go about my business.”

As for some other highlights of the conversation, Dakich called out one Twitter user on air who responded to Brisco’s initial post to announce the interview.

“You better be careful because — let me see here, hold on a second — some (jerk) named Joe Davis says, ‘No, No Josh,’ ” Dakich said. “He (doesn’t) want to listen when I’m on. So you might have just lost a listener for some dude named Joe Davis. That might come back to crush you.

“Hey Joe Davis, you’re going to miss a hell of a segment if you don’t want to listen to me and Josh, brother. Cause this is — ha, I almost swore right there — this is going to get good Joe Davis.”

Brisco, on the other hand, took it all in stride.

“I so respect him for (calling in). I loved every minute of it,” Brisco said. “He’s opinionated and confrontational and he has his own personality that reaches far beyond a KU-Omaha blowout.

“And that’s why many KU fans didn’t like him on that game. I saw people say that, ‘He made it about himself.’ … I just wish basketball fans had a little bit of a stronger stomach for that kind of personality.”

Really, Brisco was just concerned about getting the name of his impromptu guest right.

“I realized that, moments before he called in, that I wasn’t 100 percent confident I had been pronouncing Dakich correctly,” Brisco said. “So I was thrilled when he said his own name in the third-person a few minutes into our conversation.”