It’s been a rough day for makers of styling mousse, SmartOnes™, and Flomax.
Yesterday afternoon, legendary Oklahoma athlete, coed chaser, and on-air urinator Dean “The Stream” Blevins announced that after 42 years of handsomely reading a teleprompter, he will be retiring as News 9’s sports director later this year, ending a nearly half-century reign atop the OKC metro sports broadcasting scene.
Yep, that’s correct. Lower the flags at Interurban and grab an intern’s ass—Dean Blevins is hanging up the penny loafers!
If that bums you out, don’t despair. If you’re a fan of Dean and/or commercials for car dealerships, casinos, and men's health clinics, he’s keeping his daily sport with Jim and Al on The Sports Animal.
News 9 also announced that Dean will be replaced by his former backup sports anchor Toby Rowland.
Yep, keep that Oh-Face in check! Toby Rowland is coming… in July!
I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief that News 9 had someone other than Dean Blevins design that graphic:
In all seriousness, we’d like to congratulate Toby on landing the gig.
In less than 20 years, he’s gone from talking to Effie on AM radio to rounding up the play-by-play ponies for OU Athletics to now filling Dean’s hopefully cleaned and disinfected seat at News 9. How’s that for a cool career rise? I guess being nice to us and letting us join his KREF fantasy football league way back in 2007 karmically paid off for him.
For what it’s worth, I actually got word last week that something like this was in the works, but I had no clue News 9 and Dean would be in such a hurry to announce it.
I figured they’d milk it with a long, drawn-out teaser campaign—kind of like they did when they unveiled their new set back in September. Remember that snoozefest?
Honestly, they could have reused all the same copy and just swapped out the images. For example:
Then again, maybe News 9 is saving the teaser campaign for when Toby, uhm, comes in July? They could mimic the same approach they used for the big reveal of the Bob Mills Ranger 9 Bell 505K 3000.
Anyway, since it’s only February and July is still five months away, we’ll wrap this up and share more thoughts on Dean and his career as he gets closer to retirement—or gets attacked by the station’s new automated production cameras.
Until then, stay with The Lost Ogle. We’ll keep you advised.
