Ovies & Giglio Want Triangle Sports Fans to Keep Arguing Forever

It’s a Thursday in February and Joe Ovies and Joe Giglio are talking about sports.

They’re recording from the headquarters of OG Triangle Media: A tiny office in downtown Raleigh made up to be a podcast studio. The room is decorated with various tchotchkes and sports memorabilia—school pennants, lava lamps, and old media badges. There’s a cartoon of Dean Smith, a can of Old Tuffy beer, a calendar of kittens, and a neon sign that says, “Good Vibes.”

This is the scene for a live recording of the duo’s eponymous, nearly one-year-old podcast that covers Triangle sports like N.C. State, Duke, UNC, the Carolina Hurricanes, the rest of the ACC, and a bit of everything else.

Ovies and Giglio have nearly 50 years of combined experience informing—and inflaming—the competing college fandoms here, a rarity in sports. Ohio State University and the University of Michigan are hours apart and in different media markets; fans here can’t avoid each other. But last April, their careers nearly came to an end when Capitol Broadcasting Company abruptly canceled their radio show.

Now, the pair are reinventing themselves as podcasters at a fraught time for both media and sports. Newspapers have cut back on local sports reporting. Podcasts proliferated in recent years, but many companies are scaling back. And the two Joes are offering a product that appeals to neither a national audience nor one rabid fandom. They need listeners in North Carolina who care about the local rivalries.

At the same time, Tobacco Road is not what it used to be. N.C. State’s recent ACC tournament run and victory over UNC in the men’s basketball championship felt like a throwback. Still, Coach K and Roy Williams have both retired. The ACC tournament isn’t always in Greensboro. Some teams already play each other less than they used to, a trend that will only get worse as the conference grows. Sports fans worry that conference realignment could decimate the ACC and that constantly changing rosters due to the transfer portal might cause people to lose interest. 

“We’re trying to break through everybody going into their silos. Carolina fans going to their outlets. N.C. State fan outlets,” Ovies said in an interview last month in their studio. “I think it’s more important and fun as a sports fan when everybody knows what’s going on and has opinions about stuff.”

‘You’re Done’

Ovies and Giglio are trying to stay in a business where the jobs keep disappearing because they love the action and the debate.

Giglio, 48, is the son of a coach. He played sports growing up in New Jersey and he read about them on the local sports page. A seventh-grade English teacher told him, “‘You know, you really have an ability to write,’” Giglio said. “And obviously you’re supposed to write about what you know.”

Giglio attended N.C. State, where he wrote for the Technician and got a part-time job with The News & Observer in 1995. He worked his way up to beat writer covering the Wolfpack and then the Tar Heels. His time as statistics editor compiling the agate page (box scores, trades, betting lines) gave him a breadth of sports knowledge.

Ovies, 45, is a less traditional fan. He got into radio because he was interested in music. “I’m the classic, my dad is an engineer, you should be an engineer, but I did not want to do computer science,” Ovies said. He grew up in Florida and moved to Raleigh in high school, and graduated from N.C. State in 2001. “I got wrapped up doing student radio at WKNC and that’s what I fell in love with.”

In college, he took a part-time job at 850 The Buzz, a local sports talk station. He’s been talking about sports ever since. “I’ve always been fascinated by the spectacle of what sports does to people,” Ovies said. “Otherwise smart, successful people will lose their shit because their team lost, and it fascinates me. It brings people together and it also drives them nuts.”

The early 2000s were a great time for the two to come up in this market. Duke and Carolina were winning men’s basketball titles. The Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup. There was Coach K and Roy, Tyler Hansbrough and JJ Redick. As for the Wolfpack, there was Philip Rivers, Julius Hodge, and some legendary coaching searches.

In 2008, while he was at 850 The Buzz, Ovies started recording video conversations called “Low Rent Theatre” and uploading them on YouTube. Giglio was an occasional guest.

By 2020, Giglio had left The News & Observer to write for WRAL, and Ovies was at 99.9 FM The Fan. The higher-ups at 99.9 The Fan—which, like WRAL, is owned by Capitol Broadcasting Company—decided to bring in Giglio to join Ovies in the 3-6 p.m. slot. It was an interesting fit.

Ovies had followed the careers of national personalities like Dan Le Batard and Mike Greenberg. He knew how to facilitate, how to be provocative, and how to tee Giglio up for his authoritative takes. “They’ve got great personalities, and they play off one another,” said longtime ACC play-by-play announcer Wes Durham, who was a frequent guest. As a former beat writer, Giglio knew “the sidebar intricacies of what was going on,” Durham said.

Three years in, Ovies said, they were No. 1 among men between 25 and 54 years old, their most important demographic. And then it ended. After finishing a show last April, they were called into a conference room and handed envelopes. “It was basically, you’re done,” Ovies said.

It was the day after Giglio’s birthday and the day before Ovies’ wedding anniversary.

Brian Grube, a general manager at Capitol Broadcasting Company, told The Assembly that the station appreciated the duo’s work but “decided to move in a new direction.” The current set-up has a single host, plus a producer.

Listeners were shocked. Ovies and Giglio were local celebrities, asked to do things like throw out the first pitch at a Carolina Mudcats game.

Even Gov. Roy Cooper tweeted about their firing: “Thanks for the in depth analysis, the struggling prognostications, the entertainment, and the laughs. Hope you guys reemerge soon.”

Hustling for Listeners

Ovies and Giglio took it hard. “The very next day we sat at Raleigh Times, and we were not in a very good place,” Giglio said. Then a friend walked by. “He had a drink with us and said, ‘You don’t see it right now, but the way they got rid of you could be a gift … You have to take advantage of it now.’”

Ovies and Giglio didn’t want to stop talking about the games all day. The idea for a podcast emerged.

It’s a popular industry these days; think of “The Bill Simmons Podcast” and “New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce.” The hard part is finding an audience. “If the content is good, that’s great, but you have to put the content where people are,” Ovies said. “That’s become so fractured now that while it’s easier than ever to start, it’s harder than ever to break through.”

John Barth, a longtime radio and podcast developer, said Ovies and Giglio are in a tough field. “The market is packed, very few podcasts make money, very few become sustainable,” he said. “These two guys have something a lot of people don’t, which is name recognition and a fanbase they could tap and grow.” 

To generate buzz, Ovies and Giglio have hosted tailgate parties, a tournament for the video game Tecmo Super Bowl, and taped flyers in the port-a-potties at Carter-Finley Stadium. They also have a content-sharing agreement with The News & Observer. “They hustled it,” Durham said. “A lot of people sit around for two weeks after something like that. These guys found a way to get back on the air.”

Months later, “Ovies & Giglio” has over 6,000 subscribers on YouTube. According to the website Chartable, which tracks podcasts, they rank 208th in the country among sports podcasts in terms of audience size and 79th by audience growth. They have a growing list of sponsors that includes Copiers Plus, Sleek Fleet, and DraftKings. 

Ovies said overhead costs are low, and they started turning a profit within three months. The pair plans to add a premium subscription option, including a newsletter, to boost their revenue. Ovies said at nearly a year into the podcast, he is making just over half of his final base salary at Capitol Broadcasting Company. Giglio said: “As my accountant just told me, ‘You owe taxes, that means you made money.’”

The show has changed to fit its new medium. They can be less filtered now—there’s cussing—and they can have longer conversations with guests such as Durham and sports journalists Bomani Jones and Lauren Brownlow.

An appeal remains their ability to psychoanalyze the fanbases, and to be real with them. “N.C. State fans don’t want to hear about sunshine and flowers,” Giglio said. “Carolina fans do. State fans, that’s not what they want. If their team is not any good, they want you to tell them.”

They’re working to make sense of a moment where the future of the ACC is in jeopardy. They’re trying to keep these passions going by tapping into nostalgia; in recent years, they’ve drunk decades-old championship sodas, and their merchandise includes a T-shirt with a play on the old ACC logo. They realize sports are more than games. They’re entertainment. And they’re trying to make them fun. They used a “curse reverse candle” bought at a witch shop in New Orleans to help N.C. State football’s season.

When they visited Gov. Cooper—who is not related to this reporter—for his March Madness picks last year, they gave him gag gifts. “With Carolina not in the field last year, they very much enjoyed giving me an N.C. State pennant and a Duke shirt,” Cooper, a UNC graduate, told The Assembly. This year, they gave him a coffee mug that said ACC tournament runner-up in Carolina blue letters.

Given how much Giglio and Ovies enjoy covering Tobacco Road, you’d have thought that UNC vs. Duke in the Final Four in 2022 would be the highlight of their careers. It wasn’t. They thought the Tar Heel victory gave UNC fans the sort of ultimate bragging rights that should never exist in a neverending rivalry. 

“In a weird sort of way, while it was interesting, I hated it, and I think a lot of fans also agree because it is the ultimate argument ender,” Ovies said. “And that’s the whole point, you want to have this argument go on forever.” 

Michael Cooper is a journalist and attorney from the foothills of North Carolina. He lives in Raleigh.