KREF Radio 'Home of Sooner Fans' vows to 'be bigger and better than ever'

Deal between Norman-area radio station and iHeartRadio expired Aug. 18

Oklahoma men's basketball coach Porter Moser, middle, appears with KREF radio hosts Tyler McComas (left), and Teddy Lehman (right), at the Omni Hotel in Dallas before the 2022 OU-Texas football game. (Photo submitted)

By Douglas Miles, For The Crimson Captain

NORMAN – Last week, my brother called me from the truck he drives between oil well sites across Oklahoma.

"What happed to KREF?" he asked after trying to tune into 94.7 FM, where his favorite sports talk radio station known as the "Home of Sooner Fans" had been found for the past two years.

I explained to him what little I knew about the Norman-based station's Aug. 18 departure from the 1,000-watt frequency that blanketed nearly the entire state. His confusion was undoubtedly shared by other listeners, who wondered if the change signaled the demise of KREF.

"The misconception that we are going away is false," KREF Chief Financial Officer Bryan Vinyard told The Crimson Captain. "We have been in this business since 2009 and I feel like we have updated and upgraded our talent level continually over the time period that we have owned our station."

KREF is owned and operated by Metro Radio Group, which is solely owned by Vinyard's wife, Casey Vinyard. After being an AM-only station from 2009-21, Metro Radio Group signed a two-year deal with iHeartRadio in August of 2021, which gave the station a much-broader FM reach.

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What that allowed us is a platform to let everybody that didn't already know about KREF, find KREF," Bryan Vinyard said.

The original iHeartRadio deal was brokered by Jon Phillips, the market area president for iHeart for the entire state of Oklahoma and a former football player at the University of Oklahoma from 1983-87. Once Phillips left iHeart to pursue other opportunities late in 2022, KREF lost its most ardent advocate within the iHeart corporate office and the Vinyard's figured a renewal of the deal was in jeopardy.

"I think iHeart's long-term play was to try to obtain the OU media rights as the flagship station and I think that has not happened to date," Vinyard said. "And I think when that did not happen at the end of our two-year agreement, they decided to change formats and there will be a format change forthcoming."

As of now, there is no availability among the large FM frequencies in Oklahoma and FCC regulations do not allow for the purchase of a signal with the intention of relocating it to a new area.

"We are what we are," Vinyard said.

For listeners that consume content through traditional terrestrial radio, KREF is still found on FM frequencies in Norman/Moore (99.3) and Weatherford (97.3), plus AM stations in Norman (1400), Tulsa (1430), Lawton (1380) and Weatherford (1320).

Among the top-50 radio markets in the United States, Oklahoma City is one of just two that is a "Nielsen Diary Market," which means that the global marketing research firm Nielsen Company gauges ratings based on the decades-old method of sending out surveys for households to document their listening habits. This method yields about 300 responses per month. For a community like Oklahoma City with a population of 1.2 million people, that is not a large sample size and puts the validity and accuracy of numbers based on this method into question when up against other sports talk stations such as KRXO's "The Franchise" or WWLS' "The Sports Animal."

"Ratings fluctuate over time," Vinyard said. "We had gotten solidly ahead of another station in the market which I am not going to give credit by naming. And then, obviously everyone knows in our market the one station that has been here 30 years. They had a lead and that lead was shrinking drastically."

In the months leading up to the iHeart deal expiration, KREF conducted a pair of Twitter polls six months apart to learn how listeners were consuming its content. The polls revealed that 67 percent of listeners were accessing KREF at least partly through the KREF app, which is available from the "App Store," is free of charge, can be accessed around the globe and allows for much more specific tracking of data.

"Looking at the 'app map' every single day, it is not just a small concentration of where I would think most OU fans would be," said Tyler McComas, co-host of KREF shows "Locked In" and "The Rush." "Oklahoma City, Dallas, Tulsa. And when I look at the 'app map,' there is a lot there. I see a lot in the state of Missouri, I see Illinois, I see Maine."

The KREF app registered a whopping three million listening sessions over the previous 12-month period. A listening session consists of a someone accessing KREF through a phone, a laptop computer or a desktop computer. The length of the session is noted and the session ends once the listener logs out of the app or off the website.

Since the expiration of the iHeart deal, the app numbers have increased even further. The first week registered listening sessions just shy of 190,000, which would equate to 9.7 million when multiplied by 52 weeks.

With the Oklahoma football season ready to begin on Saturday, it stands to reason that those numbers will continue to grow. KREF will continue to broadcast live Sooners' pre-game shows at multiple locations, including its longstanding partnership with Balfour of Norman.

This season, live postgame broadcasts will return to legendary Norman eatery O'Connell's.

"We have a niche in this market," Vinyard said. "We are the station that you can go to if you want to hear the most relevant, up-to-date Sooner news. We are not trying to be all things to everybody. There are other stations that focus much more on the Oklahoma City Thunder or NFL football or they try to be all things to everybody. They want to give equal footing to OSU. That is not who we are. We are tag-lined the "Home of Sooner Fans for a reason."

In addition to McComas, the KREF lineup includes three members of the Oklahoma football radio broadcast team in Toby Rowland, Chris Plank and Teddy Lehman. Veteran radio and television personality Mike Steely and Rivals.com recruiting reporter Parker Thune joined KREF two years ago.

"I would put our lineup against anybody, not just in this market, but any market," Vinyard said. "I think our lineup is that strong."

Since KREF advertising deals did not distinguish between commercials on radio versus the app – advertisers had access to both within a singular agreement – there has been no drop-off in clients since the iHeart deal expiration.

"We have not taken one single hit in advertising," Vinyard said. "In fact, we added 10 new advertisers last week. It has actually been the other way around."

Former Oklahoma football player Jeremiah Hall (middle), appears with KREF hosts Tyler McComas (left) and Travis Davidson (right), during an Oklahoma football pregame remote broadcast from 2022. (Photo submitted)

The Metro Radio Group umbrella also includes publications such as Boyd Street Magazine, 19th Street Magazine and is experiencing burgeoning growth with its krefsports.tv website, which streams live video of high school athletics and has exclusive contracts with areas like Deer Creek, Edmond, Moore, Norman, Piedmont and Yukon.

Football powerhouse Bixby is the most recent addition, and its season-opening game on Thursday registered 17,000 online viewers. Vinyard expects viewer numbers in excess of 650,000 for its high school coverage this year.

These types of product offerings outside of radio provides what KREF considers is a competitive advantage.

"I just want to make it abundantly clear that the station is not going away, our lineup is not changing and we will continue to be bigger and better than ever before," Vinyard said.