FWIW, The Ticket didn't just fumbduck around into this format. The station was founded 10 years ago, with "sports" personalities like Skip Bayless and Chuck Cooperstein. The station actually centered around Chuck Cooperstein's show. It was a failure and ratings bombed.
By the way ... the quoted Bruce Gilbert, is now ESPN's General Manager for all of their talk radio. ESPN threw big money at him to save their fledging talk radio format.
I travel quite a bit, and I've heard east coast sports stations. I still maintain traditional "Sports talk" doesn't actually have much to do with sports. Its sensationalistic, manufactured conversation about people in sports, but its really little more than the male equivalent to beauty salon gossip. Traditional "sports talk" has has very little to do ith the the aspect of sports I'm interested in. I like analysis and X's and O's, and I hear very little of that. Most sports station radio programmers stay away from it, so you end up with 4 hours of talking about what a bad guy Barry Bonds/Maurice Clarett/Randy Moss is. I don't see Bob Ryan talking about how he wants to smack Jason Kidd's wife having much to do with sports.