Hours before the Dallas Mavericks took the floor at American Airlines Center for Game 3 of their playoff series against the Los Angeles Clippers, surprising reports emerged about the team’s flagship radio station, 97.1 ‘The Freak.’

Athlon Sports said Friday the station intends to turn away from its current sports talk format less than two years after the new station debuted behind the star power of Mike Rhyner and other D-FW radio personalities.

Rhyner appeared to confirm the coming change for the station on social media, and told Dallas Observer that he and the entire cast of his weekday show “The Speakeasy” had been let go.

“I could be standing at the New Mexico border and still see this coming,” Rhyner said. “It’s a feeling that I and plenty of others at the station had been getting for some time now. iHeartRadio is a music company that really doesn’t do that much talk radio, and the talk radio they do is not local or locally originated, and they got caught into something [97.1 The Freak] they didn’t know anything about, and they were kind of overwhelmed by it, and they decided that ‘this is not our bag.’”

He said he did not know the employment status of the station’s other hosts, and was informed the station will revert back to its rock music programming as 97.1 ‘The Eagle’ starting Monday.

As far as the Mavericks are concerned, the game Friday against the Clippers appears as if it will be aired as planned.

IHeartMedia, which owns ‘The Freak,’ is under a five-year contract to air Mavericks games, with two years remaining on the deal, according to The Dallas Morning News’ Brad Townsend.

Rhyner, known as ‘the Godfather of The Ticket’, shocked the D-FW radio world when he announced that he was coming out of retirement to form ‘The Freak’ in 2022.

‘The Freak’, short for The Frequency, went live Monday was set to compete head-to-head against The Ticket (KTCK-FM 96.7/KTCK-AM 1310), the station Rhyner founded in 1994, and 105.3 The Fan (KRLD-FM), but never made a serious dent in the ratings chase.

Find more sports coverage from The Dallas Morning News here.