It is an odd situation in SF for syndicated sports and talk due to different owners and contracts...
Your well-worded explanation of the situation gave me a headache for a different reason, Gregg ... I flashed back to when the original conversion of the ABC radio network into four "American (fill in the blank) Radio" networks caused a weird juggling act in my home market of Oxnard-Ventura CA:
(I have recounted this in other threads and if you have read it already in one of those threads, please feel free to move on to the next post or thread.)
American Information Radio was the one network that
had to be carried live ("News ... of the hour, on the hour") so if a market had an ABC/I affiliate everything revolved around them. In the case of my home market, that was KQIQ.
KVEN was the Entertainment Network, and they didn't want their hourly news to be at the half-hour (for the most part) they delayed it to :55, meaning they were into the local/state portion of their newscast before KQIQ went to the network at :00.
That arrangement forced Contemporary Network affiiate KACY to delay from :55 to :20, which was okay because FM Network affiliate KPMJ was delaying from :15 to :30, apparently not having the same qualms as KVEN about the news being at the half-hour.
There were a few quirky exceptions, mostly in the weekday 6:00am hour. KPMJ aired a paid religious program at 6:30am and so that hour the ABC/FM newscast ran five minutes earlier. That allowed KVEN to carry ABC/E live at 6:30, which in turn gave them a window at 6:55 to run the morning Paul Harvey newscast instead. (The lunchtime Harvey show had to air at 12:05pm, because of ABC/I on KQIQ.)
Also, since KACY didn't carry Howard Cosell's sportscasts, those aired on KVEN, and KQIQ carried both the ABC/I and ABC/E sportscasts, delayed to (I think) :35.
See why the situation in San Francisco gave me flashbacks?
Part of the problem went away when ABC/FM reoriented itself to fit better on the majority of its affiliates, which were AORs. KPMJ, being
very MOR, dropped them and picked up Mutual, which had been on KBBQ before they snagged the NBC affiliation when KFI dropped it (and Mutual had been on KVEN for
years before switching to ABC/E). The market never got a replacement ABC/FM affiliate and the other three stations continued their carriage patterns until the former KQIQ -- by then, KAAP -- dropped ABC/I after an ownership change in 1981 and KACY dropped ABC/C in the mid-1980s; ABC/C moved to KMYX (for a few years) but by the end of the 80's the only ABC affiliate was KVEN, although by then they were News/Talk and airing the newscast live at :30 a lot of the time.
We never had a CBS affiliate because they were protecting KNX's signal over the market, just as NBC had protected KFI before.
When KPMJ was sold in 1977, there was no Mutual affiliate for about five years when KKBZ picked it up. And
that was KAAP after another change in call letters. But they dropped it after a few years as well. (Poor hapless Mutual.) Similarly, NBC disappeared after an ownership change at the former KBBQ (they went through three sets of calls during that decade, and I don't remember which were in effect when they were sold).
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