What does he mean about what 'yard line' the ball is on?Sunday was completely disjointed for me.  I was on the road for most of the first half of the Bears game in Seattke, I got into my hotel room before halftime and fired up the WiFi in time to watch a good chunk of the middle of the game on the super freakin’ awesome DirecTV Sunday Ticket app for my iPod Touch.  Then with the Bears clinging to a lead in the fourth quarter I had to leave the hotel and my WiFi connection behind me, so I “watched” the rest of the game on my Blackberry.

The lasting impressions of the game for me come down to four things.

1) The Bears still play awesome field goal defense.  Opposing kickers are now 6-11 against the Bears (.545).

2) The Seahawks neon tanktops were not a great look for a football uniform.

3) Those lousy Bears receivers aren’t so lousy.

4) Jeff Joniak still sucks.

Before the last Bears Super Bowl I wrote an open letter to Joniak based mainly on his awful and inexplicable Hans and Franz “Hear me now and believe me later” call to end the game.  But in that letter I didn’t emphasize enough just what makes Joniak suck.

I was reminded on Sunday for the hour and change that the only way I could follow my favorite team was through his description.

He talks a lot, but frustratingly not very often about little things like:

– What yard line the ball is on
– What the down and distance is
– What the score is
– How much time is left in the quarter
– What quarter it is

Honestly, it’s a gift that a guy can talk about a football game as much as he does without accidentally hitting on one of those topics for such long stretches.

His call of plays has always been bad and maddeningly incomplete.  The most confusing sequence were two plays in Bears territory in the first quarter when Seattle had the ball.  On the first, Seneca Wallace turned and pitched the ball to Julius Jones, who wasn’t there.

Joniak’s description was something along the lines of, “He pitches, the 30, the 35…and they’re on it!”

I couldn’t figure out why he was counting up when Seattle was in the Bears end of the field, then after that long pause I had no idea who “they” were.  This kind of thing happens a lot.

On the next play, Wallace threw that pass to Jones and no Bear could be troubled to tackle him as he cruised in for an easy score.  But listening to Joniak it sounded like Jones started the run by going the wrong way, and his use of “the man” and “he” instead of a player’s name made me initially wonder if Wallace’s pass had been intercepted.

But it’s not the big plays that are so frustrating, because with those, he’s compelled to explain what happened, or Tom Thayer will crank up his falsetto and describe it.

More frustrating are short gains in the middle of drives.

Ones he describes like: “Handoff to the running back, he’s driving, driving, fighting for yardage, and is finally brought down!”

Who was the running back?  Did he gain one yard, six yards, 47 yards?  What down is it now?  You didn’t tell us before the play and now I’m totally lost.  Is it really worth it?  Maybe I should just put NPR on, and listen to people talk in that weird loud whisper about weather vanes made out of rebar from that Minnesota bridge collapse?  Maybe I should just jerk the wheel and drive on the shoulder until I hit a road sign or blow out a tire and roll the car?

I know how Joniak got the job, and it’s typical of the way the Bears are run.  When Wayne Larrivee left for Green Bay, the Bears brought Gary Bender in and he wasn’t really all that good.  Joniak was the sports director at WBBM and they had the games, so when Bender’s contract didn’t get renewed the cheapest way to replace him was just to give Joniak the job.  So they did.  And he’s kept it, and he was bad in his first game, and he’s still bad now.  So bad, that you actually wish they’d kept Bender.

As a kid I remember that Joe McConnell did the games and he was good, and then Larrivee did it for 14 years, and he was tremendous.  With Wayne you were seldom left wondering about any of the situational stuff.  He’s always been great about quickly summarizing the situation and giving enough time for his analyst to make a point and then get to the next play.  It’s an art, and it’s what makes the guys who are good at it, good at it and the guys who aren’t, Jeff Joniak.

Part of it, I honestly think, is Joniak’s assumption that most of his audience is also watching the game on TV.  But the fact is that it is ludicrous that a radio play by play guy would so happily use the crutch that some of the listeners can see the score, time, down and distance on the top of their screen and can tell what yard line the ball is on because there are big numbers and lines painted on the field.

It’s the same trap that Ron Santo falls into every time he talks about a replay during a Cubs game.  He’s watching it on a TV, so must everyone else.

But thinking that his listeners can “see” what he does isn’t all of it.  The other part, and the part that I would guess is much bigger, is that Joniak is just terrible at this.  He has no feel for what information he hasn’t provided most recently.  He’s been doing games now since 2001.  In nine seasons he isn’t any better than he ever was, and in fact, might be worse.

It took the Bears sixty years to get a real quarterback.  It shouldn’t take them an entire decade to hire a real radio announcer.