Bears Radio Call On The Jadyen Daniels Hail Mary Made Me Extremely Nervous That Jeff Joniak Died Live On Air
I hate to beat a dead horse with a super local radio call but that's exactly what we're doing here with Jeff Joniak on 780 WBBM.
And honestly I'm primarily sharing this because I want you guys to know Joniak survived. For a quick second there I thought we'd get the first live broadcasting death of the season but alas he's still breathing, which is awesome. Joniak's a legend and maybe the only consistently-good thing about the Chicago Bears.
Obviously we're known for defense and special teams but even so, you're bound to get a Mel Tucker-caliber season every now and then. Nobody's perfect.
Except Joniak.
That's the point I want to make here.
Everyone's shitting on Eberflus and calling for his head. People are infuriated with the defensive scheming and lack of urgency and #29 taunting the 300 level post-snap. So many things to be pissed about today and I don't want to stop you from getting angry. Heaven forbid I be the one to tell you or anyone to calm down.
However:
It's a good opportunity to remember that Joniak calls a great fucking game and that's important because you only interact with the AM station under dire circumstances. You're stuck in traffic between a family party on your wife's side. Your driving home from a weekend soccer tournament in Indianapolis. The plasma TV got repossessed. Whatever the emergency, you'd much rather have full frontal 4K on a Samsung but you're stuck listening to the radio. And in all of those circumstances for as long as he's been doing it, Jeff Joniak's there for you with polished and prepared play-by-play.
That's a modern luxury. Especially with football - I find radio to be so difficult based purely on lack of reps. Baseball gives you 162 plus a full spring training year after year. Football you get the microphone once a week and you're typically flanked by at least one former player who may or may not have advanced CTE. Either way, it's a tough job.
Joniak is special. I don't know if other people care about their AM broadcasters the way we do and quite frankly it's irrelevant. So long as Joniak gets his proper respect right here in this moment.
And not for nothing, but Joniak was on Stacey King's podcast Gimme The Hot Sauce back in August 2023 talking about how Tyrique Stevenson is the kinda player with a short term memory who doesn't care. Please ignore how/why I remember this BUT IT'S RELEVANT
Enough. I don't want to make this about Tyrique Stevenson or hyper local Chicago sports podcasts.
I just want to make it clear that Joniak survived the Hail Mary last night and that's important because Joniak fucking rocks.
That's all.
As for the Hail Mary, someone put a nice thread together of notable Hail Mary's and this should make you feel immediately better/worse.
Nvm the embed functionality is down
you can see the rest of the thread here