This weekend, the Missouri Valley Conference featured the men’s soccer match-up between Eastern and Evansville as its free webcast game of the week.

The game was shown via webcam at midfield with audio from Evansville’s radio station 91.5 WUEV-FM.

To say the coverage was terrible would be an understatement.

I watched the feed minutes before kickoff and caught the tail end of an interview with the Purple Aces coach, which was a good interview.

Then everything went downhill.

The announcer followed the interview with minutes of dead air while he was tried to look through his “notes.”

The announcer was as prepared to host a pre-game show as Pedro from “Napoleon Dynamite” was to emcee a Homecoming pep rally

When the game started, the announcer only sounded worse.

Think of how Dick Vitale would announce a game; now, picture the exact opposite.

The entire first half was stringed together with the word “and.” I don’t think he completed a single sentence. The announcer said “Umm .” so often that he would have failed every speech class in America.

If this was the first time he had ever been on the radio before, I would have believed it.

The audience was treated to gems like, “I can’t tell who that was but. uh .” as the ball went out of bounds. And mention of the substitutions in the first half were non-existent.

Being an Evansville radio station, I expected bias from the announcer, which would be understandable.

The fact that he did not even try to learn any of the pronunciations of Eastern players’ last names is inexcusable.

The announcer constantly referred to freshman forward Alex Harrison as Alex Harris and did not bother to learn how to say senior captain and 2006 first team all-conference Mick Galeski’s last name.

He used the 90-minute match to pronounce junior Patrick Maybeya’s last name about 14 different ways.

At other points in the match, I don’t even think the announcer knew who was playing when he said, “Drake’s bench was arguing a call.” I understand he meant to say Eastern’s bench, but he never corrected himself – and Evansville has not played Drake in a week.

The camerawork for the webcam was just as bad. There was no scoreboard or time clock, so the audience was left in the dark unless the audience had tuned into the entire match.

At least four of Eastern’s key shots off breakaways or advantages were not shown because the camera person did a terrible job of managing it.

The camera was so far away from the action, the players were barely distinguishable throughout the match.

The MVC should be ashamed of the quality of the webcast. The MVC has a reputation as a competitive and respectable conference. It should maintain this reputation and eliminate that junk as its product.

If the game was not the free broadcast of the week, fans would have to buy a package that would normally cost $59.95 for a regular season soccer pass.

If I had paid to watch production that poor, I would have been first in line for my money back.