There’s not much the NFL can do to make the Pro Bowl a good game. Most of the best players don’t want to be there! For many of them, the season has already been over for a month; for others, the season just ended in the playoffs on a bad note.
Any way you slice it, most players would rather be home resting and recuperating, and NONE want to take a chance on getting hurt in a totally meaningless game. So, loads of stars will claim (or fake) injuries, just to skip the game. And we end up with the AFC’s 6th best quarterback and the NFC’s 5th best quarterback throwing TD’s to wide open receivers, resulting in a 51-49 game of touch football.
So, the game itself will always be a pointless bore- to ME, that is. But the ratings are generally very good! There are plenty of people who like watching the Pro Bowl- a lot more people than watch most other seemingly better and more important sporting events. The NHL wishes Stanley Cup playoff games got ratings as good as the Pro Bowl’s.
So, as long as people are watching, I suppose the game will go on.
Maybe they count me as one of the 12 mill. If I happen to be watching TV at the time and flip through I usually stop and watch for a bit. I don’t think I’ve watched more than 5 minutes of any Pro Bowl in my life. But technically I’ve watched some of it.
Baseball really is the only sport where its all-star game bears any resemblence to a regular game. Its absence of contact (though Ray Fosse would disagree) means that the players hit, pitch, run, and catch just about as they normally would. There is a good deal of league pride among the fans, growing up an AL fan, I would dread our annual all-star loss because of the obnoxious NL fans. But this makes the game work- the fans care and the game is quite normal.
The NFL has no way to make the game work. The players simply aren’t going to play with their usual intensity and hit as hard because the game means nothing to them. It means even less to the fans, who really aren’t vested in the AFC vs NFC the same way the baseball fans are between AL and NL. Time to give it up.
The idea of stripping cheerleaders is sound, it should be adopted by all the NFL teams and colleges for regular games.
Green Bay, Buffalo, Iowa State and Michigan, just to mention a few, may have an attrition problem with this rule. You’ll need to install some heavy-duty space heaters on the sideline.
I thought of that as well - now that the Pro Bowl is before the Super Bowl instead of after it (when they realized that the players on the Super Bowl teams were just too tired or disinterested), they could have the Pro Bowl winner automatically win the coin toss at the Super Bowl. Not enough incentive? How about, the Pro Bowl winner wins the coin toss in overtime (and there’s no “if the first team scores a field goal on its first possession, the other team gets a chance to score as well” rule if they do this).
That’s only part of the problem. Football is far more of a “team sport” than the other major sports, and the one week they get to practice isn’t nearly enough time to develop any meaningful teamwork, especially on defense. The fact that they have rules like “no rushing field goal attempts” doesn’t help matters.
There’s another problem with the new format - you could have teammates playing against each other. Will a linebacker make a score-stopping hit on his teammate, knowing there’s a chance of an injury that will hurt his team next season? Also, which side do a team’s fans root for? I seem to recall that this was the main reason they got rid of the “North America vs The World” NHL All-Star Game concept (and I was surprised when they started the “draft” format years later).
The problem with this is will a Patriot player in the Pro Bowl want these benefits to go to an AFC rival like the Steelers or Ravens? Super Bowl losers often have a letdown year after their loss and that would benefit any other team in their conference.
But then if it’s going to be potential teammates vs. teammates, who would win the Super Bowl bonus at the end? You can’t just give it to the NFC if half the team is from the AFC and vice versa.
I see that the defenses will be allowed a bit more latitude than before (although blitzing is still off the table). That seems like a fairly sensible idea. The final score might actually look like that of an average NFL game for the first time in years.
I loved the skills competition. Loved it. Maybe it was artificial, but it was awesome. It’s really fun seeing what elite athletes can do when they’re not surrounded by other elite athletes - makes it more concrete for the shade-tree fan that these guys are really, really good. And they seemed to enjoy themselves and have fun with it, which was more important.
It was the only thing worth watching, IMO - I’d watch the hell out of it if they brought it back.
They should let the fans pick their favorites for each position, not have a game but have a day of fun competitions. Stuff like who can throw the furthest? Who can push a tackling dummy the furthest? Who runs the fastest? Stuff like that. If the NFL really plays up the competition aspect and puts it in prime time, people will get excited and watch and the players will try because they are competitive people and the chance of injuries is minimal.
Football is just not designed to have meaningless game with two teams that don’t know each other well and are afraid of injury. Celebrate the players and the fans and can the game.
This and what others have said in a similar vein. I have watched maybe 5 minutes of the Pro Bowl over the last decade - no interest at all. Something like this, however, I would watch. “Battle of the NFL Stars”.
