Why does the N.F.L. have the Pro Bowl at the end of the season, while baseball, hockey, and basketball have their all-star games in the middle of the season?
Too much risk for serious injury, I believe, to be held midseason.
Happy
Tell that to Ray Fosse:
http://www.pubdim.net/baseballlibrary/ballplayers/F/Fosse_Ray.stm
Also, you have to think of the length of the season and frequency of the games. Baseball has a 162 game regular season where teams play pretty much every day, hockey and basketball have about 80 game regular seasons where the teams play every 2-3 days. In these seasons, it’s fairly easy to schedule a 3 day all star break without any regular games and collect the best players for an all star game.
Football, on the other hand, is played weekly for about 18 weeks. To schedule an all star game within the season would mean interrupting a whole week’s worth of games, and extending the season for a full week. Considering the size of the football market on any given weekend (and Monday Night), it’s not practical to interrupt the season that way.
Along the same lines as the frequency of games would be the amount of games. After 80 or so games in baseball, enough time has passed to separate the All-Star caliber players from the rest. The same can be said aafter 40-50 games in the NHL and NBA. If the Pro Bowl were to appear part of the way through the season, voting would start after 2-3 games, at which point anyone who has had a decent showing would look like a stud, even if they then proceeded to stink it up the rest of the way.
It may also have something to do with the length of the seasons. Football has a relatively short season (16 games) so having a Pro Bowl in the middle of the season could skewer the results (a sudden hot streak will get you in the Pro Bowl.
With the other 3 the season’s are so long that the All Star game becomes a nice mid-season break. Yes, having the All Star game at the end of the season makes more sense but I think they like the break better.
The issue of injury, Ray Fosse aside, is still an issue. An NFL football game is, by its nature, a huge endeavour and a high-injury-risk event. NFL teams play 16-game seasons because if you played a substantially longer season you’d never get through the year with the same team you started with. An extra game in Week 9 or 10 would result in a fair number of injuries that would cause players to miss one or more regular season games.
This effect is far less pronounced in hockey, baseball, or basketball. Ray Fosse’s injury is the only major injury I can think of in the history of baseball’s All-Star game, and they’ve been playing that game for almost seventy years.
And there’s scheduling. The football season isn’t just few games, it’s also very short in terms of time; it’s basically a four month regular season and a month of playoffs, where baseball is seven months altogether and hockey and basketball are eight months. If you added a week in the middle, you’d either move the NFL season back one week or move the Super Bowl ahead a week, neither of which the league wants to do.