It’s always seemed like the most pointless game in the NFL schedule. Even pre-season games seem more relevant.
The League moved it to the week before the Superbowl but that doesn’t seem to have made any difference.
Any suggestions on how the Pro Bowl can be made into a game the average fan cares about? Or should it be written off like the Chicago Charities game?
Or is there a fanatical devotion to the Pro Bowl that I’m missing?
I feel like All-Star games are pointless and stupid in general.
If you want to select and bestow some sort of honor on each season’s best players, that’s all well and good, but I’ve always failed to see the point of actually playing a game. Trying to make that game meaningful in some significant way is even worse. I don’t like MLB’s “winner gets home field in the World Series”; the majority of players on the All-Star teams aren’t going to get there anyway so what do they really care?
I like the changing and flexible format of the NHL All-Star game, where instead of just pitting each conference/league against each other there’s something else going on, e.g. American players vs International players or some other kind of twist. If there ***has ***to be a game I’d like to see something maybe like choosing captains and having them pick teams or just something different than AFC vs. NFC. How about a mini-tournament of short 5-on-5 games with players playing both ways?
There really isn’t much of a rivalry between the AFC and NFC because there are so many inter-conference games. Baseball has/had a decent AL-NL rivalry because they used to only meet in the World Series and there was more mystery and arguing over which league was superior.
Just have the players beat on each other with nerf bats until they get tired. Cathartic!
I don’t think there’s much that could be done to help it. I’m a big fan of NFL football, and I haven’t watched more than a couple of plays in a Pro Bowl since the mid-80s. It seems like the only “fanatical devotion” to the Pro Bowl is on the part of the Hawaii tourism industry (they had a complete bird when last year’s Pro Bowl was played in Miami, at the site of the Super Bowl).
Even if you tinkered with the match-up, you still aren’t overcoming a couple of serious flaws with the game itself:
Unlike the all-star games in the other sports, it comes at the end of the season. When it was held after the Super Bowl, it was tremendously anti-climactic. Coming the week before the Super Bowl, it’s just a sideshow.
Moreso than any other major sport, injuries are a significant part of pro football. It’s rare for any “real” game to not have at least one player suffer an injury which would shelve him for at least a week or two, if not the rest of the season. Especially after what happened to Patriots running back Robert Edwards in a beach football game held before the Pro Bowl, teams (and players) are very leery about the possibility of injury during an exhibition game. And, so, it’s likely that they aren’t playing “all out”.
A significant number of players who get elected to the Pro Bowl decide not to go (though some of these are due to being previously injured).
With only a few days to work with a group of players who are coming from diverse systems, the play-calling tends to be fairly vanilla (and the rules prohibit the defenses from doing fancy stuff).
Football in particular is not well suited to not-full-speed games. In basketball and hockey you can just play token defense and lay off the physical play. Football doesn’t lend itself to this, partly because there are separate players for offense and defense. In the other sports, players can play token defense because they know they’ll get to play offense too.
Instead of an actual game, I think they’d be better off with some skills competition or other exhibition. People like the home run derby and dunk contest better than those all-star games already.
I agree with your points and I’d add one: football is probably the most teamwork oriented sport. Baseball all-stars can just go out and do the same thing they do in any other game. Less so in basketball or hockey but the players still play mostly as individuals. But football plays are very dependant on the entire team moving in sync. It takes thousands of hours of practice to get everyone coordinated.
Then you have the Pro Bowl and you throw a bunch of players together and give them a few hours of practice time. Great players as individuals but they form together into a mediocre team.
I think they ought to do a bunch of goofy shit over the course of a weekend:
What about having a flag football game? Or have a few players play QB with a bunch of kids playing flag football.
Have players play Madden games against each other. Magnetic vibration football tournament.
A hokey-ass “skills” competition like they used to do in the '90s.
Eating competitions, bowling for charity, chili contests, go-kart racing. Get the younger fans involved with all of these.
Get creative goddammit.
The might as well just televise a Madden EA version of the game, interspersed with all-star cheerleader lap dances, er, dance routines.
Combine it with the Hall of Fame Game and play it in Canton in summer.
Of course, the game will still suck, half the players won’t show up and the ones who do will continue to play it like a no-contact scrimmage. But at least it will be a more apporpriate way to open the NFL pre-season than two bad teams playing their starters for two series, then having rookies play the rest of the way.
It’s not like there’s some cosmic law that every sport has to have an All-Star Game. They started doing it because baseball got there first, and the baseball game was a Big Deal, and everybody wanted to Be Like Baseball because Baseball was Number One.
Needless to say, those days are long gone. Drop the Pro Bowl. The All-Star concept doesn’t work for football.
After it’s gone, no one will miss it. Who now misses the College All-Star Game or the Blue-Gray Classic?
Now this is a fantastic idea, except play the probowl AS the HoF game instead of making two teams play a 5th preseason game. Fans are so football starved by the HoF game they’d eat it up, and everyone would be healed up from the previous season’s injuries so there wouldn’t be as many injury scratches. Plus it’d give retired players the option to come back for one last hurrah.
Yeah, I like this idea.
I thought that move gave it a huge boost in the ratings.
Scrap the Pro Bowl.
Bring back the “Superstars” competition from Wide World of Sports. More fun to watch somebody try to break Lynn Swan’s record in the obstacle course, or some huge defensive lineman sink a kayak and stuff.
They can trick us into watching it but they still can’t make us care.
They used to play against a team of College All Stars who were coming out to the pros. That was more interesting because the college kids wanted to make an impression and the pros did not want to lose to kids.
Making it the Hall of Fame game is interesting. Would that fix it? Not really. Half the chosen players still wouldn’t show up and you’d still get minimal effort.
This is what I was going to suggest.
Is there any penalty for a player who is selected and doesn’t show up? I’m not including injuries.
I know that 2 years ago somebody in the NHL got fined and/or a suspension for skipping the all-star game.
That was the Chicago Charities game I referred to in the OP. In its early days it apparently was okay - professional football hadn’t developed too far beyond the collegiate level and there was some parity. But by the sixties and seventies it turned into a series of regular blowouts by the professional team.
The decline in interest in the series can be shown by the way it ended. The Steelers had a 24-0 lead over the All-Stars in the third quarter of the 1976 game when the weather began to get bad. So they decided to stop playing and never bothered to come back and finish the game. That apparently made everyone realize how little they cared about the game and no further games were played.
Interesting trivia note: Gerald Ford played in the 1935 game for the college team.
I’d rather watch a football old timers game.