It’s time to do away with the Pro Bowl Games

The first official manufacturing of the mixed NFL-ESPN media conglomerate would be the 2026 Pro Bowl Games. Some would love it to be the final installment of the Pro Bowl Games.

The non-football soccer occasion emerged in 2023, after years of a Pro Bowl that had step by step turn into two-hand contact in full pads.

It occurred for good cause. Any participant wholesome sufficient to play yet another soccer recreation in late January or early February shouldn’t be enjoying yet another soccer recreation — until it’s the Super Bowl. The damage danger made it silly to exert effort. The collective lack of effort made it illogical to proceed.

The league pivoted to a pair of occasions: a Thursday evening expertise competitors and a Sunday flag soccer recreation. This yr, the entire Pro Bowl Games might be mixed right into a Tuesday evening occasion. For the primary time, not one of the Pro Bowl will occur inside a soccer stadium; the Pro Bowl Games might be held on the Super Bowl Experience in San Francisco, making it extra of a strictly made-for-TV occasion.

The key turns into whether or not sufficient folks will watch the Pro Bowl Games on TV. The numbers have been dropping, considerably. In the final yr of the Pro Bowl correct, 6.7 million watched. For the primary yr of flag soccer, the quantity fell to six.2 million. The subsequent yr, the viewers shrank to five.75 million.

Last yr, the underside fell out, with a discount of multiple million viewers, to 4.7 million.

Some would say (and have been saying for years), that the league ought to simply identify a pair of AFC and NFC Pro Bowl rosters and be accomplished with it. No soccer recreation. No flag soccer recreation. No dodgeball or tug-of-war or hopscotch or no matter. If nothing else, that will finish the annual drip-drip of alternative Pro Bowlers being named to the Games.

Most lately, Joe Flacco — who began solely 10 video games this season and had a passer score of 79.2 — was added to the AFC Pro Bowl Games roster.

It’s potential that this can occur, eventually and maybe sooner. There’s certainly a minimal viewership quantity, beneath which all the train turns into a nasty enterprise proposition. The query then turns into whether or not the league can be prepared to deal with it as a loss chief, given the NFL’s present fixation on making flag soccer a far greater deal than it ever has been.

Bottom line? The second the Pro Bowl Games turn into a sufficiently big pressure on the underside line, they’ll go the best way of the shock onside kick. And so the message is obvious. If you don’t just like the Pro Bowl Games, don’t watch. If sufficient folks don’t, the Pro Bowl Games will inevitably be put out of everybody’s distress.