So long, Pro Bowl. The NFL has announced that they have officially scrapped the Pro Bowl game for this year and the years to come as it will now be replaced with skills competitions and a flag football game. Whoopie.
This is such a dumb idea for the NFL to do. First off, the Pro Bowl has been a staple of the NFL calendar season for over 70 years! Yes, the first Pro Bowl game was played all the way back in 1951 and the tradition has continued all the way up until today.
So, what is replacing the Pro Bowl? A flag football game…which is just the Pro Bowl with flags.
The Pro Bowl was already a non-tackle, boring, self-absorbed game that the NFL stars treated with disdain and contempt as it already was a meaningless “flag football’ game in its current form.
To be honest, I don’t even blame the players for disregarding the Pro Bowl. I would too if I was in the NFL.
There was simply no reason for the Pro Bowl to exist in its current form, but there was no reason to abolish it all together. Or, rather, officially turn it into a flag football match.
Why make the game even less meaningful? Who in their right mind is going to turn on their TV at the beginning of February and say ‘Hey, I should watch the best NFL players battle it out in a worthless flag football game!’?
The answer is NOBODY! The NFL has just made the Pro Bowl even more boring than it was before.
Now, turning the Pro Bowl into a fun, energetic game was always going to be a difficult task as the players playing in the game wouldn’t want to get hurt in an after-season game. But, maybe the NFL could have put some incentives in place for winning this game.
Maybe the players of the winning team would earn an additional $1M bonus onto their contracts? Surely, the NFL would be able to pay out an additional $53M to the league’s best players as it reportedly made a record-breaking $11B in revenue last season.
Though, what would make even more sense is if they made the Pro Bowl into a charity event. Giving $50M+ (which would have gone to the players in my other model) to the most needing in this world would make a lot more sense than just hoarding the money within the NFL sphere.
Not only that, but also the players would have some incentive to actually compete against one another as they would try to win their respective charities huge donations.
Maybe my models could have worked, and maybe they wouldn’t have. We’ll never know as the NFL has ignored all logic and reasoning and turned the Pro Bowl into an even more worthless event.
Another Roger Goodell masterclass in logic.
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