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Like most American football fans, you can never get enough. With the Super Bowl looming, we all recognize that our days of enjoying football are once again coming to an end. As always, it will be a long winter. Yesterday’s NFL Pro Bowl was one more opportunity to catch a game before our long absence without this great game. It’s amazing how I forgot how awful the Pro Bowl is. It has been getting awful for a long time now but yesterday it truly reached its apex.
Unlike other professional sports, the NFL just needs to let the game go. Major League Baseball can actually put a pretty good game on and in recent years, the MLB All-Star Game has improved dramatically. The NHL All-Star Game is also a pretty good game and getting better each year. The NBA’s game is less than exciting but at least the pre-game activities and festivities are fun. The NFL Pro Bowl is a joke and it needs to go away before it tarnishes what is otherwise a tremendous game.
If anyone watched the entire game yesterday, they had to be a Mom or a Dad of one of the players because it wasn’t fit for watching for the day in and day out fan. The game was pathetic. There was no intensity to the game at all. It was really like being in Hawaii where one can relax and do nothing. Clearly, not one of the participants wanted to sustain an injury and as a result, no one played the game with any zeal at all. It’s a shame to have all these great players on the field and see less than an appealing game.
One really can’t fault the players. Who wants to spend the off-season nursing an injury or worse yet, sustain an injury that potentially could be career ending. There just isn’t a point to the game anymore. Out of all the professional sports, football is the least conducive to an all-star format. Football is an injury-laded game and the idea of even one player sustaining an injury is one player too many.
Hopefully, the Commissioner and the league will take a long, hard look at the Pro Bowl concept. It’s time for it to be retired. Choose the Pro Bowl roster acknowledging the year’s great players but let’s keep in on paper and forego the game. On top of the game lacking intensity, many of the players beg off anyway because of injuries and just not wanting to take the chance of getting hurt. When you’re down to the 3rd, 4th or 5th player on the Pro Bowl depth chart, it only makes sense to kiss the concept goodbye.
Yesterday’s game was embarrassing for the fans, the NFL and certainly the players. Maybe the game worked years ago but not anymore. When the fans boo the performance on the field and the announcers are trying to make light of it, something has gone seriously wrong. Time to let it go.
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