We Need The Pro Bowl For Reasons That Go Beyond Football

Over the weekend I spent a couple of hours watching the latest iteration of the Pro Bowl, and it left me bored and vaguely unsatisfied, as have every other Pro Bowl the last two decades.

I have made a point of watching at least part of every Pro Bowl, not because I’m a sadist but simply because I really enjoy watching the NFL, and when I’m facing six months before the beginning of the next season I will watch even a pale facsimile of the real thing to get my fix.

In the last few years even calling it a pale facsimile of an actual NFL game would be generous. Each year the game degraded a little more, as players came to realize that there is absolutely no reason to risk injury in such a meaningless game, leaving few of them with any appetite to tackle, block, or seriously engage the other team. Moving it to flag football makes perfect sense given this reality.

However, another serious problem with the Pro Bowl over the years was that it has failed to resemble a genuine NFL game in many other ways as well, and the NFL’s refusal to understand that—and the societal changes that has made the league more important to fans and communities across the country—constituted a missed opportunity.

Of course, notwithstanding the Pro Bowl, the NFL’s content has greatly improved over the last few decades: there are many more games available on television, the broadcast quality is much better, and the quality of the competition has gone up as well. One outcome of this is that people have come to substitute watching NFL games on TV—either with our friends or alone at home—instead of watching lower-quality games that we once regularly watched in person.

In the 1970s my junior high basketball team often sold out its games in the 1,100 seat gym, which meant that a sizable fraction of our community of 6,000 people were in attendance. The high school gym was twice the size and it also regularly sold out its basketball games. For big rivalries people would need to purchase tickets in advance.

The people in my community attended these games because—prior to the advent of cable television—these were about the only sporting events available to watch. Besides a college football or basketball game on TV on Saturday afternoons—and there were never more than one—and two NFL games on Sunday, sports fans were out of luck.

The Battle of the Network Stars—a multi-sports competition featuring actors starring in the shows on the three big networks—was a big event in the 1970s because there were no other sports to be found on the air in winter. (the NBA was virtually rejected by the networks then for reasons I still don’t quite fathom).

But people also went to high school sporting events because these games were the social focus of the town. The schools’ teams were a way for people to come together and do something communally and represented a focal point for the community. Today, of course, no one other than parents and students would attend a junior high game, and high school sports are only a little more popular.

My town’s far from unique, of course—high school sports are now starved for fans all over the country, as fans have shifted their time and attention to the NFL.

These days we not only get sheer entertainment from the NFL, but our identity as sports fans and our opportunities to form community and bond with people increasingly come from it as well.

Why the switch happened is too big to deal with here—Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone, has argued that we’re suffering from a societal breakdown of communal events that bring people together: besides the diminution of attendance at high school sporting events we also see fewer bowling leagues, churchgoers, and fewer people even bothering to subscribe to the local newspaper.

But professional and major college sports have boomed in popularity, and the NFL more than anything else. The majority of the 10 most watched shows in the US in 2022 were NFL games and it’s been that way for some time. Nearly 60 million people in the U.S. watched the Conference Championships last weekend, and in Kansas city well over half of all televisions were tuned to the Chiefs’ game. That is a communal experience by any definition for the community.

For better or worse, the NFL is now a key source of communality for people in the U.S., and every day we seem to learn a bit more about how being a part of a community is incredibly valuable for one’s mental as well as physical health. So we need more NFL football—even the mediocre variety—just for our own health.

While the idea of people getting together to watch the Pro Bowl seems slightly absurd, that’s partly because of the way the NFL has treated it. For most of its existence the game only vaguely resembled that of a bona fide NFL game. For a long time the game was played in an unrecognizable stadium in Hawaii, with coaches wearing leis and the announcers doing tedious interviews with whatever random former NFL star happened to show up.

Moving it to Miami—an actual NFL stadium—helped a little, but the unfamiliar uniforms and the desperate need for the announcers to engage viewers beyond the actual game remained grating. And the fact that the teams wore uniforms that were completely foreign to us didn’t help things either.

With the game having devolved to flag football its resemblance to a bona fide NFL game is more tenuous, but no matter: The NFL and its broadcasters have to treat this game with the seriousness of any other NFL game, our bars and sports pubs need to run Pro Bowl specials to get people to show up for the game. We don’t need the actual caliber of the game to improve—since that’s impossible—but if the game could at least vaguely resemble a regular NFL broadcast in every other way perhaps we can all agree to get together one more time this winter for football with our friends and neighbors.