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Do you ever watch any All-Star games? For just a moment I am going to assume you don't.
An All-Star game usually occurs towards the end of a season. A sport will choose the super stars of the league for that year and the best of the best at each position will play against each other in an exhibition game. Generally (in US professional sports anyway) the east is pitted against the west. Major League Baseball has been having All Star games since 1933 and it is the American League All-Stars versus the National League's best players.
In the NFL they call their All-Star game The Pro Bowl.
The Pro-Bowl is traditionally held the week after the Super Bowl. 2009 will mark the 29th year in a row it has been held at Aloha Stadium in Honolulu, Hawaii. In 2010 the NFL will start having the Pro-Bowl in the same city as the Super Bowl and it will occur the week before the big game.
I have huge problems with these changes, but we are going to have to get back to that in a moment.
I have been watching NFL games for about 25 years now. I have been a raging, yelling at the television football fan since 1999.
1999 is also when I started watching the Pro Bowl. I used to get excited. I used to force my husband to watch the game every year, even though it didn't matter. I used to think it was fun. It always looked like everyone was having such a good time.
I don't think watching the Pro Bowl is fun anymore. At all. My first issue with the Pro Bowl is that a large number of the players selected to participate in the game elect not to play. Some guys have sustained injuries during the regular season, some don't say why they don't want to make the trip to Hawaii, others admit they don't want to risk getting hurt.
This leads me to my second beef. Football is a pretty brutal sport. When players suffer serious injuries during a game that is just for fun it sort of ruins the spirit of the game. I hate to see players getting hurt in the preseason or in any sort of All-Star game. For this Joslin Lofton has an idea:
For those that argue that football is physically demanding and the risk
of injury to great. Remove a game from the preseason schedule. It's not
like the starters play an entire game. Besides, the players don't get
serious about winning the Pro Bowl until the 4th quarter, when the
money is on the line.
Okay. Then what do we do when the Pro Bowl is the week before the Super Bowl? Do you actually think that these superstars who have earned the opportunity to play in the biggest game of their lives are going to risk anything (even missing a practice) to take part in an exhibition seven days before the championship?
Again, Joslin, this time writing as Pigskin Loving Lady, comes through for me again.
For those concerned with the players going to the Super Bowl the
league's plan is for players those squads not to take part in the Pro
Bowl. Isn't this exciting!!!
Great. So now the players that were good enough to make it to the Super Bowl aren't even taking part in the Pro Bowl? Hello! NFL! Who is going to want to watch that?
This brings me to the third and most disturbing part of the current incarnation of the Pro Bowl: the method of player selection.
Players are chosen for the Pro Bowl by three groups of people; the coaches, the players and the fans. Each group gets an equal third of the vote. Coaches, fine. Players, fine. Fans, not fine.
The fans are not necessarily voting for the players that are the best. They are voting for their favorite players on their favorite teams. I know this for sure because I was really bored at work in 2002 and I spent 20 minutes a day for a month voting for players that played for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
This is why Brett Favre will be going to Honolulu again this year. BRETT FAVRE! Favre led The New York Jets to a 7 - 7 season. The Jets finished the regular season 16th overall in total offense and passing offense. There are 32 teams in the NFL. That sounds like a pretty mediocre offense to me. If you look at passing yards Farve ranks 11th out of quarterbacks.
The
