The first official production of the combined NFL-ESPN media conglomerate will be the 2026 Pro Bowl Games. Some would like it to be the last installment of the Pro Bowl Games.
The non-football football event emerged in 2023, after years of a Pro Bowl that had gradually become two-hand touch in full pads.
It happened for good reason. Any player healthy enough to play one more football game in late January or early February should not be playing one more football game — unless it’s the Super Bowl. The injury risk made it foolish to exert effort. The collective lack of effort made it illogical to continue.
The league pivoted to a pair of events: a Thursday night skills competition and a Sunday flag football game. This year, all of the Pro Bowl Games will be combined into a Tuesday night event. For the first time, none of the Pro Bowl will happen inside a football stadium; the Pro Bowl Games will be held at the Super Bowl Experience in San Francisco, making it more of a strictly made-for-TV event.
The key becomes whether enough people will watch the Pro Bowl Games on TV. The numbers have been dropping, significantly. In the last year of the Pro Bowl proper, 6.7 million watched. For the first year of flag football, the number fell to 6.2 million. The next year, the audience shrank to 5.75 million.
Last year, the bottom fell out, with a reduction of more than one million viewers, to 4.7 million.
Some would say (and have been saying for years), that the league should just name a pair of AFC and NFC Pro Bowl rosters and be done with it. No football game. No flag football game. No dodgeball or tug-of-war or hopscotch or whatever. If nothing else, that would end the annual drip-drip of replacement Pro Bowlers being named to the Games.
Most recently, Joe Flacco — who started only 10 games this season and had a passer rating of 79.2 — was added to the AFC Pro Bowl Games roster.
It’s possible that this will happen, sooner or later and perhaps sooner. There’s surely a minimum viewership number, below which the entire exercise becomes a bad business proposition. The question then becomes whether the league would be willing to treat it as a loss leader, given the NFL’s current fixation on making flag football a far bigger deal than it ever has been.
Bottom line? The moment the Pro Bowl Games become a big enough strain on the bottom line, they’ll go the way of the surprise onside kick. And so the message is clear. If you don’t like the Pro Bowl Games, don’t watch. If enough people don’t, the Pro Bowl Games will inevitably be put out of everyone’s misery.
