Good news: The Pro Bowl ratings increased from 4.6 in 2017 to 5.9 in 2018. That’s a spike of 28 percent.
Bad news: The increased rating came from the combined broadcast of the game on both ESPN and ABC.
It’s impossible to know what the ratings would have been if the game had been confined, as it was last year, to ESPN. Sunday’s game was the first ESPN/ABC simulcast of the Pro Bowl, returning the game to the three-letter network where it had aired 22 prior times.
So the news hardly means that everything has been fixed, especially as it relates to a football game that isn’t really a football game.