The Pro Bowl is no longer the Pro Bowl. Even though many still insist on calling it the Pro Bowl.
It still includes a night of non-football activities. Tomorrow, it will culminate in a non-football game. They’ll play flag football. Which, but for the absence of pads, won’t look much different from recent Pro Bowls.
Personally, I’ve got no use for any of it. I didn’t have any use for it before they got rid of the game. The sport had long evolved past playing a truly competitive tackle football contest at the end of the season from which the players had emerged healthy enough to play one more game. The Pro Bowl needed to go.
Some would say the replacement needs to go, too.
Via Tashan Reed of TheAthletic.com, Raiders running back Josh Jacobs would agree with that. Said Jacobs of the new format: “This shit is stupid.”
This shit is also profitable. More than 1.1 million tuned in for the Frolf Olympics on Thursday night. It will be interesting to see how many watch the flag football game.
As long as people watch, they’ll keep doing it. And they realized that, given the number of people who were watching a football game that didn’t really look like football, they can just go ahead and play a game of something that isn’t really football — and people will watch that, too.