Does anyone else see the danger in this concession over the safety of NFL football?
Not that anyone watches the Pro Bowl much anyway, and for good reason — the players don’t want to get banged up for a meaningless exhibition. The fans aren’t that interested in a game in which players aren’t invested, for whatever reason. And so the NFL will now reset the all-star game into a flag-football contest, which is even further removed from the weekly NFL experience that fans expect.
Oh, and they’ll have some other exhibitions too, which may make players happy but likely won’t do much for fans either:
The NFL is replacing the Pro Bowl with weeklong skills competitions and a flag football game, The Associated Press has learned.
The new event will replace the full-contact showcase started in 1951. It will be renamed “The Pro Bowl Games” and will feature AFC and NFC players showcasing their football and non-football skills in challenges over several days. The 2023 Games will be held in Las Vegas, and the flag football game at Allegiant Stadium is Sunday, Feb. 5.
Peyton Manning and his Omaha Productions company will help shape programming and promote the event’s content throughout the week. Manning, a 14-time Pro Bowl pick during his Hall of Fame career, will provide his perspective and will also be a part of the coaching staff for flag game.
READ RELATED: Pentagon: You soldiers may want to apply for food stamps
“The Pro Bowl is something that we’ve been looking at for a while, really continuing to evolve,” NFL executive Peter O’Reilly told The Associated Press. “Coming out of last year’s game, we really made the decision based on a lot of internal conversations, getting feedback from GMs and coaches, getting a lot of feedback from players. We think there’s a real opportunity to do something wholly different here and move away from the traditional tackle football game. We decided the goal is to celebrate 88 of the biggest stars in the NFL in a really positive, fun, yet competitive way.
Why play anything if the NFL isn’t going to play an NFL game? Just make the Pro Bowl teams the equivalent of the collegiate All-American rosters — an honorific, a trophy or plaque to hang on one’s wall and view fondly at the end of a career. That would avoid the silliness of the actual Pro Bowl game and avoid the safety issues that the NFL won’t fully concede exist in its regular games as well.
The answer to that question is money, of course. The league still makes a lot of money on the Pro Bowl, and so do the players. They want to cash in on fan interest any way possible, and why not? If fans want to see “players showcasing their football and non-football skills in challenges over several days,” it would be foolish to miss that kind of financial opportunity. This is sounding more like the old “Battle of the Network Stars” program rather than anything connected to the massively popular NFL experience, but maybe they can make that work.
The concussion-concession to flags, however, may be one concession too many. The league will now protect its elite players by removing most of the contact from the contact sport while selling it as a legit pro-football competition experience. How long will it take before people connect the dots and see this as a tacit admission of the dangers of tackle football? That threatens to either dilute interest in the Pro Bowl or incentivize demand for both professional and collegiate football to adopt that form of the game for safety purposes, too.
It might not happen in the first year or even the fifth year, but plenty of people are already uneasy over the consequences of the pounding players take in the NFL especially. If the flag-football form of the Pro Bowl succeeds at all, the NFL may end up talking itself out of the model that turned it into arguably the most popular pro sport in America.
Source:
