My friends accuse me of having a fetish for hopeless causes that interest no one and have no hope of ever being accomplished. Which brings me to my plan for fixing the Pro Bowl.
This Sunday few of you will actually watch the Pro Bowl. It’s not that WEEKLY STANDARD readers aren’t pro football fans–far from it, based on the magazine’s demographics (mainly men who live in the United States.) The problem is, in a nutshell, that the Pro Bowl doesn’t resemble professional football in the slightest.
The NFL realizes that the Pro Bowl in its current form is an unwatchable mess and has tried various remedies, but they have yet to correctly diagnose the problem and their “fixes” (abandoning the NFC-AFC matchup, replacing their old, ugly uniforms with flashier, uglier uniforms) have made things worse.
There is no tweak that will incentivize the Pro Bowl participants to actually put forth full effort into the game, so that shouldn’t be a goal. Instead, the NFL should work with that constraint to make it at least bear a superficial resemblance to an NFL game.
Doing this isn’t complicated: For starters, it means ditching the stupid Nike neon-glow uniforms for some throwback uniforms from a storied franchise in the past. It would also entail moving out of Aloha Stadium. Games played under the lights, when it’s dark, are much more visually appealing, and seeing a sunburned Andy Reid standing on the sidelines wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a lei under the Hawaiian sun could not be more visually dissonant from the NFL we are accustomed to seeing.
A Pro Bowl in Miami would work just fine–I assume that’s warm enough in January to entice the wives of the players to encourage them to participate. The one time the NFL played the game there–at night–ratings leaped, and the NFL scratched their heads to figure out why. When ratings declined the next year after it returned to Hawaii they chalked it up to being some sort of anomaly. Let’s hope the children of the NFL’s marketing team never ask for their help when it comes to science experiments.
And let’s scrap the insipid player draft. The AFC and NFC might not be that much of a rivalry but at least it makes it easy for us to figure out who’s on which team.
Even with these changes the Pro Bowl will only bear a superficial resemblance to an actual game, but that’s is enough for people to turn on the game, leave it on while they do other things, and pay attention if the game is close at the end.
A better answer to the dearth of digestible football this weekend and the ensuing months would be to add 3 more bye weeks to the schedule and scrap the break between the conference championships and the Super Bowl, but in the meantime let’s gussy up the Pro Bowl.
Ike Brannon is the president of Capital Policy Analytics, a Washington consulting firm.
