The NFL has spent the last few years tinkering with the Pro Bowl but has yet to find the secret sauce that makes it an event worth watching.
After ending the classic Pro Bowl and switching to a non-contact flag football game in 2023, the event has morphed into the Pro Bowl Games, which combines the flag football game with a skills competition.
The result might be better for player safety but it hasn’t done anything to stop the bleeding when it comes to ratings. This year’s Pro Bowl Games averaged 4.7 million viewers across ABC, ESPN, and Disney XD, the lowest non-COVID audience ever for the game. That was also an 18% decline from last year (5.75 million viewers) and a nearly 30% decline from two years ago (6.7 million), the first year of the new format.
Flag football will make its Olympic debut at the 2028 Los Angeles Games, and the NFL recently approved a rules resolution that will allow players to participate. The NFL is trying to promote flag football, so adding their players to the roster seems like a no-brainer.
While the roster for Team USA at the 2028 Games won’t be decided for some time, Darrell Doucette III, quarterback of the USA national flag football team, recently said that they “don’t need” NFL players and that the current players “deserve their opportunity” to compete for the gold medal.
That prompted a response from ESPN writer Bill Barnwell, who offered an idea for solving this issue.
“I would pay a large sum of money out of my own pocket to watch the non-NFL flag football team vs. the NFL flag football team in a qualifier to see who represents the US,” he wrote on Blusesky.
He added in a follow-up post that any outcome for that game would be fascinating.
Fellow ESPNer Mina Kimes then quoted Barnwell’s post, summarizing what many people were probably thinking.
“I think you just fixed the Pro Bowl,” she wrote.
Stakes are the key ingredient missing from the Pro Bowl for a long time. The previous version was an exhibition game, and the current version is an exhibition contest. The outcome means nothing and affects nothing. If you wanted to get people to care about the Pro Bowl Games, at least for one year, this would probably do it.