Sandwiched between the conference championships and the Super Bowl, the NFL Pro Bowl has suffered from steadily declining ratings. This year, the league debuted a new format for the event, removing tackle football in favor of flag and throwing in skill tests and other fun events. It even had a new name: The Pro Bowl Games. The location was great (Allegiant Stadium in Vegas) and everyone was in agreement the event had needed an overhaul.
Now it’s time to evaluate whether the changes have wrought a new and improved Pro Bowl. So… what was the verdict: cheers or crickets?
Here’s a hint: Chirp, chirp.
Sad but true. The headline in The Big Lead made it abundantly clear: Pro Bowl Ratings Indicate New Format Won't Move the Needle.
Need another? Here’s one from the Turf Show Times: NFL Should Replace the Pro Bowl with a Documentary About the Season. (Subhead: You Can’t Fix Something That Never Worked, It’s Time to Accept Change).
Ouch. But ratings don’t lie, and Turf Show Times notes, “this year’s skills competition drew a little over 1 million viewers. That’s good news if you’re maybe an NBC sitcom these days, but it is hardly representative of the power of the NFL on television: 82 of the top-100 TV events last year were NFL games.”
Of course, analysts at NBC say the event has found the answer to its problems, noting the actual flag football game itself drew 6.28 million viewers, beating out NASCAR’s race at the Los Angeles Coliseum (3.65 million) and the NHL All-Star Game on ABC (1.5 million). At the same time, however, its viewership overall was lower than last year’s (a deplorable 6.7 million).
Turf Show Times leaves it all on the table: “What the NFL needs to realize eventually is that the Pro Bowl doesn’t work. In any form. Yes, they might be able to draw 6 million viewers, which is more than almost any other TV show possible, especially on a Sunday. But what could be more natural to the NFL than the greed...to do better? Six million viewers is laughable to the NFL. Even the Amazon Prime Thursday Night Games, an experiment in sports television never seen before and likely to continue growing, drew an average of 9.6 million viewers. And most of those games were absolutely terrible.”
Compare that to the over 100 million people who typically watch the Super Bowl and you understand the problem. People don't exactly host parties to watch this game, after all. Nobody tracks how many pizza orders are placed or cases of beer are sold during this event. Even the most diehard football fans tend to see it as a nonevent.
But it wasn’t all bad. One sportswriter for SB Nation noted that while he was disappointed in both the game’s starpower (or more accurately, the lack of starpower) and in the skills tests, he found the flag football game enjoyable:
“…Sometime around halfway through the first flag football game on Sunday, things changed. I didn’t want to like it, and I hated that I found myself enjoying it. But, as the day went on and the players loosened up, it really became fun with the players' personalities showing through.”
NBC boldly proclaimed “Pro Bowl Games is here to stay. It will never die.” But the comments of viewers speak more loudly than those of the writer. And a stroll through those comments gives a strong picture of a viewing public that is fed up with the NFL’s insistence upon presenting this event year after year.
The award for perhaps the pithiest comment goes to this: “Well, there’s 6.28 million suckers born every day.”
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