The NFL is ending the standalone Pro Bowl game and turning the Pro Bowl into an individual performance award, with 88 players honored and no alternates. Instead of a game, Pro Bowlers will be invited to Los Angeles for an in-person celebration in February.
League executives presented the change to team owners on Wednesday, making the move the next step in a format that has shifted repeatedly for years. Fans, players and coaches will still help determine the selections, with ballots from all three groups weighted equally.
The decision closes the book on one of the league's longest-running traditions. The NFL has conducted some version of the Pro Bowl since 1951, but it has struggled to make its all-star showcase feel like a real contest. Four years ago the league switched from tackle football to a flag game, after earlier scrapping the conference format in 2013 in favor of honorary team captains and a fantasy draft before restoring AFC-NFC play for 2016.
The latest change goes further because it pulls the focus away from a game altogether. Peter O’Reilly said all-star games across sports have long been fraught and have not always represented the best of the sport, and he said the Pro Bowl should be about honoring the best of the best in real games. He added that the shift is meant to move attention off the game itself and onto the honor.
That concern was echoed by Troy Vincent Sr., who spoke earlier this summer with more than a dozen star players, including Jalen Hurts, Jalen Ramsey, George Kittle and Dion Dawkins. Vincent said that if the league keeps compromising on the format, what it settles for can become the standard, and that is not the product fans deserve or the way players want to be celebrated.
The league's discomfort with the old setup is not hard to see in the memories players carry from it. Sean Taylor laid out Brian Moorman on a fake punt in the 2007 Pro Bowl, and Hardy Nickerson once told Vincent to buckle up at Vincent's first Pro Bowl after his seven-interception season in 1999. Those moments fit a game, but they did not always fit the league's idea of an honor for its best players.
What the February event in Los Angeles will look like has not been spelled out, and that is now the point the league has left open. The NFL moved the Pro Bowl from Hawaii after the 2015 edition and has spent the years since trying to find a format that can survive the same pressure that has worn down other all-star games. This time, it is betting that the celebration itself will matter more than the game it replaces.
