I really, really, really hate the Pro Bowl. Total waste of time, and totally pointless as a handicapping exercise. Here are 10 reasons why:
1. It’s boring. Name the last time that there was an exciting Pro Bowl. You can’t because it has never happened.
2. No one cares. Not the players, the coaches, the fans, the media. It’s a total farce.
3. It’s not the best players playing. Every year we see all sorts of good players beg out of the game for reasons ranging from the legitimate to the pathetic. Their places are filled by the next best players. The game, then, isn’t the best playing the best – just the pretty good playing the freely available.
4. No Super Bowl players. This is a new change this year, and it has made a bad game even less interesting. There will be no MVP in the Pro Bowl. The two best passing QBs in the league won’t be there. Several players from the two best teams in the league won’t be there. This change of timing further dilutes an already lame game.
5. What can you do in a week? The teams don’t practice for very long, so there is no way that they can implement offenses or defenses that have any wrinkles or complexity. That means that the playbooks are as vanilla as they can possibly be, and that’s far from interesting.
6. No chemistry. With the exception of the teammates that get to play together there is little chemistry in the game because players don’t know what to expect from each others, and quarterbacks can’t anticipate their offensive partners. Without chemistry offense is dull.
7. Quarterbacks platooned. In a lot of cases it takes a quarterback a while to get a feel for the game and the tendencies of the opposing defense before they can really start to make things happen. They don’t get that chance in the Pro Bowl because they have to split the time three ways.
8. Played at half speed. The biggest focus of every player in the game is avoiding injury, so they are running slower, tackling with less intensity, and avoiding major collisions. We love watching the NFL because of how fast and nasty it is, so this game is a joke.
9. It’s totally meaningless. There is no incentive to win this game, and no one ever remembers or cares about who wins or loses. It means absolutely nothing. In that sense I hate this game in the same way that I hate most of the preseason and most of the games in week 17.
10. It just sucks.
