Table of Contents
Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I think there’s something poetic about the final Pro Bowl being played inside a lifeless convention center.
In today’s SI:AM:
👋 Pro Bowl axed
💰 College football’s spending boom
✈️ Breer’s notes from Jets camp
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No more Pro Bowl
Bad news for everyone who loves watching NFL players disinterestedly go through the motions of a flag football game the week before the Super Bowl: the Pro Bowl is being canceled.
The NFL said yesterday that it is doing away with the annual all-star game but will still name 88 players to the Pro Bowl teams. The Pro Bowl had been played (in one form or another) every year since 1951.
The Pro Bowl had been on life support for a long time. It’s impossible to play a friendly game of tackle football, and so the lack of physicality made for a joke of a game. The league spent the past decade tinkering with the concept to try to keep the tradition alive. It first tried scrapping the usual AFC vs. NFC matchup and instead had Hall of Fame captains draft their teams. (That lasted only three years.) It moved the game from its traditional home in Hawai‘i to the U.S. mainland. The NFL’s last-ditch effort to keep the tradition going was to replace the game with a series of skills challenges and a flag football game, beginning with the 2023 edition.
The tweaks were primarily intended to revive fan interest, but the players were just as indifferent. The number of players who opted out often prompted the NFL to dig deep into the list of alternates to find a replacement. Remember when quarterback Tyler Huntley was named to the Pro Bowl after starting four games for the Ravens in 2022? When only two million people tuned in for this year’s game, it was clear that the Pro Bowl had run its course.
“It’s O.K. to be the first league to walk away from a competitive all-star game,” NFL executive vice president Peter O’Reilly told reporters yesterday at the owners' meetings in Atlanta.
The Pro Bowl was the worst all-star game in American sports, but it’s not like the other ones are all that great. The NHL has similarly suffered from a lack of physicality. The only time in recent memory that MLB’s has been at all interesting was in 2025, when it was decided by a swing-off. But even then, the tiebreaker was contested by a bunch of B-tier All-Stars after the real stars left the ballpark early. The NBA had some success this year with its new 12-minute mini-game round-robin tournament, but how long before that eventually grows stale again? The NHL is copying that format beginning with the upcoming All-Star Game.
The concept of the all-star game is a relic of the past. In the days before television and interleague play, the All-Star Game might be your only chance to see some players. If you lived in Detroit in 1951, the only way to see National League stars like Jackie Robinson, Stan Musial and Ralph Kiner was when they came to town for the All-Star Game. The MLB All-Star Game was once so popular that it was held twice annually between 1959 and ’62. But that’s no longer the case. The game hasn’t attracted more than 10 million TV viewers since 2015.
Players aren’t all that interested in participating in all-star games, either—and not just in the NFL. The NHL gets players to show up for the All-Star Game by issuing a one-game suspension to anyone who skips the festivities without a valid injury. Can you blame anyone who’d rather have a day off in the middle of a grueling season than play a meaningless exhibition? Even that threat isn’t always enough to get players to show up, though. Alex Ovechkin, for example, skipped the 2019 game, opting to serve his suspension during the Capitals’ first game back from the break. (Washington won anyway.)
The only surprising thing about the NFL’s decision to abolish the Pro Bowl is that it took this long to do so. No one will miss watching players go through the motions of a football-adjacent competition inside a sterile convention center. Even though the game had become expendable, it does take some amount of gumption to pull the trigger and end a nearly 80-year tradition. Will other leagues have the guts to follow suit?
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The top five…
… things I saw last night:
5. Angel City defender Sarah Gorden’s impressive individual effort to prevent a goal.
4. Tyler Stephenson’s pinch-hit single to give the Reds the lead over the Giants. Cincinnati scored seven runs in the top of the ninth to pull ahead and won 10–9.
3. The unusual double play the Dodgers turned.
2. Raphael Veiga’s beautiful curling shot to score for Club América against the Columbus Crew in the Leagues Cup quarterfinals.
1. Unlikely hero Ha-Seong Kim’s walk-off single for the Braves against the Dodgers. Kim, who’s making $20 million this year, has been one of the worst hitters in MLB history this season but was called upon to pinch-hit after the Braves gave up the DH earlier in the game. The walk-off was his sixth hit of the season, raising his batting average to .078 in 32 games. He’s the first non-pitcher since Ron Karkovice in 1987 to have at least 80 plate appearances in a season and a batting average of .080 or worse.
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DAN GARTLAND
Dan Gartland writes Sports Illustrated’s flagship daily newsletter, SI:AM, and is the host of the “Stadium Wonders” video series. He joined the SI staff in 2014, having previously been published on Deadspin and Slate. Gartland, a graduate of Fordham University, is a former Sports Jeopardy! champion (Season 1, Episode 5).
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