Fan voting for Pro Bowl has cratered in recent…
2 min read
Getty Images
The Pro Bowl survives because it remains profitable, even if it stopped being a competitive game of football many years ago.
It shouldn’t be a competitive game of football. Not in the modern NFL, where any player who is healthy enough to play one last game that isn’t the Super Bowl shouldn’t be playing in that game.
And so it’s now a glorified game of two-hand touch in pads. People keep watching, so it keeps going. But interest in the game seems to be waning, if the trend in fan voting has any relevance to the extent to which fans care.
Consider this simple, undeniable fact. The top fan vote-getter in 2021 for the Pro Bowl was Colts running back Jonathan Taylor, with 265,370. Four years ago — in the second season of the anthem protests and when people supposedly were turning away from the NFL — Steelers running back Le’Veon Bell generated 855,539 fan votes. Three other players racked up more than 800,000 votes that year, and even the player who finished tenth in the voting (former Jaguars running back Leonard Fournette) had 544,068 votes.
A dramatic reduction happened the following year, when Saints quarterback Drew Brees led the way with 487,400 votes. Still, the highest vote-getter at every position in 2018 racked up more votes than Taylor in 2021.
The next year, Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson pushed the high-water mark above 700,000. In all, eleven Pro Bowl starters for the 2019 season drew more votes than the top vote-getter this year.
We haven’t been able to find the raw voting numbers for 2020; last year’s Pro Bowl game was canceled in October but the teams were still announced.
The reason for the dip isn’t clear, but there aren’t many ways to spin this one positively. Although the ratings are up and interest in the NFL seems higher than ever, the fans simply aren’t clamoring to cast ballots for their favorite players. While that won’t kill the Pro Bowl as long as people keep watching it, it’s possibly an indication that this year’s Pro Bowl won’t generate much attention or excitement — if it’s even played. With the latest wave of the pandemic just getting started, the easiest game for the NFL to abandon will be the Pro Bowl.
