The 2015 NFL Pro Bowl

This Sunday the National Football League held its annual Pro Bowl at the site of the upcoming championship game, Super Bowl XLIX in Glendale, Arizona. For those that don’t know, the Pro Bowl is an All-Star game played at the end of every NFL season, where the league’s most popular players participate in a pass-happy game that penalizes defenses for play calling designs as fundamental to the sport as blitzes.

Historically the Pro Bowl has drawn poor numbers of viewers, and with good reason. The game used to be played on the weekend following the Super Bowl until very recently when the NFL recognized how few people retained interest in watching football after end of the season. Now the game is played during the bye week between the conference championship games and super Sunday. The Pro Bowl, like any All-Star event, is merely a front for shameless promotions, and it provides additional airtime fodder for hype-machine networks like ESPN and the NFL Network before the sports-world lull that encompasses the month of February.

For decades the Pro Bowl would feature match-ups of the best players selected in the National Football Conference against the best players selected in the American Football Conference. The NFC wore blue and the AFC wore red; certain players would be on the same team as rivals, and it made everything interesting… but not quite enough for the younger fans. More recently, the Pro Bowl has adopted elements of fantasy in which two NFL Hall of Fame members (Michael Irvin and Cris Carter in 2015) draft teams from a pool of over a hundred players selected by the fans as Pro Bowlers. This system churns out two hodgepodge teams that make it far more difficult to know who to cheer for. At the end of the day, fans end up rooting for clothes, as is the case in almost any game where the outcome is inconsequential to the viewer.

The NFL has made drastic and hideous alterations to their uniforms worn in the last two Pro Bowl games. Gone are the days of the classic matchup of red versus blue; the uniforms in the 2015 Pro Bowl featured jarring combinations of white and neon yellow versus gray and a vibrant orange. The players sure looked ridiculous, but considering the endgame is selling jerseys to young kids, those bright colors are clearly working for the NFL. This is just more evidence of the sporting world evolving constantly, and modified uniforms are hardly groundbreaking. However, other changes implemented by the league in this year's Pro Bowl turned out to have an actual impact on the final score.

One phase of the game that the shield has been trying to complicate for years now is the kicking game, and provided with the playful atmosphere of the Pro Bowl, the NFL has decided to use this matchup as its proving ground. In the 2015 Pro Bowl, some of the changes the NFL sought to experiment with involved lengthening the distance of extra-point kick attempts as well as shrinking the width of the goalposts. The impact on the game was two missed extra points and a missed field goal, which raises the question of whether or not fans want to compromise points for their team in exchange for an overhaul of the entire kicking phase of football? It will be interesting to see if and when any changes are implemented to regular NFL games, and if so, how many more of these missed kicks will be seen in future NFL seasons.

As the dust settled in the desert this weekend, Team Irvin defeated Team Carter by a count of 32-28, which means nothing really; it means I wasted an evening watching a silly exhibition football game with less actual competition than a wrestling match. It means that the Super Bowl is less than a week away, and that's plenty to be excited about. My three big takeaways from the 2015 Pro Bowl were that the uniforms are silly, kicking a football is hard enough already, and that the only All-Star game worth watching is played in July. God, I miss baseball.