In my second of a three part look into the All Star games, I now take a look at the NFL Pro Bowl.  Here is the breakdown:

NFL Pro-Bowl Game

When: After the Season

How Players are selected: Combination of fan, player, and coaches votes.

Incentive: None

My Take

Having this event after the season is a no brainer.  Football is a high contact, violent sport and nobody would play seriously at all if if was in the middle of the season because of risk of injury.  Practically, there is no way around this.  The injury rates are too high in football to risk your team’s best player(s), playing a meaningless game at the end of October.

The addition of coaches and players in addition to fans voting for the pro bowl players makes this a little bit better than MLB’s voting method.  One glaring problem that is faced with this method is the fact that fans can vote as many times as they want.  Here is an example of the flaw in this system: After the fan vote was counted last year, something like 8 players from the Washington Redskins were selected to play, half of which weren’t even starters.  Thanks America, once again you prove that your judgment isn’t very rational overall and you pick players who don’t deserve to be playing in the probowl.  So to fix this problem, the voting method needs to follow my 33-33-33 method (look at MLB all star article if you don’t know what I mean), and fans need to somehow be limited to one vote, this will keep it under control.

Obviously, having an incentive in playing this game would be nice, but I can’t think of any practical one that would make these guys want to play extremely hard.  Especially since its after the season is over, and players are beginning recover before they start preparing for the next season.  Overall, football players are extremely competitive in the first place, and that should show up anyway.

Next up: NBA All-Star Game

Related posts:

1. Tackling Controversy: Part III – NBA All Star Game
2. Tackling Controversy: Part I – MLB All Star Game
3. Vick and Favre: Can they Both Return to Greatness