Apparently a Pro Bowl, well, event that included Joe Flacco and Shedeur Sanders was a bridge too far.
The NFL will officially eliminate the Pro Bowl as a competition and simply apply the honorific to deserving players, many of whom have contract escalators for being named a Pro Bowler.
However, a pure Pro Bowl had not been played since 2021. The league tried an eSports format during the COVID-19 pandemic following the 2020 campaign and had shifted to a "Pro Bowl Games" format in recent years that was significantly less likely to cause players serious injuries in an all-star exhibition.
Still, the NFL's biggest stars routinely avoided any kind of actual Pro Bowl competition, some begging off with injuries and/or surgeries, others unavailable due
to the Super Bowl or late playoff runs once the game was moved ahead of Super Sunday on the calendar (in 2010) rather than being played afterward.
Earlier this year in San Francisco, the NFC defeated the AFC 66-52 in a flag game staged at the Moscone Center, a downtown convention space but not a venue meant for football. Flacco, a Super Bowl MVP 13 years ago, and Sanders, a rookie in 2025 who had an uneven − at best − first NFL season wound up playing for the AFC after a season when both were Cleveland Browns teammates, though Flacco ended the year with the Cincinnati Bengals and filled in for injured star Joe Burrow.
All the NFL news on and off the field. Sign up for USA TODAY's 4th and Monday newsletter.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: NFL announces the end of Pro Bowl. It was already dead
