The NFL eliminated the Pro Bowl on Wednesday, according to Jonathan Jones of The Athletic. He published this piece breaking the news at 1:49 p.m. PST.
The Pro Bowl has been around since 1951, but it’s been dying a slow, painful death over the last decade. League executives presented a new version to team owners today, which gives up on holding any sort of all-star event. The Pro Bowl will now be an individual performance award like the All-Pro team, with eighty-eight players receiving honors and no alternates.
Jones spoke to NFL executive vice president Peter O’Reilly, who said that “all leagues have struggled” to hold all-star games that are worth the squeeze. He also admitted that when they switched from tackle to flag football, “In many ways,
we saw a decrease in the replacement players.”
The 2025 Pro Bowl, which will indefinitely go down as the final edition, was mocked relentlessly for including two quarterbacks who played for a 5-12 Cleveland Browns team. They picked Shedeur Sanders because he was an extremely popular public persona, and Joe Flacco because he was a former Super Bowl MVP who was an endearing comeback story last year. Neither put together a starter-level season, let alone an all-star-level one.
This wasn’t the moment they became more of a reality TV show than any sort of all-star or even football event, but it was the final straw. It’s the amalgamation of what O’Reilly’s referring to. The league saw this and finally put the entire operation out of its misery.
For title contenders like the Seattle Seahawks, this means very little. Their players can rack up the selections and not have to worry about going (most of them skip it anyway), but it won’t have the value of the AP All-Pro teams or the other official NFL honors for at least a few years.
The biggest way this relates to Seattle is actually on the ownership side, though, as the league meeting in Atlanta where this occurred today was primarily focused on approving the sale of the Seahawks to Vinod Khosla and The Khosla Family for a record $9.6 billion. Seahawks Wire’s own Kole Musgrove has you covered on that story right here.
This article originally appeared on Seahawks Wire: NFL Eliminates Pro Bowl
