Across the sports world, the NFL has always seemed to be the only league immune to the ratings erosion of the cord-cutting era. But there is one exception.
According to Sports Media Watch, the 2026 Pro Bowl continued the league’s worrying trend, averaging just 2 million viewers on ESPN in the new Tuesday time slot. That’s down 59.6% from last year’s record low of 4.7 million viewers.
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Just how bad are we talking about here? The 2021 Pro Bowl, a tape-delayed virtual event that pitted some players against each other on “Madden NFL” due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, attracted 1.9 million viewers.
Here’s how the ratings have changed since then:
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2023: 6.3 million viewers
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2024: 5.8 million viewers
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2025: 4.7 million viewers
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2026: 2 million viewers
To be fair, the main reason sales were down last year was because the game wasn’t airing on ABC. The time and location are also a big change this year, as it takes place on Tuesday in Super Bowl host San Francisco instead of Orlando or Las Vegas. The NFL said the change is intended to help promote flag football’s debut at the 2028 Summer Olympics.
In this year’s flag football game, the NFC defeated the AFC 66-52.
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Is it time to finally kill the Pro Bowl?
At some point, it might be time for the NFL to take a step back and ask itself: “Is it all worth it?”
The Pro Bowl started as a simple idea. The best players in the league — or at least the best players who didn’t make it to the Super Bowl — can vacation in Hawaii while easily playing a game. However, the safety of the tackle game is never guaranteed, and the more players try to avoid injury, the less fun it is to watch. Understandably, when the risk is so low, player safety will be prioritized in all likelihood, which is why the NFL is switching to flag football in 2023.
In this regard, the Pro Bowl is essentially a football variety show that invites the public to watch some of their favorite players play for hours. The NFL wants to promote flag football so it feels more natural when its players report to Los Angeles in 2028, but how much will that actually help?
Making the Pro Bowl has also become a hollow honor, at least at the quarterback position. The biggest news for the event was Cleveland Browns rookie Shaddell Sanders taking the field after a seven-touchdown, 10-interception season, which isn’t a good sign, but what’s worse is that Sanders is just following the norm of the past few years.
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Tyler Huntley became infamous after starting just four games for the Baltimore Ravens in 2023 as nearly every other AFC quarterback was injured or unwilling to play, and something similar happened with Gardner Minshew in 2024. Joe Flacco spent his entire career being sidelined by a generational group of quarterbacks before being drafted this year with the Cleveland Browns and Cincinnati Bengals after a mediocre 10 starts.
Pro Bowl selection is supposed to mean a player was one of the best at his position that season, but what it actually means is that “the best player at his position was willing and able to play in a meaningless event.”
The NFL is working to make flag football a reality at the Pro Bowl. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
(Associated Press)
So what are they doing here? What’s stopping the NFL from declaring its Pro Bowlers at the end of the season and then… honoring them at the NFL Awards? If all these guys come together on Tuesday night and can’t even draw half the crowd for the MLB wild-card game, how much does it matter?
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The NFL isn’t hurting anyone by hosting the Pro Bowl this way, and if it thinks getting a few million eyeballs on Tuesday afternoon is a good outcome, that’s their decision. Still, you can imagine there will be a lot of viewers where the effort is no longer worth it financially, especially if the league’s stars agree to return a week before the Super Bowl.