Some of the SB Nation football gang are thinking of ways to fix the Pro Bowl. Obviously, wedging the game between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl is having the unintended consequence of losing All Star players at the All Star game either through a lack of motivation or the players in the Super Bowl aren't going to play in the All Star game.
In my opinion, the Pro Bowl can't be fixed. It'll never turn into a game of bulls punishing each other into submission. This isn't a critical playoff game, a must-win scenario. You can't modify the importance of the game like Major League Baseball by giving the winning conference any post-season advantages. The site of the Super Bowl is dictated well in advance by several years and all post season games are hosted by the better seeded team -- which it should be.
It was never an interesting game to begin with and magically dropping a finger elsewhere on the calendar provides what improvement? Put it before the Super Bowl and many players won't be able to play. Play it after the Super Bowl and deal with deceleration among the fans after the biggest game of the year; many tend to be done with football after the Super Bowl. Move the game to August in place of the Hall of Fame game and you replace an exhibition game with young players fighting to make it in the NFL with all star players that have no intention of playing hard and risking season long injury. Then there's having injuries in August, which would otherwise not happen or allow a player to recover from if it's before or after the Super Bowl. Changing the location doesn't help. If anything, it hurt the league moving it to the site of this year's Super Bowl. Move it to Miami and lose that appeal players would have had if they could go to Hawaii.
It's difficult enough to find a solution to a problem that few has called an issue. I can understand the stance the league takes; maximize profits and revenue. However, if you want maximum participation in the Pro Bowl, move it back behind the Super Bowl and keep it in Hawaii. Otherwise, hand out the awards, decide not to have the game and, like the rest of us, just move on into the offseason.
Moving on.
Johnathan Joseph, Cedric Benson and Leon Hall made the All-Joe team. The All-Joe team is USA Today's awards for honoring players that are "not average or even sloppy, but rather unheralded, unloved and, sometimes, underpaid since the one prerequisite for being an All-Joe is that you cannot have a Pro Bowl on your résumé."
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