Chicago Herald-American

The Pro Bowl has long been a joke of an "All-Star" game, but at least it was in Hawaii and at the end of the season, where it didn't conflict with the Super Bowl. Now, though, the NFL has made it a real annoyance by moving the game to the Sunday before the Super Bowl and playing the game in the Super Bowl city.

If the intent is to improve the legitimacy of the Pro Bowl, the NFL is in for a rude awakening. There's a better chance that Americans will embrace soccer or the metric system than the Pro Bowl. For one thing, the dynamic of the game of football does not lend itself to being an entertaining exhibition event. Football is a "collision sport" rooted in brutality, contact and aggression. You can't duplicate that in anything but the real thing -- and an exhibition game is by definition NOT the real thing.

But by moving the Pro Bowl to the Sunday before the Super Bowl, the NFL eliminates the players from two of the best teams in football -- this year, by chance, the two best teams in football. And it's pretty clear that a game in south Florida doesn't have quite the attraction of the game in Hawaii. There have been 31 players who have opted out for various reasons, from real injuries to made-up injuries to Randy Moss, who just didn't want to play in it.

I was amused by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell's take on the game in the face of almost universal criticism.

"We're seeing a lot more attention on the Pro Bowl than we've ever had before," said Goodell, taking another giant step toward morphing into Paul Tagliabue. "And that in and of itself is a success."

He couldn't have said that with a straight face. As my good friend Dan McNeil wrote in his weekly column in the Tribune this week, the added attention is an avalanche of criticism. People are talking about the Pro Bowl because it's such a joke.

Thankfully, the experiment is for this season only. The Pro Bowl will return to Hawaii in 2011 and 2012, though it has not been announced whether it will be before or after the Super Bowl.

I imagine there are ways to make the Pro Bowl more relevant to NFL fans, but moving the game out of Hawaii on the Sunday prior to the Super Bowl is not the solution.

An unintended consequence of the move is the continued dilution of the term "Pro Bowl player." It's bad enough that the term has lost a lot of its meaning because of a voting process rife with abuse, with veteran players getting in on reputation, players having their trainer vote or having no clue whom to select. Now it's a matter of volume. With the 30-plus defections, there are 118 "Pro Bowl players" this season. The Jaguars' David Garrard and the Titans' Vince Young are "Pro Bowl" quarterbacks despite finishing 17th and 18th in the NFL in passer rating this season. Calling some players a "Pro Bowler" is almost like referring to a running back as "a 1,000-yard rusher" -- another specious standard of legitimacy.

Either way, I don't think much will come of it. We'll continue to ignore the Pro Bowl, and the NFL will continue to prop it up and convince itself they put on a heluva a show.