One Year After Major Changes, Pro Bowl Still Proving to Be a Huge Disappointment

Last year's Pro Bowl was kind of awesome.

No, really—it was! There were a lot of scores and turnovers, plenty of real line play (complete with bone-rattling sacks), and even the retired-star "coaches" gave us some entertaining antics and anecdotes. If you bothered to tune in, you were rewarded.

After years of complaints about the Pro Bowl game itself, it looks like the combination of cross-conference selections, NHL-style schoolyard drafting and some mic'd-up Hall of Famers adding spice did the trick.

I guess nobody told the players.

After a spate of injury withdrawals and "thanks but no thanks" responses, the NFL is having to dig very, very deep to fill out the rosters:

With all-star prestige, an important legacy bullet point, possible contract bonuses and a free trip to sunny Arizona at stake, you'd think players would be lining up for the honors. Instead, they're staying away in droves.

Even if the NFL has finally fixed the on-field product, just about everything else Pro Bowl is in shambles.

It starts with the voting process. Fan balloting opened before Halloween this year and closed with a full week left in the regular season. For an end-of-season award, this makes zero sense.

Ballot boxes swell long before players have a chance to prove that their early-season hot streaks will last. Votes are tallied before major injuries occur, leading to players who limped down the stretch bowing out of participating. Players who started cold heat up, and season-deciding clutch performances all happen in December—but votes have long since been cast by then.

The epic two-month window also allows fans way too much time to get voting campaigns going. Big-market teams have a natural advantage here, but small-market teams determined to take care of their guys can skew the voting, too. Just look at the work Cleveland Browns fans did this year: Nine of the top 38 vote-getters were Browns, despite their 7-9 record and last-place finish.

Players and coaches weren't quite as enamored with the team by Lake Erie; only three Browns made the initial Pro Bowl roster.

Then again, why are players and coaches voting at all, let alone each counting for a third of the votes?

You'd think players and coaches would know the lay of the land better than anyone else. In reality, players and coaches vote on reputation and bias just as much as fans do. Not many players spend their few free hours of the in-season grind watching games or sifting through stats, and most coaches are working 100-hour weeks just game-planning for their next opponent.

Then there's the positions to which players are voted. The rise of 3-4 and hybrid defenses forces voters to compare players with completely different on-field roles, putting some at a massive disadvantage and giving others an easy path.

Fans rely heavily on glamour stats like yards and touchdowns on offense and weigh sacks and turnovers even more heavily on defense—and understandably so; that's all the information most fans ever see, unless they spend time (and sometimes money) sponging numbers from sites like Pro-Football-Reference.com, Pro Football Focus and Football Outsiders.

As a result, pass-rushing 4-3 defensive tackles who get lots of sacks compete for votes against 3-4 nose tackles who don't. There are 4-3 defensive ends who make their hay as situational sack artists going up against 3-4 ends who have to be as superhuman as J.J. Watt to compete. There are 3-4 outside linebackers who do nothing but pin their ears back and rush the passer dominating 4-3 outside linebackers who generally cover the pass and stuff the run.

Detroit Lions general manager Martin Mayhew, in the wake of the snub of his standout 4-3 outside linebacker, DeAndre Levy, told ESPN.com's Michael Rothstein he's going to speak up about it:

"

I'm going to make a recommendation that we elect a Pro Bowl team with a 3-4 defense and a Pro Bowl team with a 4-3 defense. You see guys like DeAndre (Levy) and Lavonte David that don't really get the credit they deserve and get an opportunity to be Pro Bowlers because in the 3-4 these guys have so many sacks. A lot of fans are voting for guys with sacks, but there's some 4-3 outside linebackers who are outstanding players, and I think they should be recognized as such.

"

Then there's the problem of the game's timing.

In 2010, the Pro Bowl was moved from its traditionally scheduled post-Super Bowl slot to the layoff week just before. Every year since, players from the two conference champions haven't participated—so the best players from the hottest teams are suddenly ineligible, a huge problem for a game specifically designed to showcase the best players.

From a philosophical standpoint, the league's desire to leave fans buzzing on the high of the dramatic title game makes sense. Given that the league's title game is often an anticlimactic snoozer, as it was last year, this doesn't make much sense.

It makes even less sense to hype up the Pro Bowl as a clash of the best against the best, then feature average players coming off unremarkable seasons, like Dalton and Matthew Stafford.

Eugene Tanner/Associated Press

The solutions here are obvious: Open fan voting for two weeks following Christmas, reduce or eliminate player and coach voting, change the definition of positions being voted on and return the Pro Bowl to its post-postseason date.

There's another possible remedy, and it goes hand in hand with the expanded 18-game regular-season schedule the NFL has hinted at implementing: an all-star break.

Every other major American sport takes a break in the middle of the season for an all-star game. Why not ditch the rotating-bye-week boondoggle and just take a two-week break in the middle of the year? Everyone can play, everyone can benefit from the rest, and there's less risk of injury as opposed to players going a dangerous mix of speeds. There's also less time for fans to get silly with the voting and a better chance you see what the Pro Bowl's supposed to be: all the game's top stars, playing their best.