Pro Bowl 2012: Football in Paradise and the NFL's Rules of Engagement

If the NFL season could be seen as an orchestrated strategic campaign, a war, then the Pro Bowl is its Vietnam, its Persian Gulf II. In an age where the league's brightest stars can be seen in cable TV highlight packages and satellite subscriptions, pro football's All-Star Game is obsolete, and has been for some time.

Why are we still here? By here, I mean Honolulu, a city whose appetite for touch-style football ranks up there with bowls of poi and funny-looking shirts.

The best players in pro football—the ones that haven't cited injury concerns—still show up for it. Most of them haven't played in nearly a month, since their respective regular seasons ended, so it could almost be forgiven if our best and angriest had forgotten how to play, especially in a game with so little on the line.

Every player on the winning Pro Bowl team (the AFC, by a score of 59-41) earned a $50,000 check, the losers $25,000. Whether a player wants to put his body on the line for less than what he would likely earn for a regular-season game is his business, but it seems like bad business.

Yet there seems to be an unwritten understanding during this game. Or maybe they did write it down somewhere, who knows. Such a document might read to the effect of: "Don't ruin my career, and I won't ruin yours."

The Pro Bowl is awful football because of its altered rules of engagement. Even Steelers linebacker James Harrison, who consistently claimed he couldn't alter his style of play that resulted in so many helmet-to-helmet hits, managed to alter his style of play.

Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis, who famously shouts at his team before every kickoff, could have spent his pregame at a nearby tiki bar slurping down Mai-Tais and no one would have thought less of him.

The Pro Bowl wasn't always meaningless. The first AFC-NFC Pro Bowl was played in 1970, at a time where those conferences still bore more resemblance to their earlier incarnations. The upstart American Football League was full of owners that wanted to sit at the old National Football League's table, a wish that came to fruition before the 1970 season.

The best players of each "league" would meet after that campaign in Los Angeles. The NFC won that game. The AFC would win the next three.

Despite that history, there are no great Pro Bowl games. What few memorable moments the game does deliver came about when that understanding is either exposed (Drew Brees' missed drop kick extra point attempt Sunday, Alex Mack's touchdown fumble recovery) or wholly ignored (Sean Taylor destroying Brian Moorman on an ill-advised fake punt).

The game is a circus, and not just in its frolicking nature. Nobody walks out of a circus wondering why the elephants didn't trample any clowns. 

The city of Honolulu, however, is more than happy to pitch the tent for this game. Aloha Stadium recently underwent a $200 million renovation of its field, scoreboard and structure, but not without some coaxing from the NFL. Two years ago, the league moved the game to Miami, perhaps as a suggestion to play along with all of the other cities willing to build brand new arenas with a wave of the league's hand.

But the state of Hawaii, who made $3.1 million in tax revenue from the game, eventually ponied up.

And the venue, perhaps most of all, is the reason why players dial it down a notch for the Pro Bowl, or several notches. And that makes sense to me.

Dolphins wide receiver Brandon Marshall, who caught four touchdown passes Sunday, might have explained it best: "It's always an honor to be selected to a Pro Bowl. But this is what the Pro Bowl is about—paradise."

Apparently so.