Why the NFL's Pro Bowl Voting Process Is Broken

2012 Pro Bowl voting has opened, meaning the annual farce begins once more.

The NFL is about to be bombarded with votes from fans across the league trying to get their favorite players a free trip to Hawaii at the end of the season, and as superficial as that may be, it could be the most legitimate part of the entire Pro Bowl selection process.

In an age where we have never had so much access to football we’re becoming more, not less blinkered. If anything, the Pro Bowl voting is becoming even more ridiculous, with players making it despite horrible play (or in the case of Brandon Meriweather, despite being benched for poor play), and with deserving candidates going ignored because they failed to catch the limelight at just the right angle.

Somehow, despite more people watching the NFL than ever before, we all seem led far more easily by the hype machine.

Last year Maurkice Pouncey made the Pro Bowl despite a rookie campaign that was anything but dominant. He may have carried himself very well in the locker room, assimilated a huge amount of information for a rookie, handled the line calls well and been a great teammate, but in terms of the No. 1 item in his job description—blocking—he was average at best. 

Pouncey finished the season as ProFootballFocus’ 21st ranked center. That ranking is based on grading Pouncey, along with all other players, snap by snap in every game over the season.

If you want more conventional statistics, they say the same thing. He allowed three sacks, four more knockdowns and 17 pressures on the QB. To put that into some context, the two clear best centers in the AFC last year (Matt Birk and Nick Mangold) combined for significantly less total pressure than Pouncey managed on his own; just two sacks, a knock down and 11 more pressures.

The hype machine had made its mind up about Pouncey before he ever played a snap in the NFL. He was a guaranteed star as a prospect coming out of Florida, and then the Steelers began to make the usual positive noises surrounding their new player and the media was away.

Since nobody really watches the O-line very closely during games, nobody ever called them on it.

Pro Bowler, Maurkice Pouncey.

Pouncey isn’t the only one, far from it, but he represents the growing trend of hype over substance and reality. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if the Pro Bowl didn’t still actually mean something.

Some players have contract escalators tied to Pro Bowl appearances. It can be worth serious money to them to get selected, not to mention the bonuses players get for the appearance itself.

Saying ‘Pro Bowler’ in front of a player’s name also gives them an air of mystique and legitimacy, especially amongst announcers, that only snowballs the whole process. Comments such as “That’s Pro Bowler Donald Penn he just beat there” serve to put a little asterisk next to the poor play and credit it to the guy who beat him. He’s a Pro Bowler after all, it must have been a great play to beat him, he wouldn’t just have been useless.

The average fan excuses the poor play from those guys and votes them back in the next season, because they’re Pro Bowlers.

Getting to the Pro Bowl only helps players keep getting back there, until guys who are clinging onto the tail end of their careers with desperation during the season find themselves going to Hawaii at the end of it, being celebrated as one of the league’s best players. Things no longer add up, if they ever did.

Then, at the end of it all, you hear about the number of Pro Bowls the latest Hall of Fame candidate went to.

We can all think of players every season who shouldn’t be anywhere near the Pro Bowl, yet wind up making the trip, but as soon as we roll around to the next season, the next round of injustices, those details get lost in the haze.

Does anybody remember whether someone from the 1994 Pro Bowl got there on reputation rather than deserved play? Of course not, it goes down as just another Pro Bowl appearance, and when you stack them all up like that, it starts to look pretty compelling.

How can we not induct him into the Hall with that number of Pro Bowls? Nobody remembers how many of them that player got while mailing it in during their career.

You can’t lay all the blame at the door of the fans either; the players and coaches' vote may be even more ridiculous.

Coaches put in crazy hours at the office; we see the features on 18-hour days often enough. They’re there every waking hour, putting together game plans each week, self-scouting, checking up on their upcoming opponents, but outside of that?

Bill Belichick didn’t even know who the Patriots play after the Steelers in their upcoming game, saying ‘The Steelers and whoever we play next’ in a recent press conference.

They live in their own little self-contained bubble, with single-minded purpose and tunnel vision. They’re not throwing on games during the week to kill a few hours of idle time.

Unless a coach has had to play them during the season, or it’s a player from his own team, he has no clue how players around the league are performing, especially when it comes to linemen.

You only have to look at waiver wire moves that get made during the season to believe that. Players get snapped up because of a connection to a coach regardless of how overtly useless they have been in order to wind up dumped from their team in the first place.

Players are similar. They have too much time invested in getting themselves right, and checking out their upcoming opposition to be poring over tape from other players around the league.

They’ll watch SportsCenter and catch the prime-time games when they can, but they’re not checking out the back and forth in the trenches just to check out if Eagles offensive guard Evan Mathis really is Pro Bowl-worthy (he is so far, by the way).

In essence you have Pro Bowl rosters being selected by three separate votes, none of which is capable of making an accurate and informed decision.

The fan vote is often misled by hype perpetuated by the media’s mania surrounding a hot topic, and coaches and players don’t have the time or desire to properly evaluate a league’s worth of players, they’re a bit busy trying to win football games.

Yet the vote from those three groups can be the difference between thousands of dollars for players, can get them a trip to Hawaii, and can perpetuate a mythical reputation of play that a player can live off for years, and potentially even ride all the way to the Hall of Fame.

Selection isn’t the only problem the Pro Bowl faces, there is a bigger issue—nobody cares anymore, including the players.

Last season 17 players withdrew due to ‘injury.’ A further 10 couldn’t play because they were due to play in the Super Bowl the week after, and Kevin Williams withdrew for personal reasons.

In 2010, Bryant McKinnie was more interested in living large in Miami than he was attending practices. That’s like taking the best player from every team in the league away from the selection pot.

If the NFL is going to have an all-star game, and if the Pro Bowl is to remain meaningful, it needs to find a way to overcome the problems and to end the circus that the current system produces every year.

The league needs to find a way to ensure the best players are actually selected each season, not just the most widely known or the most highlight-friendly. Anyone voting should take a little time to check out as many players as they can, and look into below the radar players who are earning a spot this season, and maybe we can start to fix the whole process

I for one can’t cope with another season seeing Antrel Rolle make the Pro-Bowl.

Sam Monson is one of the core team members at ProFootballFocus.com, a website that analyzes every player from every snap of every game in the NFL season and provides a whole host of unique data, stats and gradings.  He lives in Dublin, Ireland having caught the football bug from the year he spent in Minnesota as a seven year old.