Philadelphia Eagles: Darius Slay gives context on the Pro Bowl

The Pro Bowl isn’t a ton of fun to watch.

The players don’t really try, especially on defense, and the game rapidly devolves into an offensive shootout of mildly interested guys looking to make business decisions whenever possible.

While the NFL has attempted to expand out the event into a whole weekend NBA-style, with fun new side games and carnival-style tests of skill to keep fans engaged, if the actual on-field product isn’t very good – which, in my humble opinion, it really isn’t – it’s going to be hard to get folks to tune in, especially when there is so much content available to watch across the entertainment world.

To his credit, Philadelphia Eagles‘ cornerback Darius Slay has heard the collective complaints on the NFL’s most televised game of two-hand touch and has a measured response to add context to the situation.

Darius Slay is the Philadelphia Eagles’ reigning voice of reason.

The NFL is the only sport that doesn’t have a mid-season All-Star game. In hockey, basketball, and baseball, teams take about a week off in the middle of the season to rest, relax, and allow their best respective players to play alongside the cream of the crop for fans worldwide.

That fact is why Darius Slay believes the NFL’s Pro Bowl has a diminished product versus other All-Star exhibitions, which, if we’re being frank, are seldom very good either. If, for example, a team makes it all the way to the Conference Finals, then going to the Pro Bowl is just another week of football, as they’ve been training consistently for six straight months, but for teams who didn’t make the playoffs, as half of the league fails to do each year, there could be an entire month between their final game and the Pro Bowl, with no guarantee that any given player will or won’t actually make it to the game.

This disparity has led some players to be a month into their out-of-shape recovery period when they take the field for the Pro Bowl and has inspired others to avoid making big money hits or contested catches to avoid a serious injury in a meaningless game, especially if they are about to his the negotiation table the following month.

When you take Darius Slay’s words through that contextual lens, it paints a fuller picture that doesn’t quite make up for the product on the field but does put it into the proper context. If the NFL was more concerned with getting a big ratings pop for the Pro Bowl, maybe they too would take a page from, say, the NBA and give the entire league a bye on the same week, with the Pro Bowl aired live in Primetime, but do you know what? Something tells me that isn’t the league’s goal. No, a regular weekend of football in the middle of the season is surely worth more overall than a single game aired in February, and thus, it takes a back seat to what the Pro Bowl really is all about: giving the Super Bowl teams an extra week to prepare.

Because each NFL franchise only plays one game per week, it’s easy for the fans of non-playoff teams to tune out off the season by mid-January. They start watching basketball, or maybe hockey, and once every four years, they tune into freestyle skiing at 3 am to watch Olympians attempt wild tricks from a halfpipe built in a literal closed Chinese steel mill and only get roped back in once the Super Bowl commercials start to air the week prior. If the Pro Bowl was a Super Bowl-lite draw, it likely would be moved to the middle of the season, but since it isn’t, it will remain an underwhelming product stuck in a cyclical echo chamber of complaints from all parties involved.