Sportsrageous

This Sunday at 7pm will be the leagues annual showcase of the leagues “best” playing against one another in Hawaii. Sunday’s Pro Bowl will be unlike any other NFL all-star game ever played before. This season is first time the game will take place the week prior to the Super Bowl instead of the week after the championship game. The problem here is that nine deserving players from both the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers rosters will not be participating in the game in addition to 14 other players who will be unable to participate due to injury.That leaves out 23 players who were initially chosen off the rosters. This has forced the league to find replacement players to supplement the vacant spots on the rosters. Now I’m not taking anything away from the men that were selected to replace certain original players like defensive tackle Darnell Dockett of the Arizona Cardinals, linebacker Jonathan Vilma of the New Orleans Saints,Linebacker Shaun Phillips of the San Diego chargers, and free safety Micheal Griffin of the Tennessee Titans because these guys certainly are good players. But the guys they are replacing such as defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh of the Detroit Lions, Linebacker Clay Matthews of the Green Bay Packers, linebacker James Harrison of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and lastly free safety Ed Reed of the Baltimore Ravens are definitely the leagues elite or “best of the best”. This poses the question, how significant is the Pro Bowl in today’s game? If players use it as an accolade to gauge how great their careers were, one could easily say a better gauge would be how many All-Pro teams they were selected to as a better measure of their playing ability. The game is definitely a way for the league to squeeze in one more game to make money and in today’s economy you can’t knock them for that. All in all I’m just saying that game is watered down and has lost some of it’s importance. It is fun to see the leagues best pitted against each other but the game is basically padded two hand touch. The game is probably here to stay and is fun to watch but doesn’t mean what it did 20 years ago.
-Shay Graves