The Pro Bowl has been dying in slow motion for years, and the NFL finally pulled the plug. Beginning with the 2026 season, the league will name an 88-man Pro Bowl class in late December with no replacement selections and no game at all -- just an in-person celebration in Los Angeles the weekend the game used to happen. Barstool didn't need a second invitation to dance on the grave.
End of an era
It's a fitting end for an event that's been circling the drain since the league stopped even pretending it was real tackle football. What started as the NFL's version of an all-star game way back in 1938 got turned into dodgeball, throwing competitions and skills challenges, capped off by a flag football game starting in 2023. Nobody watched, nobody cared, and now nobody has to pretend anymore.
We used to be a proper country
That clip is the whole joke: a genuine, honest-to-god hit from a Pro Bowl of decades past, deployed as a punchline for how far the event fell before the NFL finally euthanized it. Kenjac put it more bluntly, saying he'd love for the late-90s/early-2000s version of the Pro Bowl to come back, but since that was never happening anyway, killing it outright "makes sense". Big Cat went even further, admitting he felt nothing watching it go because the thing had "been in hospice care being spoon fed apple sauce for a decade".
Pardon My Take leaned into the bit with an old chestnut about Bill Belichick, teasing that the Pro Bowl was the worst game he ever coached.
Bill Belichicks worst game he ever coached was the Pro Bowl
That's the running joke around this whole rollout -- even the six-time Super Bowl-winning head coach couldn't make the Pro Bowl matter. And that's really the story here: the NFL didn't kill a beloved tradition, it finally stopped propping up a corpse. Clem summed up the news the same way Barstool's main account did, calling it exactly what it is.
The NFL Has Finally Mercy Killed The Pro Bowl t.co/RbI95XNWJC
The Pro Bowl isn't totally gone -- the league still wants to hand out the honor and throw its 88 honorees a party in LA -- but the game, in any form, is done. For a league obsessed with ratings and spectacle, letting the Pro Bowl quietly disappear says more about how far its stock had fallen than any headline could.