NFL Eliminates the Pro Bowl Game After 70 Years, Shifts to Honor-Only Selections

The NFL is pulling the plug on the Pro Bowl Games as fans know them. The league confirmed Wednesday that it will no longer stage an AFC vs. NFC exhibition, ending a tradition that stretches back more than 70 years. In its place, the NFL will simply name 88 Pro Bowl selections across offense, defense, and special teams each season, with no game, no alternates, and no made-for-TV skills competitions to replace it.

The Pro Bowl has been in decline for years. The league moved away from full-contact football back in 2023, shifting to a flag football format between the AFC and NFC in an attempt to reduce injury risk and modernize the showcase. It didn’t work. Star players routinely opted out, forcing the league to dig deeper into alternate lists just to field two rosters, and the players who did show up rarely treated it as anything more than an obligation. This year’s flag football game, held during Super Bowl week in San Francisco, drew just 1.9 million viewers — an all-time low for the event, according to The Athletic.

What Replaces the Game

Beginning with the 2026 season, the NFL will name 88 total Pro Bowlers in late December, split across both conferences, based on the same combination of fan, player, and coach voting used previously. The key change is that there will be no alternates this time around. Every era of the modern Pro Bowl has featured replacement after replacement as stars withdrew — a dynamic that turned rosters into a rotating door of names like Mac Jones, Tyler Huntley, and Shedeur Sanders receiving the “Pro Bowl” title despite never appearing in the actual game. Eliminating alternates is designed to restore some weight to the honor itself.

Instead of a competitive event, the NFL will host an in-person celebration in Los Angeles during Super Bowl week, timed around Super Bowl LXI. The gathering will honor the 88 selections without asking players already nursing injuries or preparing for offseason plans to suit up for an exhibition nobody outside the broadcast truck seemed to want. There is no word yet on what programming, if anything, fills the vacated broadcast window on the schedule once occupied by the Pro Bowl Games.

A Long Time Coming

This wasn’t a snap decision. The Pro Bowl has cycled through format after format over the last decade — full contact, flag football, skills challenges, celebrity captains — each an attempt to manufacture stakes for a game that carries none. Perennial All-Pros like Micah Parsons, Myles Garrett, and Maxx Crosby have skipped recent editions entirely, and even players who did participate often treated the week as a vacation with a jersey attached. The NFL’s own numbers made the decision easy: a 1.9 million viewer average for a marquee showcase event is a rounding error compared to regular-season windows, let alone the Super Bowl.

The move also reshapes the NFL calendar heading into the 2026 postseason. Fans searching for early markets on award races and postseason futures can already find early lines through the sportsbooks tracked on Bettors Insider’s DraftKings Sportsbook Review, and bettors comparing sign-up offers ahead of the stretch run may want to check the latest FanDuel Promo Code terms before the postseason schedule fills in. For now, the Pro Bowl designation survives as an honor without a stage — a name on a roster sheet rather than a game on the calendar. The NFL is betting that stripping away the spectacle and leaning into the recognition itself will matter more to players and fans than another year of declining ratings ever did.