For nearly 90 years, every NFL season was punctuated with a Pro Bowl trip, the league’s version of an All-Star game. The honor became a reason to visit a warm-weather city where a heaping handful of All-Pros went through the motions in an exhibition game before the Super Bowl. That tradition is over.
Team owners wrapped up meetings in Atlanta this week, and the outcome ended a run that stretched back to 1938. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell delivered the news, and he had hinted at it for over a decade.
Roger Goodell says the game stopped workingSeveral players pose during AFC Pro Bowl practice at the Flag Fieldhouse Moscone Center South Building.Goodell told reporters Wednesday that the league is scrapping the Pro Bowl game entirely. Instead moving to an honors-only format for the 88 players selected each year. Goodell said the quality of play had fallen short of the league’s standards for years. That’s a concern he raised publicly as far back as 2011.
“I think we’ve been focused on the game,” Goodell said, via Mark Maske of Front Office Sports. “You’ve heard me say it for many years about the quality of the game in the Pro Bowl. I don’t think it’s up to NFL standards. And that’s why we changed to the flag game several years ago.”
Goodell said the switch away from a full-contact format in 2023 was an earlier attempt to fix the same problem, but it didn’t solve it. The commissioner said conversations with players over multiple years pointed toward one theme.
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Players changed Goodell’s view of Pro Bowl“We had conference calls the last couple years: What’s working? What’s not? What would you like to see?” Goodell said. “And the number one thing that came out, and there were a lot of wonderful comments by the players, one is: we want to be honored and celebrated as a Pro Bowl player. It just opened my eyes.”
An all-star game was never supposed to carry this much weight in the first place. It exists for the fans in the building and the players who get a paid vacation, nothing more. Every year brought the same tired debate about effort and pride, as if a February exhibition needed to justify its existence. Fans treated a glorified scrimmage like it reflected something about the sport itself. It never did.
What replaces the Pro Bowl game moving forwardLos Angeles Rams linebackers Byron Young (0) and Jared Verse (8) pose during NFC practice at the NFL Flag Fieldhouse at Moscone Center South Building.Starting with the 2026 season, the NFL will name 88 Pro Bowlers in late December without naming replacements for players who withdraw. Those players will be invited to an in-person celebration in Los Angeles the week of Super Bowl LX, rather than travel for a competitive event.
NFL executive vice president Peter O’Reilly called the move a shift from the game to the honor and said the league was comfortable being the first to step away from a competitive all-star format. Troy Vincent, the league’s executive vice president of football operations, said the recommendation came directly from players who told the league they did not want competitive play so soon after the playoffs.
Goodell pointed to years of replacement selections. Many analysts are pointing to quarterback Shedeur Sanders’ inclusion last year. Despite throwing more interceptions than touchdowns as a rookie last season, Sanders still made the Pro Bowl. The league also announced a new player-safety accountability system alongside the Pro Bowl change, developed jointly with the NFL Players Association, that will automatically suspend players for a game after a third safety violation in a season.
Goodell said the union’s input shaped both decisions.
“So it was a really healthy process,” Goodell said. “Listen, I think probably both sides would probably say this might work better or this. But we made an agreement that let’s try this. Let’s learn from it.”
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