All*Star Stupidity

By all accounts, the reimagined Pro Bowl Games were a hit with both the players and fans.  So, it looks like the NFL is going to stick with this format, at least for a while.  Which is...whatever, I guess!  I think the whole concept is dumb, which is actually in line with all of the other All*Star Games, all of which now have some truly ridiculous elements.

Even the MLB All*Star Game, which has long been the standard-bearer because there are only so many ways to play a baseball game, has ventured into the land of the stupid.  Baseball, with its one-on-one, pitcher vs. hitter nature, lends itself best to the all-star format, and, despite being an exhibition, the MLB All*Star Game is closest to a traditional game of the four.  God forbid the game go into extra innings though!  

So, even though rules changes and roster expansion have made it so that teams have plenty of pitchers available for extra innings, they've done away with extra innings entirely and instead will have a home run derby if the game is tied after nine.  Fortunately, last year's All*Star Game in Los Angeles didn't go into extra innings, but it seems inevitable that we'll see this dumb home run derby tiebreaker happen at some point.

Then there's the NHL, which has actually gotten it right with its four-team, 3-on-3 tournament.  This came after a lot of failed formats, starting with the North America vs. the World thing they did when the NHL first started sending players to the Olympics.  After that format had run its course, they moved on to the "captain's pick" era, where the All-Stars chose their own teams.  The less said about that, the better.  And I think the 3-on-3 concept is great!

The NHL Skills Competition, though, which was once the best part of All*Star Weekend, has become a hot mess!  They keep changing the events every year, and I seriously don't know what some of that crap the other night was!  They've even found a way to screw up the traditional events they have all the time!  I get the idea behind incorporating the host city with some of the special events, but they're so odd and out of place!  (And what are they gonna do next year in Toronto?  You can't really do stuff outside like you could in Las Vegas and Miami.)  Kudos for including the women's players from the U.S. and Canadian National Teams, though.

With the NBA, I don't know where to start!  That whole weekend has become utterly absurd!  The NHL dumped the "pick your own teams" thing because they realized how dumb it was, but even that's not dumb enough for the NBA!  And this year, in a new wrinkle, the teams won't even be chosen until the night of the All*Star Game!  (We're on year six of this format, and LeBron has one of the captains all six times.)

As if that's not enough, the fourth quarter is untimed.  They use that "Elam Ending" from The Basketball Tournament, that single-elimination event ESPN uses as filler programming in the summer.  They add 24 (in honor of Kobe Bryant) to the leading team's score after three quarters and use that as the "target score."  Whoever reaches the target score first wins.  It's as ridiculous as it sounds!

They went to the team captain thing in 2018 and have used the Elam Ending since 2020.  Both were in response to the 2016 event in Toronto, where the final score was 196-173, followed by a 2017 game in New Orleans that finished 192-182.  Defense has always been optional in All*Star Games, but apparently the winning team almost scoring 200 points went a little too far on the no defense thing!

Meanwhile, the Pro Bowl is an event that Roger Goodell has been trying to kill ever since he became commissioner.  The Pro Bowl was never a display of high-quality football!  It's an exhibition game played after the season, so that's to be expected.  But there was never so much complaining about the quality and lack of competitiveness and how much it "needed to change" until Goodell took over.

Goodell's first two terrible moves came in 2010.  First, he took the game out of Hawaii, where it had been played for 30 years and moved it to Miami.  The idea behind this was that it would be played at the site of the Super Bowl as a kind of kick off to the week's festivities.  Except going to Hawaii was one of the things that actually made the Pro Bowl appealing to players!  The whole "Super Bowl rotation" lasted all of one year before they went back to Hawaii before moving to Orlando and, most recently, Las Vegas.

He also moved it from the week after the Super Bowl to the week before, which meant players from the two Super Bowl teams would be ineligible.  The number of players who are replaced (for whatever reason) has always been one of the Pro Bowl's biggest problems, and none of these recent changes have done anything to remedy that.  And I get the idea behind having it in the week off between the conference championships and the Super Bowl, but the idea of having an All*Star Game where players from the two best teams are automatically ineligible will never not be stupid to me!

Football has also tried the unconferenced pick your own team format with Hall of Famers serving as team captains for a little while.  Fortunately, that only lasted three years before they went back to AFC vs. NFC.  Then this year, they abandoned the idea of a traditional game entirely, opting for the new "Pro Bowl Games" format (which is still AFC vs. NFC).

While I'll admit to not watching any of the skills challenges and very little of the flag football finale itself, that was mostly on principle.  I think the format is stupid, so why would I support it?  And I will give them credit for trying something different.  The players and fans seemed to enjoy it, too, so maybe it'll end up being a good idea in the long run.  Likewise, the changes in the other sports don't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.

It might sound simple to just get rid of the Pro Bowl entirely, which I think is Roger Goodell's ultimate goal.  The players still want it, though, so he can't just get rid of it entirely.  So, the Pro Bowl Games is what we got!  Is the idea stupid?  Yes!  But it's not like the NFL is alone in finding a way to make its All*Star Game more stupid.  That's something all four sports have in common!