If it weren't so pathetic, we might pity the poor Pro Bowl. Nobody's ever loved the Pro Bowl. And, it appears, nobody ever will.

           

Consider the opinions of our own beloved Cold, Hard Football Facts trolls. It's safe to say that our readers represent the hardcore fringe of football fandom (in fact, this hardcore devotion to all things pigskin makes us a little bit proud of each and every one of you).

 

And yet, despite your devoted fandom and our swelling pride, only 16 percent of our readers will watch the Pro Bowl today – at least according to a recent CHFF 1st & 10 poll.

 

Given the fact that 1) the Pro Bowl is the last sniff of any kind of major-league football for six months and 2) our readers would rob soup kitchens and run over their grandmothers if it helped their fantasy football teams, it's remarkable that fewer than 1 in 5 hard-core, fringe-element-of-society football fans will even watch the NFL all-star game.

 

In fact, not only did you, the hard-core, fringe-element football fan say you won't watch the Pro Bowl, you seemed to react to the thought of watching it with a mixture of scorn, rage and contempt. Here were the answers to our poll question, "Will you watch the Pro Bowl?"

In other words, the Pro Bowl has been abandoned like a sporting orphan – even by those who love the sport more than any other.

           

All of which begets the question: Has the Pro Bowl outlived any usefulness it might once have had?

           

The obvious answer is "yes." But the longer answer is that the Pro Bowl, in its myriad foms, has always been kicked around like a red-headed stepchild. The concept should have been abandoned years ago.

 

What we know as the Pro Bowl today originated back in 1934 with a pre-season Chicago all-star game in August that first pitted the Bears, and then future defending NFL champions, against a collection of college all-stars at Soldier Field. It was the brainchild of Chicago Tribune sports editor Arch Ward as a way to raise money for local charities. It actually generated quite a bit of interest for a brief period – at least if attendance figures are to be believed. The game drew more than 100,000 to Soldier Field several times in the 1940s (according to the ESPN Pro Football Encyclopedia).

           

This Chicago all-star pre-season game existed, believe it or not, up until 1976 when Chuck Noll's Super Bowl champion Steelers battled a college all-star team led by retired Notre Dame coach Ara Parseghian. Pittsburgh won, 24-0, for those of you keeping score at home. But they never even finished the game.

 

In fact, the NFL should have taken its outcome as a hint.

           

The 1976 Chicago all-star game was suspended in the third quarter because of flooding rainstorms. So fans – reports say that 53,000 were in attendance – stormed the field and tore down the goal posts, apparently in celebration of their charitable largesse. When the posts came down, officials simply cancelled the game.

           

It was a fitting end to the last NFL vs. college all-star game: it ended in muck and mire with no conclusion – an orphan orphaned by orphans.

           

For a brief period from the 1938 through 1942 seasons, a similar exhibition – this one after the NFL title game in December or January – pitted the league champion vs. a collection of all-stars from other NFL teams.

 

The bookend all-star games made for some interesting seasons. Consider the case of the back-to-back champion Bears of 1940 and 1941. As defending champs, they began the 1941 season with a game against college all-stars. Then, after winning the 1941 title, they ended the season with a match against NFL all-stars at the Polo Grounds in New York City (for the record, the Bears won both games).

 

The Pro Bowl as we know it – matching the best players from the league's two conferences – came into being at the end of the 1950 season. It was first played at the L.A. Coliseum – basically a warm-weather respite to reward top players who just battled it out in the muck and the mire of chilly Eastern and Midwestern pro football towns. The game kicked around from one southern city to another in the 1970s before settling in Honolulu after the 1979 season.

 

But no matter where it's been, the Pro Bowl has never been embraced by players or by fans.

 

It's easy to see why: the Pro Bowl is a game that sounds good in theory only. And it certainly works in other sports. You can still play a reasonable facsimile of baseball or basketball, for example, in an all-star exhibition. But in football an exhibition that approximates the real game is simply not practical: not in a sport built around ruthless brutality. Hell, who wants to take a nice year-end vacation in paradise and then put your career on the line in an all-out football game?

 

Nobody.

 

It's no wonder the game has been abandoned even by folks like you, the hard-core football fan: all-star football is simply not real football.

 

Players don't even take it seriously, many of them dropping out with phantom injuries that didn't seem to slow them down during the regular season. New England quarterback Tom Brady has routinely dropped out to play in the Pebble Beach Pro-Am. This year he and record-setting batterymate Randy Moss both said "thanks but no thanks" to the Pro Bowl.

 

Players want the honor of being voted into the Pro Bowl. But they don't want the inconvenience of actually playing.

 

Even the Pro Bowl voting process is a joke, as we've chronicled each year with our All-Douched Team. The voting begins way too early in the season and the guys who make it are usually voted in on the strength of their performance in previous seasons. Plus, voting ends with two to three games left to play – 12 to 18 percent of a season that's only 16 games long to begin with.

 

The NFL could always look to the Pro Bowl, at the very least, as some sort of entertainment for passionate football fans. Yet tonight, 84 percent of hardcore football fans will find they have something better to do than to watch the Pro Bowl. Is it still entertainment if nobody watches?

 

Maybe it's time for fans to storm the field like those folks did on that rainy August day in Chicago back in 1976. And then let the NFL cancel the game ... this time permanently.