Pro Bowl ratings: NFL's flag football game draws horrendous 2.0 million viewers, 57% fall from last year's record low

Across the sports landscape, the NFL always seems to be the one league immune to the ratings erosion brought on by the era of cord-cutting. With one exception.

The 2026 Pro Bowl Games continued a worrying trend for the league, drawing an average of only 2.0 million viewers on ESPN in its new Tuesday timeslot, according to Sports Media Watch. That's a 59.6% drop from last year's record low viewership of 4.7 million.

Just how bad are we talking here? The 2021 Pro Bowl, a tape-delayed virtual event in which some of the players faced off in "Madden NFL" due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, drew 1.9 million viewers.

Here's how the ratings have gone since then:

• 2022: 6.7 million viewers (lowest in 16 years)

• 2023: 6.3 million viewers

• 2024: 5.8 million viewers

• 2025: 4.7 million viewers

• 2026: 2.0 million viewers

To be fair, much of the drop-off from last year can be explained by the fact the game wasn't on ABC. This year also a big change in both time and venue, as it was held on Tuesday in the Super Bowl host of San Francisco rather than Orlando or Las Vegas. The NFL said the change was intended to help promote flag football for its debut at the 2028 Summer Olympics.

This year's flag football game saw the NFC beat the AFC 66-52.

Is it time to finally kill the Pro Bowl?

At some point, it might be time for the NFL to take a step back and ask, "Is this all worth it?"

The Pro Bowl was originally a simple idea. The best players in the league — or at least the best players who didn't make the Super Bowl — get a Hawaiian vacation while taking it easy for a single game. However, there's no guarantee of safety in a tackle football game, and the more the players tried to avoid injury, the less fun it became to watch. Player safety is understandably going to take precedent 10 times out of 10 when the stakes are so low, which is why the NFL switched to flag football in 2023.

At this point, the Pro Bowl Games are essentially a football variety show in which the public is invited to watch some of their favorite players goof off for a few hours. The NFL wants to promote flag football so it feels more natural when its athlete report to Los Angeles in 2028, but how much is this actually going to help?

Making the Pro Bowl has also become a hollow honor, at least at the quarterback position. It wasn't a good sign for the event that its biggest story was Cleveland Browns rookie Shedeur Sanders making the game after a seven-touchdown, 10-interception season, but making it even worse is that Sanders was simply following the norm of the past few years.

Tyler Huntley infamously made the game in 2023 after starting only four games for the Baltimore Ravens due to seemingly every other AFC quarterback being either hurt or unwilling to play, and a similar thing happened with Gardner Minshew in 2024. Joe Flacco spent his entire career getting squeezed out by a group of generational QBs, then made it for the first time this year with 10 mediocre starts for the Cleveland Browns and Cincinnati Bengals.

A Pro Bowl selection is supposed to mean a player was among the best at his position that season, but it really means "best among the players at his position willing and able to show up to a meaningless event."

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So what are doing here? What's stopping the NFL from announcing its Pro Bowlers at the end of the season and then... recognizing them at the NFL honors? How important is it that all of these guys come together on a Tuesday night, if it's not even going to draw half the audience of your average MLB wild-card game?

The NFL isn't hurting anyone by doing the Pro Bowl Games this way and if it decides getting a couple million eyeballs on a Tuesday afternoon is a fine outcome, that's their decision. Still, you'd imagine there is a number of viewers in which the endeavor is no longer financially worth it, especially if the league's stars would approve of getting their week before the Super Bowl back.