What Is the Pro Bowl? The NFL All-Star Game, Explained

The Pro Bowl is the NFL's all-star event. It happens the week before the Super Bowl, it features the players voted best at their positions, and since 2023 it hasn't been a tackle football game at all.

That last part surprises people, so let's start there.

What the Pro Bowl is now

The modern version is called the Pro Bowl Games, and it's a week of events rather than one game.

Players compete in skills challenges: precision passing, a lineman relay, dodgeball, best catch. Then it finishes with flag football, AFC against NFC, played seven on seven across a few short games that add up to one score.

Nobody tackles anybody. That's the entire point of the change.

How players get picked

Selection is a three-way vote, and each group counts for a third.

• Fans vote online.
• Players vote for the opponents they respect.
• Coaches vote too.

Rosters get filled out with alternates as players drop out for injury or because they're playing in the Super Bowl, which is why the phrase "seven-time Pro Bowler" sometimes includes a year somebody was a third alternate. It still counts, and it still goes on the plaque.

That matters to collectors more than you'd think. A Pro Bowl selection is one of the standard inscriptions a player will add next to a signature, along with a Super Bowl or a Hall of Fame year.

Why it stopped being a real game

The Pro Bowl had a problem it could never solve. You can't ask players to hit each other at full speed in an exhibition, a week before the Super Bowl, with contracts and careers on the line.

So the league kept adding safety rules. No blitzing. No press coverage. Quarterbacks could throw the ball away freely. The result was a game that looked like football and moved like a walkthrough, and viewers noticed.

By 2023 the NFL stopped pretending and replaced it with the flag format. Whether that's better is a matter of taste, but it's more honest about what the event always was.

How it got here

1939. The first all-star game pitted the NFL champion New York Giants against a team of all-stars at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles. That format ran until 1942, when the war ended it.

1951. The game came back under the name Pro Bowl, played in Los Angeles between the two conferences. This is the version the modern event traces to.

1971. After the NFL and AFL merged, the game became AFC against NFC, which is the matchup most fans picture.

1980. The Pro Bowl moved to Aloha Stadium in Honolulu and stayed for about three decades. The trip to Hawaii was a genuine perk and a real reason players wanted the selection.

2014 to 2016. The league dropped conferences entirely and had Hall of Fame captains draft mixed teams, fantasy style. Jerry Rice and Deion Sanders picked the first ones. It didn't stick.

2017. Back to AFC against NFC.

2023. The Pro Bowl Games replaced the tackle game with skills events and flag football.

Does a Pro Bowl still mean anything?

As a game, not really. As an honor, yes.

Pro Bowl selections are one of the numbers that get counted when a player's Hall of Fame case comes up, alongside All-Pro selections, which are the harder honor and the one players quietly care about more. All-Pro is a single team of the best at each position across the whole league. Pro Bowl takes dozens of players from each conference.

If you're reading a signed jersey inscription and trying to work out what it's worth, that distinction is worth knowing. "8x Pro Bowl" and "First Team All-Pro" aren't the same claim.

The collector angle

Pro Bowl items are a small, strange corner of the memorabilia world. Game-worn gear from the event exists but nobody chases it the way they chase regular season pieces, because the game itself carries no weight.

Where the Pro Bowl shows up is in inscriptions. A signed helmet with a Pro Bowl count next to the signature is a common and popular configuration, and inscriptions like that add real money on the right player. Our guide on how signing events work explains how inscriptions are priced, and the types of football helmets covers what usually gets signed.

We stock authenticated signed full-size helmets and jerseys from plenty of Pro Bowlers and a fair few Hall of Famers. If you want to know which signatures actually hold value, read the most iconic sports autographs.