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In professional American football, the Pro Bowl is the all-star game of the National Football League (NFL). Since the merger with the rival American Football League (AFL) in 1970, it has been officially called the AFC-NFC Pro Bowl, matching the top players in the American Football Conference (AFC) against those in the National Football Conference (NFC).
Unlike most other sports leagues, which hold their all-star games during the halfway point of their respective regular seasons, the Pro Bowl is generally the last game played at the end of the NFL season. The first Pro Bowl, featuring the all-stars of the 1938 season, was played on January 15, 1939 at Los Angeles's Wrigley Field. The game was then played at various venues before being held at Aloha Stadium in Honolulu, Hawaii for 30 consecutive seasons from 1980 to 2009. The 2010 Pro Bowl will be played at LandShark Stadium, the home stadium of the Miami Dolphins and host site of Super Bowl XLIV, on January 31, the first time ever that the Pro Bowl is held before the championship game.
Through the 2009 game, the NFC leads the series 20–19.
Game history
A post season all-star game between the new league champion and a team of professional all-stars was added to the NFL schedule at the end of the 1938-39 season. On January 15, 1939, at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, the New York Giants won the first Pro All-Star Game 13-10, defeating an all-star team of players from NFL teams and two future Pacific Coast Professional Football League clubs, the Los Angeles Bulldogs and the Hollywood Stars (the Bulldogs, a former AFL II franchise, were originally planning on joining the league but were rejected; the team, in independent play, went 2-1-2 against NFL opponents in 1938).
This format continued for the next four seasons, except that the all-star team now consisted solely of NFL players. In January 1942, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the game was moved from Los Angeles to the Polo Grounds in New York City. The last Pro All-Star Game was held in December 1942. Seeing that it was currently wartime, and the NFL playing a reduced schedule (and had significantly less talent to work with due to top players being drafted or enlisting into the war) starting in 1943, the series was abandoned.
The NFL revived the game (now dubbed the Pro Bowl) in January 1951, after the 1950 season. The game was now a contest between conference all-star teams: American vs. National (1951-53) and Eastern vs. Western (1954-70). The rival AFL, meanwhile, staged its own All-Star Game from 1962-70, using the same East vs. West format. The AFL departed from this format once, in the January 1966 game, when the league champion Buffalo Bills played all-stars from the rest of the league.
After the AFL-NFL Merger of 1970, the name of the NFL's all-star game was changed to the AFC-NFC Pro Bowl. Since the merger, the head coaches of the teams that lost in the AFC and NFC championship games have been selected as the coaches for the respective Pro Bowl squads — a compromise that arose from the decision to discontinue the Playoff Bowl, which had it been retained, would have matched up the two teams that lost the conference title games.
As mentioned above, Honolulu served as the permanent site of the game for 29 consecutive seasons. This is credited to the efforts of Dan McGuire, sports editor of the Honolulu Advertiser, who reached out to NFL officials in the 1970s with the suggestion. Today, the game's most valuable player award is named for McGuire.
Player selection
Currently, players are voted into the Pro Bowl by the coaches, the players themselves, and the fans. Each group's ballots count for one third of the votes. The fans vote online at the NFL's official site. There are also replacements that go to the game should any selected player be unable to play due to injuries. Prior to 1995, only the coaches and the players made Pro Bowl selections.
In order to be considered a Pro Bowler for a given year, a player must either have been one of the initial players selected to the team, or a player who accepts an invitation to Hawaii as an alternate; invited alternates who decline to attend are not considered Pro Bowlers. Being a Pro Bowler is considered to be a mark of honor, and players who are accepted into the Pro Bowl are considered to be elite.
Pro Bowl MVP
The first Most Valuable Player award (or Most Outstanding Player) in the Pro Bowl was presented in 1951. From 1957 to 1971, two awards were presented to an offensive back and a defensive lineman. In 1972, there were awards for both an offensive player and a defensive player. Since 1973, only one MVP award has been presented (though three times this award has been presented to multiple players).
Pro Bowl uniforms
Because the teams are made of players from different NFL teams, using their own uniforms would be too confusing. The players all wear the helmet of their team, but the home jerseys and pants are either a solid blue for the NFC or solid red for the AFC, while white jerseys with blue or red accents, respectively, for the away team. While it has been speculated that the color of Pro Bowl jerseys is determined by the winner of the Super Bowl, this is untrue. The design of Pro Bowl uniforms is changed every two years, and the color and white jerseys are rotated along with the design change. This has been Pro Bowl tradition since the switch to team specific helmets in the early '90s. The two-year switch was originally created as a marketing ploy by Nike, and has been continued by Reebok, who won the merchandising contract in 2002. The early Pro Bowl, contested by the National Football League's Eastern and Western Division stars and played at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, featured the same uniforms from the 1950s to mid-1960s; the Eastern team wore scarlet jerseys with white numerals and a white crescent shoulder stripe, white pants with red stripe, red socks, and a plain red helmet. The Western team wore white jerseys with royal-blue numerals and a Northwestern University-style triple stripe on the sleeves, white pants with blue stripe and socks and a plain blue helmet. Perhaps oddly, the Eastern team, wore home dark jerseys, although the host-city team, the Los Angeles Rams, were members of the Western Conference. From January 1967 to January 1970 both teams wore gold helmets with the NFL logo on the sides; the Eastern helmets featured a red-white-red tri-stripe and the Western a similar blue-white-blue tri-stripe. In fact the players brought their own game helmets to Los Angeles, which were then spray-painted and decorated for the contest. (For the 1970 game the helmets featured the 50 NFL logo, commemorating the league's half-century anniversary.) In the earliest years of the AFC-NFC Pro Bowl, the players did not wear their unique helmets, as they do now. The AFC All-Stars wore a solid red helmet with a white A on it, while the NFC players wore a solid white helmet with a blue N on it. The AFC's red helmets were paired with white jerseys and red pants, while the NFC's white helmets were paired with blue jerseys and white pants.
Two players with the same number who are elected to the Pro Bowl can wear the same number for that game. Prior to a few years ago, all players were required to wear different numbers, regardless of what jersey number they wore on their regular team. This changed a few years ago, when players wore the jersey number on their regular team jersey, thus initially resulting in virtually every wide receiver on the field being numbered 80 or 81, a situation that, predictably, created significant confusion. Thus, it is recommended—although not required—that players use different jersey numbers, and generally when two players share a number, the less experienced one will wear a different number for the game.
The 2008 Pro Bowl included a unique example of several players from the same team wearing the same number in a Pro Bowl. For the game, Washington Redskins players T Chris Samuels, TE Chris Cooley, and LS Ethan Albright all wore the number 21 (a number normally inappropriate for their positions) in memory of their teammate Sean Taylor who had been murdered during the 2007 season.
Game results
NFL All-Star Games (1939-1942)
- 1943-50 - No games
NFL Pro Bowls (1951-70)
AFC-NFC Pro Bowls (1971-present)
Records
- Merlin Olsen (Rams) and Bruce Matthews (Oilers/Titans) each were in 14 pro-bowls. Olsen played in 14 consecutive pro-bowls beginning his rookie year.
- The most Pro Bowl invitations for an active player is 12 for Junior Seau.
- In the 20 seasons prior to the AFL-NFL merger, the Western/National Conference won both the Pro Bowl and the NFL Championship game nine times, while the Eastern/American won both two times. In the years they have split, the East won the Pro Bowl and West won the NFL title five times, while the reverse has occurred four times. Also, in this era, the National/Western Conference won 13 of 20 games played against the American/Eastern Conference.
- In the 37 seasons since the AFL-NFL Merger, both conferences have swept the Super Bowl and Pro Bowl 9 times. In the 19 years they have split, the NFC has won the Super Bowl 10 times.
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