Top 10 Ways to Make the Pro Bowl Better

"What we're seeing is a lot more attention on the Pro Bowl than we've ever had before," (NFL Commissioner Roger) Goodell said. "And that in and of itself is a success."

Poobah Goodell thinks that the date switch is a success (shocking, isn't it, that he holds the opinion that His Plan Is Working Out Just Fine). As a snarky sports blogger who is always hoping to fill the hole, I quite agree. Bot Goody Boy, we can do so much more. And some of these are even legitimate suggestions!

10) Pro Bowl cheerleader voting. Now, you could do this via online voting and make the Internet explode among certain portions of the self-pleasuring populace, but for me, I think you need to let the players vote on this. That way, we know which ones are not just loose, but skilled and willing.

9) Hold it at a cold weather site. It's the perfect way to satisfy all of the host cities that will never get to host the Sooper (Note: Misspelling used to avoid the packs of roving NFL lawyers that would want to confiscate my children for their organs for using the intellectual property of the Word That Rhymes With Oooper). Plus, it will allow for extraordinary comedy as hundreds of players invent injuries, and the good times of (a) snow game in HD and (b) cheerleaders with frost-encouraged mammalian protuberances. Sold to an American!

8) Hold it in mid-season. As the Saints and Colts showed this year, parity is starting to wane in the NFL, and a game that has more of their players in it, if held mid-week especially, could really balance the power in the league. Besides, it seems like your criteria for success for this thing is just to get more people talking about it... and hell yes, this would do that. Along with exploding footballs, sexy refs in lingerie, and firing the announcers out of cannons. But let's not get unrealistic.

7)) Change the headgear. Show the world your growing concern about concussions by making the players go hatless for a game, or at least, put them in the old-school leather helmets to push the sale of more retro apparel. If nothing else, it might make a few of the more egregious dreadlock and mullet enthusiasts rethink that choice and go for a God-Fearing Unitas-esque flat top. Now that's a haircut you can set your watch by!

6) Bring back the skills competition, and open it up to non-participants. The average NFL fan looks at JaMarcus Russell and can't possibly imagine what would possess an NFL team to employ him, let alone draft him with the #1 pick. You need to stand up for your scouts and particularly idiotic NFL franchises by giving these men the chance to shine in the non-game activity in which the excel at. Once everyone's seen JaRuss throw the ball 60 yards from his knees while eating, it will show the world what the Raiders were drafting. Besides, it might help the Raiders feel better about themselves!

5) Use the game to really tart up Punt, Pass and Kick. The annual trotting out of children in jerseys during an NFL playoff game is all well and good, but if you want to get more of America's rotund spawn away from the video game console, you need to make them reality TV stars by giving them the full features and buildup treatment. Besides, too many of these kids are hard on the eyes; a little trash TV will clean that up right nice.

Is one kid a moody loner with good cheekbones, while another is mourning the untimely passing of a parent? Can some of the older kids start to show PG-13ish feelings for each other? Will Bill Simmons devote thousands of words to it while other men his age wonder if an intervention or NBC Dateline episode is necessary? And finally, isn't all of this as good or better than what you show on NFLN?

4) Sideline Reporter Island. Continuing with the pipeline into human degradation that is reality TV based work, put all of the network sideline reporters in a mobile phone voted contest against each other. Each contestant gets their own camera person, mic, and carte blanche to try anything they can to get entertaining moments onto the air -- with the extra incentive that the winner gets a double check for the game, while the lowest voting person gets canned, tarred, and feathered.

You mean to tell me that you wouldn't want to see what Pam Oliver does when the numbers are looking bad for her midway through the third? We might see our first full-on tackle, or Oliver slap the taste out of the mouth of a coach who won't give her a good quote. And you know what slaps mean - ratings!

3) Division games. Let's face it: no one really cares which conference is better. But NFL fans -- or, at least, the bleating pule-tastic honks that follow the league in the DC to Boston SprawlPlex -- love to tell you how tough their division is. Oh Sweet Sassy Molassy, if only Their Aggrieved Laundry were in the West, they'd roll to the Super Bowl every damn year. Those teams in the West are terrible! They've got no quarterbacks, defenses, or urinals, because they all sit to pee. I bet they're all secretly French! And so on.

(By the way, you Northern types are no better, and you Southern fans would also be right up there, if the Internets would only come to the trailer park. And now that I've won friends and influenced people...)

Well, let's settle this, in as much as anything can be settled at a meaningless exhibition played by risk-averse millionaires: with 7-on-7 15-minute mini-games between divisions. We'd have 7 of them in all, and if that's too much time, have two of them going on at once by splitting the field in half. This would also give the NFL the opportunity to design lots of extra awful division Pro Bowl jerseys, which fetishistic laundry lovers would purchase, and also give the league's sweatshop workers and Third World fans (you know, the ones that get Losing Team Super Bowl Champion swag every year) more to do and enjoy. It's a 7-way win!

2) NFL Vs. The World. Don't you think that CFL, Arena, WLAF, Arena, XFL and UFL alumni would give their left nut to square off against the Overleague in front of television cameras and the NFL gentry? And don't you think that if they had time and training -- and perhaps a motivated coach and a month to prepare -- that they might pull off several quarters or more of close football, leading the possibility of an upset for the ages?

Well, me neither. But it would still be more fun than what we've got.

1) Go Virtual. Honestly, the Pro Bowl works only for kids anyway -- anyone with the experience to have seen this thing before knows not to watch it again -- so let's just go all the way and make it an avatar-only event. Break out the Madden engineers and stat nerds to crunch the numbers and recreate the entire game, then bring in the starring players for sideline voice work and coached acting to get them into the proper character. If it winds up with a hard-fought win for one of the teams, with a pretty-boy QB sobbing his eyes out and/or throwing his offensive line under the bus... well, isn't that just, again, better than what we've got now? Plus, no injuries or half-assed tackling!

Add your own in the comments...