Fantasies are fun things, for the most part, their expectation is greater than their realization can ever match, and their realization actually brings something unimaginably worse.
Which leads us, as you know, to the latest rumor about the most cancellable entertainment vehicle, the Pro Bowl. According to NFL Media’s Ian Rapoport, no less a source than Roger Goodell said, and quoted, “The game itself doesn’t work. We need to find another way to celebrate the players.”
Now, given that Goodell is attending the International Den Of Thieves Symposi … well, the Spring League meeting in Atlanta, any bite comes with its own disclaimer, known to veterans of the trade as the “My Ass, You Say” clause. Goodell rarely comes out of his bunker, and then only to deny well-informed things like the owner’s dissatisfaction with the settlement taxes of Danny Snyder or Stan Kroenke, and we all roll our eyes, wishing we hadn’t wasted so happily even a single small fraction of our remaining life. But he also knows he can’t stand the public for long without some candy to mix with the glass fragments, so he played the Death To The Pro Bowl card on Monday. Not to really bury him, but to throw a few handfuls of dirt in his still well-made boots.
Before you imagine that the NFL has finally recognized the fact that it gladly offers a form of entertainment that is embarrassing even to its shameless self, note that Goodell has hinted at it before without actually offering the eradication. He knows that well-thought-out players, teams, and all civilians view the Pro Bowl as a safety septic tank in the front yard of a mansion. But he also knows that the few million repeat offenders who still watch the Pro Bowl must have four hours of equivalent programming, and that’s where your fantasies end.
Thus, when Rapoport reports that the owners are “discussing the Pro Bowl and ways to improve it” and includes the possibility of getting rid of it, we have been mocked and disappointed. You see, while homeowners are looking for ways to “show off their players,” they’re only really interested in creating an alternative monetization tool when all we want as consumers and citizens is for Goodell to go to a podium and say “Well, we killed the bastard. Welcome to the four hours we just returned to your life.”
What I really fear, of course, is that we recover four hours before you have a chance to get credit to return them, let alone replace them with something that could really be more repellent. He wants to be the guy who says, “Look what I’ve done for you” before posting news of a Law & Order football spin-off, a spring version of Hard Knocks, or a full variety program of players: “I now we go back to Rebel Wilson and Tom Brady as they show us how Jimmy Garoppolo juggles these puppies as he lifts the trunk of this team only with his eyebrows. “
In other words, there may be ideas even worse than the Pro Bowl, and when they are conceived, the NFL will deliver them. Because while the endless search for vehicles in which to stick AT & T’s Lily may result in the end of the worst athletic effort on this side of Battle Of The Network Stars, they are less interested in the show than in the possibility of more ads by Lily.
You know how it all ends: you miss the Pro Bowl because you made the mistake of expecting better entertainment from the people who kept giving you the Pro Bowl.