The NFL Pro Bowl Games hit a new low in the third year of the flag football format.
Sunday’s NFL Pro Bowl Games averaged 4.7 million viewers across ABC, ESPN and DisneyXD, marking the least-watched edition of the annual all-star event, excluding a taped COVID-era edition in 2021. Viewership declined 19% from last year (5.8M) and 25% from two years ago, when the NFL debuted the game’s new flag football format (6.3M).
Despite the decline, the Pro Bowl Games still delivered the largest sports audience of a weekend that included North Carolina-Duke men’s college basketball, a Lakers-Knicks game in the NBA, NASCAR’s preseason “Clash” and the PGA Tour at Pebble Beach. It outpaced the second-place event, Pebble Beach (3.3M), by more than a million viewers.
The Pro Bowl Games ranks fourth among all-star telecasts over the past year behind last year’s MLB All-Star Game (7.4M), NBA All-Star Game (5.4M) and MLB Home Run Derby (5.25M). It narrowly outdrew last year’s NBA All-Star Saturday Night (4.6M).
For all of the complaints about the old, traditional Pro Bowl and the lack of intensity with which it was played, considerably more viewers watched the game before it changed formats. The last traditional Pro Bowl in January 2020 averaged nearly eight million viewers despite competing with significant breaking news coverage.
While pre-COVID viewership figures lack relevance in the current television environment, the Pro Bowl lost half as many viewers from 2015-2020 — about 800,000 — as it did over the past two years (about 1.6 million).
