The NFL Pro Bowl is again changing formats and will now be part of the Super Bowl week festivities, it was announced Wednesday.
The annual NFL Pro Bowl Games will shift to a made-for-TV format and take place on the Tuesday of Super Bowl week, the league said. The move from its traditional Sunday afternoon slot to Tuesday night means the event will no longer be simulcast on ABC, with coverage set to air on ESPN, DisneyXD and ESPN Deportes on February 3 at 8 PM ET.
The status of the Pro Bowl had been unclear, with the event absent from the league’s list of important dates this season and both ESPN and ABC scheduling other live sports programming for the date the game would usually have taken place. ESPN has an NBA game and two NHL games — including a Stadium Series outdoor game — set for February 1, while ABC is scheduled for a college basketball doubleheader on the date.
With the Pro Bowl leaving its weekend slot, February 1 will be the first NFL-free Sunday during the regular season or playoffs since January 25, 2009 — the last year that the league scheduled its All-Star event for the week after the Super Bowl. In addition to the ESPN and ABC programming listed above, that date will also mark the debut of NBC’s new “Sunday Night Basketball” NBA series.
It should be noted that there will still be some Pro Bowl programming on that day, as ESPN will air an “NFL Live” special at 11 AM ET and ABC will carry some form of Pro Bowl content at Noon.
As for the Pro Bowl itself, the new format is one step further away from the event’s heyday. The game topped 11 million viewers for five-straight years from 2010-14, and for a time surpassed the MLB All-Star Game as the most-watched exhibition in sports TV. The last traditional version of the game in 2022 averaged a respectable 6.7 million. But since shifting away from the traditional game to a flag football format, viewership has waned — and this past year’s audience of 4.7 million was the lowest for the game on record, not counting a pre-taped COVID edition in 2021.
The indoor, limited capacity format — players will compete in front of “their families, friends and select fans” — is a marked departure from the Hawaii-based games that once closed out the NFL season.
