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THE GOLDEN GOOSE

I made it through nearly a quarter of the Pro Bowl before turning it off in disgust.

The timing for this year’s NFL all-star game could not possibly have been worse. One week after one of the more compelling conference championship Sundays in recent memory—featuring two punishing, back-breaking games that went down to the final seconds—the Pro Bowl looked nothing more like a bunch of guys playing two hand touch in the backyard. It’s no wonder that boos were cascading down from the rafters at Aloha Stadium; who would want to spend money on a game that the players didn’t care about? Who would want to watch it?

Apparently a lot of people would: this year’s Pro Bowl drew 12.5 million viewers. Yes, a game in which even NFC starting quarterback Aaron Rodgers thought players were dogging it drew 1.5 million more viewers than Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game. Are you kidding me?

If you needed a reminder of how popular the NFL is in this country and around the world, look no further. People will sit down in droves to watch the most extraneous all-star game in professional sports if it bears the NFL logo. With at least nine more years of labor peace guaranteed, the NFL will no doubt grow into an even more dominant force in American culture. What a difference a year makes.

This time last year nobody knew what would happen to the NFL. Talk about lockouts, work stoppage and decertification dominated the airwaves. And the worst happened: the league locked out the players and fans wondered for months if the 2011 season would even be played. The draft was a jarring, bizarre affair and free agency only a memory. It wasn’t until the 11th hour that the league and the players came together and worked out a last-second compromise. It could have been so much worse—NBA fans will attest to that—but it was more than bad enough.

Expect record ratings for anything NFL over the next several months as fans revel in an offseason of trades, transactions and turmoil that they were denied last year. Anything that can be televised will be televised. Fans won’t need to chant “we want football” at this year’s draft because they’ll have all the offseason football coverage they can stand. Hopefully Seahawk fans will get to see their team build on the potential we saw in last year’s results and take the next step towards getting back to the playoffs and ultimately the Super Bowl. The debates about what Seattle should do with their quarterback situation alone will consume the next two or three months.

Yes, the 2011 season is nearly over. But football is back with a vengeance. The NFL gets a lot of things wrong (in the name of all that’s holy, PLEASE move kickoffs back to the 30-yard line) but it is still the best professional sports league in the world. And in the end, that is the reason why we really didn’t need to worry so much about last year’s lockout. Sure, the league and the players squabbled and talked tough, but neither side was stupid enough to kill off the golden goose. In the end both sides won big, and so did the fans, and all of us will continue to win big for years to come.

The Pro Bowl will probably never be worth watching, but nothing’s perfect.