The NBA and MLB have their respective All-Star Games, and the NFL has the Pro Bowl. The NBA and MLB have theirs in the middle of the season, the NFL’s is at the end. There is only one of them that has got it all together to have meaningful and entertaining All-Star festivities.

The late Sean Taylor and Chris Samuels at the '06 Pro Bowl. "Aw man! Do we have to play football?"

The NFL struggles the most with it’s Pro Bowl, which is held in Hawaii every year. Not only is viewership down in the company of the PBA and the Scripps National Spelling Bee contest, but it is just difficult to watch. The offensive sets that each conference uses are very basic, much like the ones run in your local pee-wee football league. The defenses are about the same, except for it doesn’t take a pack of them to tackle one player, just two or three. What the Pro Bowl needs is some sort of challenge involving top quarterbacks, just a little something to spice it up. I remember watching one quarterback challenge in particular with Brett Favre (pre-Wrangler endorsee), Warren Moon (Pre-annual DUI suspicion arrestee), and Steve Young (pre-bald spot in the back of his head). They had competitions testing accuracy, quickness, and strength. My favorite was the motorized carts with wide receiver cutouts attached to them. Three or four would cross each other at a time and the QBs would have to hit them with footballs that had paint on the tips. The slower/closer carts were less points then the ones that were faster and further away. As it stands, the Pro Bowl is a dried baked potato that’s been sitting under the heat lamps at Wendy’s; no butter, no chives, no cheese, just plain and stale. The Pro Bowl is nothing more than a congratulatory vacation package to Hawaii for the players and cheap entertainment for the fans.

Amare Stoudamire and Tim Duncan arguing over who has to guard LeBron James.

The NBA has got a good thing going with it’s pre-game entertainment. The new Skills Challenge (designed to test passing accuracy and quickness of guards) fits in quite well with the Slam-Dunk Contest and 3-Point Shootout. Now all they need is a competition for the centers…hmm…maybe they can have 20 elementary school kids all shooting at the same time and see who can reject the most shots. Entertaining and fun for the kids, I think we have a winner! The All-Star Game on the other hand is quite a snoozefest. What the game includes is a bunch of “All-Stars” showboating and not playing defense, not to mention as many flubeed alley-oop attempts as you’ll see with a couple of 12-year olds playing on a 6-foot hoop. The past few years, it has also turned into a ‘runway’ for Adidas to show off some new funky uniform. Here’s a gallery of All-Star uniforms through the ages:

1990ish / 1995 / 2004 / 2005 / 2006 / 2007 West 2007 East / 2008 West 2008 East

The NBA has been criticized for its All-Star Game because of it’s selection process and the fact that half the players do not deserve to play. In 2007, Shaq played a whole 10 games the first half of the season, yet started for the Eastern Conference team. Allen Iverson sat out almost the whole first half of the season with the 76ers (in the Eastern Conference), and was traded to the Nuggets (in the Western Conference) and was consequently a starter for the West team. Then there’s the stigma around Yao Ming, how is he voted the starter every year? oh yeah, he has a billion votes pouring in every year from China alone. A more fitting name for the game should be the ‘Market’-Stars Game.

Josh Hamilton hit a record 28 home runs in the first round of the '08 Home Run Derby.

Lastly, there is Major League Baseball, the only league to get things right. The one things that makes the MLB All-Star Game the cream of the crop is that it is meaningful.Come October there will be plenty of baseball fans who will wonder, “Who won the All-Star Game?” That is the case because the league(National or American) that wins that All-Star Game gets home field advantage in the World Series! In the NBA and NFL next to nobody cares enough to remember who won because it doesn’t matter! in the 2008 MLB All-Star Game, the American League won in the 15th inning, capping the most watched All-Star game for MLB since 2002. Similar to the NBAs dunk contest, MLB has the Home Run Derby, which adds to the excitement and entertainment value of the All-Star Game. It is a glorified batting cage for the players and a spectacle to watch. This past derby featured Josh Hamilton hitting a record 28 home runs in the first round. Let’s be honest though, if my grandpa was throwing me fast balls like 71-year old Clay Council was throwing Hamilton, I’d be hitting that many too.

Tags: MLB, NBA, NFL

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under MLB, NBA, NFL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.