The 2026 NFL Pro Bowl will have its flag football game on Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET on ESPN. The NFL faced declining interest in the Pro Bowl due to the perceived low quality of the game in the 2010s, so they opted to switch the format to a flag football game during the 2022 season. However, NFL legend and former quarterback Steve Young revealed on Tuesday that the Pro Bowl was never a low-contact game.
Steve Young Reveals When the Pro Bowl Was Ruined
Young played in the NFL for 15 seasons from 1985 to 1999. He was one of the best quarterbacks in the league during that time and made the Pro Bowl seven straight seasons from 1992 to 1998.
However, Young’s experience in the Pro Bowl was very different from that of players today.
“The Pro Bowl lost its luster when I took the biggest beatings I’ve ever taken in my football career were at the Pro Bowl,” Young said on the Dan Patrick Show Tuesday. “You laugh because that makes no sense. Why would the biggest beating … With the elite players in the NFL and everyone’s been on the beach all week, and no one really knows the plays, and now Reggie White doesn’t drink. Reggie White is not hungover, or Bruce Smith, or name it.
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“I look back, and I’m like, ‘This is not right. I just finished the Super Bowl, and now I’m going to the Pro Bowl, and I love being in Hawaii, but I’m not gonna take a beating.'”
“The biggest beatings I’ve ever taken in my football career were at the Pro Bowl… It was irrational, it couldn’t be sustained.”
– @SteveYoungQB on the Pro Bowl. pic.twitter.com/DDIeliWkzk
— Dan Patrick Show (@dpshow) February 3, 2026
Young said that’s when the Pro Bowl started its decline because players weren’t willing to play an extra game for fun, get beaten up, and deal with injuries.
“It was irrational, and it couldn’t be sustained because who’s gonna go do that and take that risk?” Young asked rhetorically.
A flag football game is the solution the NFL came up with, making it safer for the players, while not taking the competitiveness out of the game.
However, Young said the problem with that answer was that these NFL athletes weren’t used to playing flag football, calling it a “cheap answer.”
“Flag is becoming so big. Flag was an answer that was kind of a cheap answer for the Pro Bowl,” Young said. “I’m coaching with Jerry, and I said look, ‘Tommorrow when we play, you’re representing the fastest growing sport in the world. People are playing it because it’s accessible and unique, and if you guys play like it’s just like a football lite, it’s not the truth.'”
Young and Jerry Rice will be the two coaches for the 2026 NFL Pro Bowl flag football game, and Young wants to make it a strong, competitive game that actually resembles the growing sport.
“Flag has its own world now, and it’s elite, and I could tell you that if we got an elite men’s team to play those guys tomorrow, I think that elite men’s team would kill ’em,” Young said. “You can see their eyes light up. they’re like, ‘You’re right.’ So I have two 45-minute sessions, yesterday and today, to get them ready to go play elite flag football.”
The Pro Bowl has become a joke over the last decade-plus, but Young thinks flag football could be the answer, if it’s done the right way.
Flag football is growing fast and is already picking up speed with the Olympics. Now, the NFL has a chance to embrace it with its best players.
“I think the Pro Bowl, if we keep playing flag,” Young said. “It will become something that they can start to embrace themselves and not just be like, ‘Ahh, Pro Bowl is a joke.’ You know?”
