Of all of the All-Star games in professional sports, the Pro Bowl is the most useless. Many players feel the same way, and now one of them has made his feelings public.
Bengals TE Tyler Eifert tore a ligament in his ankle in last season’s game, and he made it clear that he wouldn’t be returning to the Pro Bowl.
Eifert was hurt in the middle of the fourth quarter of the Pro Bowl when Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Jameis Winston overthrew him in the back of the end zone. After leaping for the high pass, Eifert landed awkwardly on his left foot and immediately requested to come out of the game.
“It’s kind of a fluke thing,” Eifert said Friday. “My foot just kind of hit the turf. I didn’t really turn it or anything like that. I just got my cleats on the ground and my foot kind of twisted.”
This is a nice illustration of why the game is pointless. Football is an inherently dangerous sport, and it’s not just the tackling and contact. We see non-contact injuries all the time in football, and spectacle of the Pro Bowl itself is certainly not enough to justify the risk. Eifert’s injury required surgery, and his return timeline is still questionable:
Once simple rest and rehab didn’t get Eifert to 100 percent by May, he underwent surgery. The recovery time from it has his return expected to fall near the start of the season.
“It’s a fine line between you want to push it and you want it to get better, but you’ve got to figure out why it’s not getting better. You go hard and you take a couple of days off and it’s still sore,” Eifert said of his early offseason regimen. “It’s just about getting to the bottom of what’s going on.”
Eifert has been in a walking boot the past six weeks. It will come off next week, and at that time, he will begin testing his ankle with mobility and other range-of-motion exercises.
Eifert enjoyed the week, the festivities surrounding the game and hanging out with the league’s best players in Hawaii, but emphasized that the game itself is still risky even though it’s fairly clear no one is trying that hard.
He said he’d play in a skills competition if that was the end result of the week’s worth of fun, but as for the glorified scrimmage of the Pro Bowl itself, Eifert won’t be playing there again.
[ESPN]
