Drones Will Be In The NFL Pro Bowl Because It's Not Weird Enough

The NFL Pro Bowl has officially gone sideways with the announcement that drones will be part of the Pro Bowl Skills Competition.

As if adding dodgeball to the schedule wasn’t strange enough, the NFL has raised more eyebrows this week by declaring that it will now include drones in the upcoming Pro Bowl Skills Competition that takes place in Orlando on Thursday.

A report from Fox Sports details the newly-added fifth round of the competition, called “Drone Drop,” which is pretty self-explanatory.

The NFL will have a drone carry a football – similar to the one at the top of this article from November’s NCAA game between Vanderbilt and Auburn – and then let go of said football, with the player having to catch the ball. As Fox points out, this is basically vertical punt returning.

The league is so excited about “Drone Drop” that it’s already put out a preview clip of the event on Twitter, too:

Check out the Drone Drop at the #ProBowlSkills Showdown!

Thursday night at 7 pm ET on @ESPNNFL. https://t.co/0kjPPJDonW

— NFL (@NFL) January 25, 2017

If you’re a football fan, you probably weren’t planning on watching the Pro Bowl anyway because the event has generally become irrelevant with many of the elected players not even participating in the game and the game itself often winding up subpar. But if you were considering it, you might be very confused about now.

The NFL has been trying all kinds of tricks to revitalize interest in its All-Star Game for years now, including abandoning the conference format in favor of two star-led and drafted teams, a practice that it finally stopped after last year.

The Skills Competition sounded like it could’ve been a good idea in theory but when you start with gimmicky elements like dodgeball and drones, it turns into vaguely sports-themed entertainment rather than anything worth paying serious attention to. (Or is ESPN doing some cross-promotion for its broadcasts of the Drone Racing League?)

Now if the drones were dropping dodgeballs in some sort of faux Terminator scenario, with someone like J.J. Watt playing the Arnold Schwarzenegger part, that might be entertaining enough to tune in for. Maybe that’ll happen in 2018.

The 2017 NFL Pro Bowl Skills Competition takes place Thursday, January 26 at 7 p.m. ET and will be televised on ESPN. For more upcoming events in the Orlando area, visit the Orlando section of Local POV here.