NFL: 25 Most Surprising Pro Bowl Picks This Century

The NFL Pro Bowl isn’t as important as it once was. It’s no longer held the Hawaii, which was just a really fun atmosphere to have a football game in January. The stars are rarely there. They hold the game in the week before the Super Bowl, and all of the players in the Super Bowl no longer go to the game. In fact, nobody really goes to the game. Tom Brady has been named to his 15th Pro Bowl this season. Yet, Brady has played in the game just twice. He hasn’t been there since the end of the first Patriots dynasty. Even when his Patriots teams were knocked out early, Brady decided to start his offseason without the All-Star Game.

Other players make the same decision. This leads to some pretty bloated Pro Bowl rosters at times. For the 2019-20 Pro Bowl, the last time they actually played the game, there were 32 alternates. That’s almost as many players on the normal roster! It doesn’t always lead to the best-on-best game we want, but there are times when some of the greats in the league make the team because they were snubbed in the first place. Davante Adams was an alternate in 2020. So was Alvin Kamara.

This leads to some interesting names on the Pro Bowl roster. Sometimes it’s the odd Pro Bowl fullback that makes the team, surprising everyone that the position is still represented. Every so often, there’s a player who really comes out of nowhere to make the Pro Bowl roster. Which ones were the weirdest? There are so many to choose from. We went through the last 20 years of Pro Bowl rosters, and we picked the 25 names that stood out to us the most.