Hub Arkush: The Pro Bowl is a joke, and not because Roquan Smith didn’t make the team

Anyone who gets excited over whether NFL players get selected for the Pro Bowl needs to find a better and more meaningful way to raise their stress levels and aggravate themselves needlessly.

Pro Bowl selections are a farce.

Don’t get me wrong, getting voted to a Pro Bowl is great on a résumé, it can result in significant bonus payments for players, and most everyone who gets selected are good, often very good, football players.

But as often as not, they are not the best at their positions in a given season.

Fans, coaches and players do the voting, with each group’s selections weighted to represent one-third of the total vote.

What is wrong with that process?

For starters, fans are encouraged to vote as often as they like, so at least one-third of the vote has absolutely nothing to do with talent or who the best players are and everything to do with a popularity contest and how motivated different teams’ fans are to vote.

We could expect players and coaches to do a better job of evaluating performance if they had the time and opportunity, but they are voting or not voting for guys they haven’t seen play more than once or twice a year or often not at all.

Think about it. They get to study a few game tapes for a week of the 13 teams they play during the season and maybe see two or three other games a week if they choose to when not at work themselves.

They go an entire season without seeing half or more of the players they’re voting on.

Some will take the time to study statistics, but when stats aren’t lying, do they ever tell the whole story?

At the end of the day, the Pro Bowl is no more than a popularity, beauty and publicity contest, and to expect more is foolish.

The Bears’ Roquan Smith didn’t get jobbed out of a Pro Bowl nod.

Is Smith a Pro Bowl talent this season worthy of a selection? Yes, he absolutely is.

But so are Seattle’s Bobby Wagner and San Francisco’s Fred Warner, who got the two NFC inside linebacker bids, and had Smith taken a spot from them, they would have been every bit as shorted as Smith.

Honestly, the guy who got overlooked the worst at the position is Tampa Bay’s Devin White, for the most part a Smith clone in size, athletic ability and the way he plays the position and easily the most productive and impactful inside linebacker in the NFC this year.

Although Smith certainly could have a gripe if he wants to waste time on it, the two Bears who didn’t get in who were even more deserving are Kyle Fuller and Allen Robinson.

Love him or not, Jalen Ramsey is the best cornerback in the game today. But the idea that Marshon Lattimore, Jaire Alexander or James Bradberry, the NFC’s other three Pro Bowl corners this year, have played as well as Fuller, let alone better, is absurd.

They are good football players, but Lattimore actually was a part of the problem with the Saints’ pass defense the first half of the season, and Alexander and Bradberry still are trying to ascend to Fuller’s level.

Pro Bowlers DeAndre Hopkins, Davante Adams and D.K. Metcalf are the three best receivers in the league this year, not just the NFC.

But Justin Jefferson, a surefire all-rookie selection and contender for Offensive Rookie of the Year who nabbed the fourth spot, does not deserve it more or as much as Robinson.

The differences in their numbers are Jefferson has 54 more yards and A-Rob has 21 more catches.

The difference in their value is every team the Bears played schemed first to take away Robinson, while the Vikings’ Jefferson benefited tremendously from the attention paid Adam Thielen and Dalvin Cook.

And by the way, Calvin Ridley of the Falcons deserved that spot more than both of them.

It is unfortunate none of Smith, Fuller or Robinson got their due recognition from the Pro Bowl voters, but there are never enough spots to honor all who deserve them most, and few honors in sports are less representative of a player’s true value and performance.