Pride of Detroit
Recap and highlights from Day 1 of the Pro Bowl, and how Detroit Lions players competed.
I watched Day 1 of the 2025 Pro Bowl so you didn’t have to.
The Detroit Lions were all over the event on Thursday night, which included six different skills competitions in the lead-up to Sunday’s flag football game. Here’s everything that happened in relation to the Lions.
Lions quarterback Jared Goff teamed with Green Bay Packers running back Josh Jacobs for what was called the “Passing The Test” event. In short, Jacobs was given five trivia questions about NFL players at the Pro Bowl. For each question he got right, Goff would have an additional 10 seconds to hit as many targets as possible in his allotted time. Jacobs—with a little help from Goff himself—answered all five questions right, giving Goff the maximum of 90 seconds. Goff used that time to score a total of 44 points in the event. Here’s his entire run.
Here’s how the rest of the Pro Bowl quarterbacks finished:
The next Lions-related event was a big-man spike, where offensive and defensive linemen spiked a football into a mechanism much like a “high striker” hammer game at a carnival, or the “power punch” boxing arcade game. Players had to spike the football directly on a small target on the ground and with as much force as possible, and the contraption would spit out a score from 000 to 999.
Each player got two opportunities, and Frank Ragnow’s score of 856 was only good enough for fourth out of six participants.
Lions running back Jahmyr Gibbs was smartly the anchor of a four-man relay race. But he didn’t have to show off his Sonic skills, as the NFC cruised to an easy victory after the AFC fumbled the handoff between the final leg of the race.
Branch, who was originally scheduled to be part of the relay race, swapped into dodgeball instead. That turned out to be a bad decision, as Branch took a dodgeball to... his BBs in a losing effort.
While the NFC did lose the first game of dodgeball, Lions tackle Taylor Decker did get one elimination on Derwin James Jr.
The Pro Bowl Games will continue on Sunday, Feb. 2 from 3-6 p.m. ET. Jack Fox will participate in the “Perfect Punt” competition, Frank Ragnow will be part of a relay race, Taylor Decker will compete in the Tug-of-War, and several Lions will take part in the flag football game to conclude the events. It’ll be televised on ABC and...
