Whatever problems the Pro Bowl has — and space limitations do not permit a comprehensive listing here — they aren’t Hawaii’s fault.

That was long suspected, of course, but we now have definitive proof because the NFL’s annual all-star game was played Sunday in Orlando, Fla., and the overnight TV ratings continued to drop, traffic was snarled and a lot of players continued to skip the whole anachronism.

New home, familiar bottom line.

After playing the event here for 35 of the previous 37 years and following considerable offseason rumination, the folks atop 345 Park Ave. in New York announced last June that the Pro Bowl needed a change of scenery.

So much so that the NFL was reportedly willing to pay Orlando $1.75 per scanned ticket to play there. (The NFL did reap a $1 million payment).

So they took it almost as far away from these shores as possible, 4,753 miles, while still keeping it in the U.S. Good thing, too, because Sunday was a bad day to have to go through immigration.

They also, in the words of NFL officials borrowing upon a Disney phrase, “re-imagined” the Pro Bowl conceptually. This was appropriate since they were “re-imagining” it in Disney and ESPN’s backyard as a boost to tourism in a traditional “down” period.

Alas, a sizable number of TV viewers chose not to imagine it at all. Overnight viewership on ESPN was down 8 percent from 2016, according to Sports Business Daily. The 4.6 overnight rating was the lowest for the exhibition “since at least 2006,” Sports Media Watch reported.

Moreover, for all the talk about how Orlando would be more convenient for the players, just 57 percent of those initially selected for its rosters, including one of the six original quarterbacks, actually made it, the Elias Sports Bureau said. A slight improvement over 2016 but still the second-highest turnover in the game’s history.

“There were a few other hiccups like parking-lot traffic leading to parking lots hours before the game…” the Orlando Sentinel reported of the announced 60,834 who found their way into Camping World Stadium.

By most accounts, the highlight of Pro Bowl week — including the game — was Thursday’s skills competition, something the NFL chose to do away with here after 2007.

The events included catching a ball dropped from a drone and dodgeball.

The competition drew 989,000 viewers on ESPN, according to Sports Media Watch, a fraction of the audience Major League Baseball’s Home Run Derby or the NBA’s Dunk Contest pull in and almost 30 percent less than UH’s Hawaii Bowl victory over Middle Tennessee State.

The NFL also returned to the traditional NFC vs. AFC format it had employed until adopting the goofy Team (fill in retired star’s name) vs. Team (fill in another retired star’s name) draft formula for the 2014 game.

The last time the NFL played a Pro Bowl in central Florida was 1978, the penultimate year before it moved to Aloha Stadium to resuscitate the game. Orlando is contracted to have it for 2018 and there is an option for 2019.

At the game’s present pace, Hawaii need not be concerned about it washing up here again because it may not last through the NFL’s next collective bargaining agreement in 2020.

Whatever happens, Sunday’s game was proof positive that the event’s demise won’t be on Hawaii’s hands.

And, it didn’t cost another $5.2 million to learn it, either.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.