I'm gonna defend Professor Price a little bit. Not much, but just a little bit.
"X does not belong on The Price is Right" is something you can say
now, with 50 years of hindsight, but it's not something you could have said in 1977. 1977 was the year of punk sweeping away old dinosaur musical acts. It was the year Star Wars changed moviegoing forever. Revolution was in the air. Why shouldn't TPIR evolve with it?
Two years prior, Price had become the first (and only) game show to successfully transition to an hourlong format, allowing and demanding more variety that any other game show had ever had. The pricing games changed to fill this demand. The year before, Price introduced both its first luck-based pricing game (3 Strikes) and its first skill-based pricing game (Hole in One). They had successfully pushed the envelope of what a pricing game could or couldn't be. Why
couldn't you do a pricing game that had elements of trivia? Who says?
Four new pricing games debuted on Price's sixth season. Squeeze Play and Secret "X" are pretty traditional ideas at their core. Finish Line adapted a proven idea to a new prop. Only Professor Price stood out as trying to bring something new to the table.
They quickly realized Professor Price didn't work and yanked it after just two playings. What lessons
could the showrunners have learned from this? They could have easily said "we've strayed too far from our roots, let's get back to basics".
To their credit, they did the exact opposite. If anything, they experimented
even harder and doubled down on some really weird ideas next season. If the issue with Professor Price was "it's a bridge too far from pricing", those other ideas--like, say, a giant luck-based punchboard filled with money--would be nipped in the bud. They didn't let their experience with Professor Price scare them away from experimentation, and now the show has nine cash games in the rotation.
So why didn't Professor Price work?
On paper it should have played to Bob's strengths. He could do a classic Truth-or-Consequences style bit with the contestant, ask a funny yes-or-no question to the puppet, have some kitschy classic old-fashioned Price is Right fun.
But the biggest problem was the puppet just looked creepy.
They didn't just want it to nod its head "yes" or "no". They wanted it to
emote. They wanted to show him smiling or frowning via its moustache. And it does not look good emoting. They were aiming for "goofy and eccentric" and accidentally landed in "get that thing off the air".
The other issue with it was the presentation of the pricing elements and the trivia elements were like oil and water. The price mattered, and then suddenly it didn't. And then suddenly it did again, and suddenly it didn't again. Bob's going back and forth and reexplaining what matters and what doesn't matter and making it far more confusing than "get three questions right". It's not like the pricing portion was fun to play along with, either--"Is there an eight in the price of the car?" isn't a very interesting question in the first place.
But the idea wasn't devoid of potential. If they had figured out a better way to integrate the trivia elements into the presentation, like 3 Strikes or Hole in One or Punch a Bunch did, maybe a trivia game
could have worked. The presentation just ended up being... Professor Price.