The Pro Football Hall of Fame enshrines five men on Saturday at noon in Canton, and by any reasonable standard it is a terrific class.
Drew Brees and Larry Fitzgerald go in on the first ballot. Adam Vinatieri and Luke Kuechly get there in year two. Roger Craig finally arrives through the seniors committee, thirty-three years after his last carry.
The name everyone will still be discussing is the one not on the stage.
The Five Who Made It
Brees walked away after twenty seasons holding the career record for completions at 7,142, a mark Tom Brady took from him a year later, along with a Super Bowl XLIV title and a long argument for what a quarterback who is not physically imposing can do with anticipation and footwork. Fitzgerald played seventeen seasons in Arizona, caught 1,432 passes, and somehow never generated a bad word from anyone in the sport.
Vinatieri’s case was always going to take a beat because kickers make voters uncomfortable, which is its own small absurdity given that two of the most replayed plays in Super Bowl history are his. Kuechly’s case was the reverse problem: eight seasons, a career ended at 28 after repeated concussions, and voters who needed a second look to accept that peak dominance counted for as much as longevity.
Craig is the one worth pausing on. He was the first player to run for 1,000 yards and catch for 1,000 in the same season, and he spent decades as the standard example of a candidate the process kept losing track of. The Hall’s own class announcement lists him as a seniors finalist, which is the polite institutional phrasing for a player the voters got wrong the first fifteen times.
The presenter list is the good part. Sean Payton will present Brees. Fitzgerald picked his son Devin. Kuechly picked his father Tom. Craig picked a friend he has known since elementary school, junior high, high school and college, who then happened to overlap with him for two seasons in San Francisco, including the 14-2 team in 1989 that finished by beating Denver 55-10 in the Super Bowl.
The Belichick Problem Is Structural, Not Editorial
Bill Belichick did not get in. Six Super Bowls as a head coach, the most playoff wins in league history, third all time in regular-season victories, and he fell short in his first year of eligibility. Patrick Mahomes called it insane in a post that was, for once, the mainstream take rather than the hot one.
The reason is not that fifty voters sat down and concluded Belichick was not a Hall of Famer. It is that the ballot does not ask them that question. As WBUR reported when the outrage first landed, Belichick and Robert Kraft were grouped with three seniors players on a combined coach-contributor-senior ballot, and voters were asked to select three of the five rather than vote each candidate up or down. Election requires 80 percent, or 40 of 50.
Sit with what that structure does. It converts a merit question into a rationing question. A voter who believes all five belong is forced to leave two out, and the two who get left out are not the least deserving candidates. They are the ones whose supporters were least efficiently distributed. Belichick could have been the unanimous top choice of thirty-nine voters and still missed.
That is not a scandal about anyone’s judgment. It is a category system built to protect the seniors pipeline from being permanently crowded out by modern candidates, doing exactly what it was designed to do, in the one year when the modern candidate was the most accomplished coach of the century. The Hall has since said it will consider changes to the panel and the process, which is an institution conceding the mechanism failed without saying so directly.
Canton Got Its Football In Early
The weekend opened Thursday night with the Hall of Fame Game, and it was better than it had any business being. Carolina beat Arizona 33-30 when rookie quarterback Haynes King ran it in from five yards out with no time left, as NFL.com recapped. Cardinals rookie Carson Beck, who was supposed to be the story, went 15 of 19 for 188 yards and a touchdown and was excellent, and got upstaged anyway.
Preseason football is a strange product and August scoreboards mean close to nothing, though they do tell you which rookie quarterbacks look comfortable and which look like they are reading a menu. That question is running league-wide right now, from Canton to Pittsburgh, where Aaron Rodgers has been managing his own snap count into a season nobody can predict.
What Saturday Is Actually For
The enshrinement runs at noon Eastern from Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium. Five speeches, five gold jackets, and a lot of people in the stands who drove from New Orleans and Phoenix and Charlotte.
The Belichick argument will still be there Sunday, and it should be, because a process that can miss on him can miss on anyone and the fix has to come from inside the building. But there is something worth noticing about a class in which a man asked his father to present him, another asked his son, and a third asked someone he met before either of them could drive. For one afternoon the Hall stops being a voting body with a structural problem and goes back to being a room where people say thank you to whoever got them there.