NFL Hall of Fame Snubs

I may be biased when it comes to Tim Brown, my favorite
Raider ever but I believe his numbers speak for themselves. 

Nothing gets the discussion going quite like the Hall of Fame virtues of active or recently retired players. Besides winning a championship, the ultimate individual goal in ANY sport is to be inducted into that sport's Hall of Fame. Recently the NFL inducted 6 players into the Hall of Fame, and as I was looking down the list, I realized two things. First, this was the first class of inductees that featured exclusively players I'd watched as a kid and second, the guys who got in were, with a few exceptions, not really superstars. So I looked into it further to see who the finalists were for this year's class and was horrified to find who the selection committee had left off.

Here is a list of all of the finalists, with the bolded names representing those who actually got in.

• Jerome Bettis
• Tim Brown
• Jack Butler *
• Cris Carter
• Dermontti Dawson
• Edward J. DeBartolo, Jr.
• Chris Doleman
• Kevin Greene
• Charles Haley
• Cortez Kennedy
• Curtis Martin
• Bill Parcells
• Andre Reed
• Willie Roaf
• Will Shields
• Dick Stanfel *
• Aeneas Williams

If you know anything at all about football, you can see six really problematic names in terms of who didn't get in. I'm talking about Jerome Bettis, Tim Brown, Cris Carter, Charles Haley, Bill Parcells and Eddie DeBartolo. I mentioned before that Super Bowl wins tend to be how players get judged in the long run. That extends even more so when it comes to front office guys (DeBartolo) and coaches (Parcells). You win, you're great. You don't, you can only be really really good. 

Other than the wins, it is obviously statistics that tend to get guys in. What is truly perplexing about this year's snubs is that guys who were seemingly locks based on Super Bowl success were snubbed equally alongside guys who many thought were guaranteed inductees based on stats. Hell, Jerome Bettis seemed like a lock on both sides, winning championships and putting up historically great numbers. So Let's go down the list and make a case for all six of those most glaring snubs.

Jerome Bettis

They called him The Bus. Can you

guess why?

Starting with his statistics, Bettis compares favorable to most current Hall of Fame running backs. The Bus currently sits sixth all time in career rushing yards, less than 500 behind Curtis Martin, who was selected where Bettis was snubbed this year. He sits ahead of TWENTY-TWO current Hall of Fame running backs in career rushing yards. 

The only other stat that matters with running backs is touchdowns, and there we find Bettis tenth all time with 91, one more than Martin and higher than 14 current Hall of Famers on that list. 

We can go beyond that and point out that he has a Super Bowl win (and two appearances), along with being a constantly productive back for a team that was consistently in Super Bowl contention for 12 years, which is somewhere near the 99th percentile when it comes to the length of running back careers. My inclination is to compare him to Martin, because Martin played the same position and got in over Bettis. And I'm not going to say Curtis Martin isn't a Hall of Famer, the guy is the fourth leading rusher in league history. But again, Martin never won a Super Bowl. 

Intangibles? Bettis had them. He was a great leader and arguably the best BIG back in the history of the league. Was Curtis Martin the best at any one thing? I don't think so.

Tim Brown 

To me, Tim Brown (along with Cris Carter coming up in a second) is the biggest snub of the year. Timmy must feel like he's been slapped in the face getting left out where Cortez Kennedy got in. Kennedy was a scary d-lineman, but HOFer? I don't think so. But back to Tim Brown, I'll just list some all-time rankings: Fifth all time in receptions (third when he retired), fourth all time in receiving yards (second when he retired), sixth in TD receptions (third when he retired), 16th all time in total TDs (he returned kicks at the beginning of his career). 

He never won a Super Bowl, but his statistics are absurd considering that the best quarterback he had throwing him the ball before Rich Gannon came in for Tim's last three years was Jeff George (a notoriously terrible quarterback). He put up those numbers with the equivalent of a fourth-line winger throwing him passes. There is only one current Hall of Famer who outranks Tim Brown in any of the stat categories I listed: Jerry Rice, the greatest football player in the history of the game. 

Cris Carter

Bringing prayer to the NFL since Tim Tebow was a toddler.

He never won the Super Bowl either, but his statistics are every bit as good (if not marginally better) than Tim Brown's. Click the links in the Tim Brown entry where I cite my stats. Carter is present on every one of those lists, usually very close to where Brown is. Again, Jerry Rice is the only one who out ranks Carter across the board in the important categories. Again, Jerry Rice: Greatest of All Time. 

The argument for Carter is almost identical to the argument for Brown. Brown, Rice and Carter were contemporaries seen at the time (when I was a kid/teenager) as bar none the best three receivers of all time. That is how they were talked about when they played. Now that they're retired, all of a sudden that changes? Now that they're retired, only Rice is the all-time great? 

I don't buy it, and whoever is on the selection committee must be on drugs. That's the only explanation I have. STEVE TASKER IS IN THE HALL OF FAME AND HE WAS A SPECIAL TEAMS-ONLY PLAYER! 

Eddie DeBartolo Jr.

Addendum: The 80's were retarded. 

In 1977, Edward DeBartolo Jr., known as Eddie D, had amassed a real estate fortune that is almost impossible to replicate. His company once owned over 2 billion square feet of retail space nationwide. Like most people who amass the kind of wealth that is incomprehensible to the human brain, he got bored and bought a sports team (who wouldn't?). That team was the San Francisco 49ers, a team with a rich history of never winning anything and being mediocre at the best of times. The rest is history. The history of the greatest dynasty in the Super Bowl era (that means after the AFL-NFL merger in the early 1960's). By 1982, the Niners were Super Bowl champs and would go onto win a total of five Lombardi Trophies between 1982 and 1995, while making the playoffs every year between 1981 and 2000. You might be inclined to say "well he just owned the team, big deal." 

DeBartolo was incredibly hands on with personnel on the team, and it was his decision to bring in the wizard Bill Walsh (who coached four of those Super Bowl teams), and it was ultimately he who spent the money to bring in the Jerry Rices, Joe Montanas and Ronnie Lotts who would win those championships on the field. Owners get into their sports' Hall of Fames all the time, and no one in the NFL is more deserving than Eddie D (besides maybe Art Rooney Sr. of the Steelers). 

Charles Haley 

Charles Haley, seen here doing his his patented "Fuck You, I Win

at Winning" pose. 

If Super Bowls are the reason why Bill Walsh (four) is the best coach of all time and Joe Montana (four) is the best quarterback, then Charles Haley is among the greatest defensive lineman of all time with his five Super Bowl rings (won with two different teams). He won two straight Super Bowls with Montana and Walsh in 1988-89, then went on to win three more within the span of four years as a Dallas Cowboy in 1992, 1993 and 1995. And it's not like it was just about rings for Charles Haley. He was pretty damn good at rushing the passer.

His 100 sacks are good for 25th in NFL history, but more importantly he was one of the first "pure" pass rushers in league history. He was a new kind of defensive player, spawned from the game's evolution towards the more pass heavy version we watch today. He was one of the pioneers of the position that is considered an important specialist job today. And seriously. FIVE SUPER BOWLS. That's the most rings any one has won as a player (Mean Joe Green won 6, but two of them were as a coach). He is the best at winning in a sport where all anyone seems to care about is winning. 

These voters make no damn sense. 

Bill Parcells

The Tuna. Incidentally, I'll never eat sushi again.

Finally we come to Parcells, owner of my favourite nickname in sports. He's The Tuna, the Big Tuna. I don't even remember why. But he is. And the Tuna wins. Wherever he goes, he wins. More importantly, he has deservedly developed a reputation as a guy who can take a team that has been terrible or mediocre and turn them into a winner. He won two Super Bowls with the New York Football Giants after he took over as Head Coach in 1983. The team had one winning season in the previous 10 years. In 1984 and 1985, he took the Giants to the playoffs in consecutive years for the first time in THIRTY YEARS. In 1986, he won the Super Bowl, another franchise first. After that game, we was doused in Gatorade by his team, WHICH WAS THE FIRST TIME THAT HAD EVER HAPPENED. He won another Super Bowl with the Giants in 1990 before retiring. 

He came back from retirement in 1993 to take the helm of the New England Patriots (who, for those of you who only know the Pats from the Belichick-Brady teams, were pretty fucking bad until recently). Within two years he was in the playoffs (the Pats hadn't been there in eight season), He had, by this time, also gained a reputation as a great personnel guy, drafting for both the Pats and the Giants. In 1996, he took the Pats to the Super Bowl and lost to Brett Favre and the Green Bay Packers. 

He left the Pats for the Jets , 4-28 in the two years immediately before he got there in 1997. Back in NYC, he was the Jet's GM and Coach. In his first year there, he went 9-7. The next year they were 12-4, which allowed them to play host to their first playoff game since 1985. They made it to the AFC Title game that year. They he had a few ok seasons and retired for the second time.

Then he came back with the Cowboys in 2003 and the team improved. But he retired again in 2006 due to disputes with douchey owner Jerry Jones. Three retirements. Recently he came back as Exec. VP of Football Operations for the Miami Dolphins in 2007 before again calling it quits. Four retirements.

So to sum it up: Two Super Bowl wins, invented the Gatorade shower, and retired as many times as Brett Favre starting more than a decade before Favre started doing it. Parcells was clearly an winner and more importantly, he was an innovator both on and off the field all the way up until his current (and fourth) retirement. 

I want to make a point that I think that Demotti Dawson and Willie Roaf both definitely belong in the Hall of Fame, as does Curtis Martin. The two best offensive linemen of their era and the fourth leading rusher in history definitely have a place in Canton, Ohio. But Cortez Kennedy with his 58 sacks (101st all time) and zero Super Bowls (last all time) has no reason to be there, and neither does Chris Doleman (though you could make the case, since he's fourth on the all-time sack list). As for Jack Butler, well he retired in the late 1950's and I hadn't heard of him until he was inducted into the HOF. That I don't' even understand. He's been eligible since the 1960's. If he deserved it, he'd have been in before athlete's stopped smoking cigarettes on the sidelines.