On Friday the Pro Football Hall of Fame announced the biggest change to its selection process since the introduction of the semifinalist stage in 2004 – if not longer.
Last year’s selection process saw some head-scratching moves at each stage of the process. The list of preliminary nominees, once numbering fewer than 100, ballooned to 173, yet still saw some head-scratching omissions, with Eric Berry, a member of the All-Decade Team of the 2010s, probably being the most glaring. The list of semifinalists wasn’t too bad, but then the finalists saw the inclusion of the highly marginal resumes of Fred Taylor and Rodney Harrison, seemingly putting them in line for almost certain induction. What attracted the most attention, though, wasn’t anything to do with the modern-era selections, but the selection committee rejecting the senior-candidate bid of Art Powell – the first time a senior candidate had been rejected in 12 years – as well as coach/contributor finalist Buddy Parker. Some of the changes the Hall made should address the odd list of nominees we saw last year, but the changes later in the process aren’t necessarily related – and might make the actual issues the Hall faces worse.
Under the new bylaws, two new screening committees – consisting of Hall of Famers, front office personnel, historians, and media members, but not members of the selection committee – will review the full lists of nominated players in the modern-era and senior-candidate categories. Their job will be to reduce the lists of candidates to 50 players each before referring them to each category’s full selection committee (with the Seniors Committee also including two people who aren’t members of the full selection committee, alongside seven who are).
The idea, presumably, is to avoid overwhelming the selectors with too many options in case last year’s massive list of nominees would otherwise become the norm, and ensuring the nominated players sent to the selection committee represent the best players in each category. In the case of senior candidates, the effect could be to allow more recognition for older players which have increasingly faded out of view even of the senior committee. (Of the 31 players that made the senior semifinalist stage last year, only three started their careers before 1950 and thus weren’t eligible to receive Monitor scores from Pro Football Reference. The median retirement date was 1988, and for the twelve finalists it was older than that, but of the seven senior candidates to be inducted since 2020’s Centennial Class, only Chuck Howley did not play in the 1980s or later.) On the other hand, Clark Judge points out that the Hall of Famers will make up seven of the eleven members of each panel, and they’re likely to “push teammates and friends” over the players that might actually be the most deserving.
But even relative to older, smaller lists of nominees, 50 candidates is a pretty big reduction, cutting those smaller lists nearly in half and cutting last year’s list to less than a third the size. Regardless of whether the “lists of nominated players” actually comes out, I don’t think I’ll be able to treat the list of 50 candidates as equivalent to the lists of nominees of the past. I’m probably going to end up denoting them as “quarterfinalists” or something similar to distinguish them from previous lists of nominees, and I won’t be including players on the “notables not included” just for having made the much longer preliminary nominee list in the past. (I was already considering letting last year’s nominees only spend a single year on the “notables not included” list if they didn’t get nominated again and the list of nominees went back down to under 130. I’ll also probably put the quarterfinalists on a single list, similar to the similarly-sized All-Snub Team and Top Active Players lists, instead of splitting them by position.) In addition, because of the differences in the committees naming the 50 candidates to the committees involved in the later cutdown stages, the composition of the quarterfinalists and how long one has spent there won’t mean much for who gets selected to the semifinalist stage (though as seen last year, the list of semifinalists doesn’t necessarily mean much for who gets chosen as a finalist either). I may also put more emphasis back on NFL Network’s “Top 100 Players” lists for players who entered the league in 2010 or later, as I did when predicting the All-Decade Team of the 2010s.
Among other changes, the selection processes for seniors, coaches, and contributors will be held closer to being in parallel with the process for modern-era players; in past years the senior and coach/contributor finalists would already be selected by now, but this year the two screening committees will be meeting “soon”. The senior, coach, and contributor committees (with coaches and contributors once again split) will vote over the course of “several weeks” to cut down the list of candidates down to three senior finalists and one coach and contributor finalist each, with Judge saying the list will be cut down to 25 in October, with modern-era semifinalists announced in November and modern-era finalists in December; the list of “semifinalists” in the senior, coach, and contributor categories (using the confusing terminology the Hall adopted last year) has been cut from twelve to nine, reflecting the number of members of each panel.
The change that caught the most attention from those outside the realm of hardcore Hall of Fame watchers was the reduction in the waiting period for coaches from five years out of the game to one year, mostly for the prospect it raised that Bill Belichick could be inducted as soon as 2026. This is one of the less significant changes to me, but it’s still kind of head-scratching considering Belichick still hopes to coach again. I wasn’t around for this, but when Belichick’s mentor Bill Parcells was inducted into the Hall in 2013, I read about how he’d previously been eligible immediately after his stint as coach of the Jets ended in 1999, and even made it to the final round of finalist selections (coaches being considered alongside players in those days), but was voted down because voters didn’t want to induct him while he still wanted to coach again, which he eventually did with the Cowboys. By the time he left the Cowboys in 2006, the Hall had passed the five-year waiting period for coaches.
Now the Hall wants to go back to having almost no waiting period at all for coaches? What happens if Belichick can’t find a job again next year, but does find one in 2026? That’s still a year shorter than Parcells spent out of coaching before joining the Cowboys. The one potential saving grace the Hall might have is that, if voters were reluctant to vote for Parcells until they were certain he was done coaching entirely, they might do the same for Belichick, but if that happens, what’s the point of having shortened the waiting period at all? And Parcells and Belichick aren’t the only coaches that have spent time out of the game before returning to coaching. Multiple people have pointed out the case of George Seifert, who might have been a surefire Hall of Famer if he was voted in immediately upon leaving the 49ers, but who tanked his reputation so badly with the Panthers that he continues to be on the outside looking in to this day.
The prospect of the selection committee rejecting Belichick seems especially likely because of the changes to how finalists will be voted on. The senior, coach, and contributor finalists will be combined into a single group with no more than three of the five combined finalists being inducted. In other words, even once the finalists in each category are chosen, at least two are guaranteed to be left at the altar, as the candidates in each category are pitted against one another.
The Hall also claims that “with the 80% approval threshold, classes are more likely, statistically, to have five or six members.” This is a curious statement because the 80% approval threshold – unchanged from before – hasn’t actually affected anything in the past, because the way the finalists are voted on, there’s a defined set of potential Hall of Famers selected that the committee simply votes up or down on, and all of them are almost always voted up. I don’t believe any modern-era player has been voted down after making the final five since Michael Irvin in 2006. It’s certainly possible for there to routinely not be sufficient agreement over the senior, coach, and contributor finalists for the full three candidates to be inducted, but there’s still a minimum of one senior/coach/contributor inductee, so for there to routinely be only five inductees there’d need to be less than a full five modern-era inductees on a regular basis as well. But there doesn’t seem to be any changes to the modern-era induction process after the introduction of the screening committee, so how can that be?
Well, it turns out the Hall’s announcement left out a pretty major change to the selection process for modern-era finalists (which according to Judge, even many voters weren’t aware of). In the past, when the committee met in January, they would cut down the 15 finalists to ten and then finally to five. Now, the last of those cutdowns will be to seven, with no further reductions after that, meaning just like with the seniors, coaches, and contributors, voters will have to leave two names off their ballot when making their final votes for induction. It’s mathematically possible for six candidates to clear the 80% threshold… and conversely, also possible that none of the final seven will.
It’s clear that those that would prefer a “small Hall” have successfully caught the ears of those at the Hall of Fame to change the selection process to incentivize smaller classes. The Hall has moved the process closer to what’s in place at the Baseball Hall of Fame, with massive lists of finalists where the voters can only choose ten, and rarely do enough of them agree on which ten to vote for that more than one or two clear the 75% threshold for induction. Things aren’t quite that bad – the majority of modern-era players to make it to the last stage should still be inducted – but it’s still worth noting that just about everyone, among both fans and voters, hates the Baseball Hall of Fame process, and the baseball Hall, dealing with a sport where there isn’t much difference in how positions other than pitcher are considered, doesn’t have to deal with players at the same position routinely splitting votes. That’s already been a contributing factor to the wide receiver backlogs of recent decades, and forcing voters to make tough decisions on who to induct at the last stage of voting is likely to only make such situations worse.
If these changes were a response to last year’s selection process they seem to be solving the wrong problem. Powell would have been one of the more questionable candidates in the Hall, but the scuttlebutt in the online discussion after the vote was that Parker was long overdue to be inducted already and the decision to keep him out was mystifying. I honestly don’t think the 15-10-7 cutdown sequence is going to last very long, certainly not if Torry Holt doesn’t get inducted in the next three classes. In the meantime, however, I’ll continue to pick five modern-era players for induction in each class, just because there’s no way for me to predict how few or how many players get inducted.
Reading between the lines, it’s apparent that the Hall was primarily acting at the behest of Hall of Famers themselves, who generally would prefer a smaller Hall to ensure maximum prestige and had become concerned that the Hall was electing too many “Hall of Very Good” players, and who will now make up most of the screening committees to pass through primarily those players they’d actually be content with sharing the Hall with (though since they’d be passing through 50 candidates they’d likely still have to pass through potential “Hall of Very Good” players whose fates they won’t have any control of past that point). Conversely, apparently the Hall never consulted voters, even as a courtesy, before making these changes, and many of them still had unanswered questions days later. As such, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Hall walks back, or at least tweaks, some of these changes as soon as next year, after hearing from the selection committee and seeing the results of how this new process plays out in practice the first year.
But among both voters, including Judge, and the commenters on Zoneblitz, the concern is about the prospect of electing too few inductees, not too many. In particular, there seems to be a consensus among both voters and fans that there’s a senior candidate backlog, with far too many senior candidates, especially older ones, that deserve to be in but haven’t gotten their chance, including quite a few All-Decade Team members who haven’t even gotten a shot as finalists. (Judge and his panelists seem to be fine with making it harder to get in but not with putting the pressure on senior candidates to do so.) Some Zoneblitz commenters went so far as to hope that the senior candidates get all of the slots allocated to non-modern-era players for the foreseeable future with the possible exceptions of Belichick and Robert Kraft, and the impression I get is that the voters might be inclined to oblige. (Given that, I’m not sure the splitting of the coach and contributor categories was necessary, considering that it should be pretty rare that both get in.)
Given the conflict between voters and fans who want a larger Hall and enshrinees who want a smaller one, perhaps the Hall should adopt something like Bill Simmons’ Pyramid idea so everyone who people think should be inducted can be, but those who want a more exclusive club can point to however many higher levels they wish as the “true” Hall in their minds. Maybe I’ll put together my own “shadow” Hall of Fame over the course of this season, using Pro Football Reference’s Monitor as a baseline to sort players into tiers, maybe even reviving Da Blog Poll to help sort out borderline cases between two different tiers. Perhaps that could strike a balance between recognizing players deserving of recognition and reserving a place for the true best of the best.