Cantonmetrics: 2024 Finalists

Offseason Snapshot | Senior/Coach/Contributor Semifinalists | All-Snub Team

Each year, the Pro Football Hall of Fame names at least 15 modern-era players (more if there’s a tie for the last spot), narrowed down from the semifinalists named in November, who played at least part of their careers in the past 25 years and have been retired at least 5, as finalists for induction to the Hall of Fame. Before Super Bowl LVIII, the panel will meet virtually and narrow down the list of modern-era finalists down to five. Those five will be considered alongside three senior candidates and one coach or contributor, each selected by nine-member subpanels of the larger panel last August, for a total of eight. From this list, at least four and no more than nine people will be selected for induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Unless they have only a handful of years of eligibility left, players that are named finalists are almost always inducted eventually, so this provides a glimpse at what players can look forward to eventual induction.

Players are generally sorted according to their performance on past ballots, with those players that have advanced the furthest listed above those that haven’t advanced as far, and those that have advanced more recently listed above those that haven’t advanced as far as recently. Generally, the order in which players are listed only changes to arrange players based on the stage reached in the most recent year, and each new player to become eligible is listed at the top of their applicable category. The stages are abbreviated and color-coded in the “Last 5 Years” columns based on a system I shamelessly stole from another blog post a decade or so ago I probably couldn’t find if I looked for it today: “UNL” if a candidate wasn’t even among the nominees that year, “PRE” if they only reached the nominees stage, “Semi” if they were among the 25 semifinalists (this stage), and “T15” or “T10” if they were among the finalists announced in January and were eliminated at the first or second stage, respectively, of deliberation.

To the right of the “Last 5 Years” columns are the various stats and honors that go into the Hall of Fame Monitor, along with the Monitor itself, which is color-coded with the background moving from red to green as the number climbs from 40 to 80. To the left of the Monitor are those awards that apply regardless of position: All-Decade team membership, MVPs (but not Defensive Player of the Year awards even though PFR treats them as equivalent to MVPs), first-team All-Pro selections, and Pro Bowl selections. There are two different columns for All-Pro team selections, with the one on the right counting only the most commonly cited selections by the Associated Press, while the one on the left counts each year a player was selected All-Pro by any of the three organizations recognized by the NFL’s official record books, generally the AP, Pro Football Writers Association, and Sporting News. Even though PFR’s own Approximate Value calculation can make up close to half of each player’s Monitor number, I haven’t listed it here. Statistical categories specific to particular positions are not listed here. Finally, the “Semifinalists Not Advancing” section lists those semifinalists that were not named to the list of finalists.

Without further ado, here are the 15 modern-era finalists for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2024:

I am officially worried about the current crop of Hall of Fame voters. Eric Berry’s failure to even be nominated was eyebrow-raising but not knowing what into the list of nominations it’s possible for it to be completely understandable. Passing up Brandon Marshall and Haloti Ngata as semifinalists for Hines Ward and Vince Wilfork was a bit head-scratching, but Ward and Wilfork had been semifinalists in past years, I could buy that Marshall and Ngata looked worse on film than their postseason honors might suggest relative to some of the players named as semifinalists, and it didn’t necessarily mean anything about whether or when any of them would be inducted.

But now we’re reaching the stage where, unless you’re in your last few years on the ballot, you’re almost guaranteed to be inducted, and while the voters did advance both first-year eligible players as expected, and fixed last year’s snub of Jahri Evans, the remaining three spots opened up by last year’s inductees (and Albert Lewis aging out of the modern-era pool) all went to very marginal candidates. As skeptical as I’ve been about Ward’s credentials, I feel like the voters have started jerking him around unfairly, as he’s been a semifinalist pretty much every year he’s been on the ballot while none of these new finalists were even semifinalists five years ago, and Ward has a higher Monitor number than any of them.

Eric Allen has the highest Monitor number of the three yet seems the least likely to be inducted as he only has two years left in his eligibility (though the same forces that got him this far this late could well get him in before either of the other two). Rodney Harrison has the lowest Monitor number (and would have the lowest Monitor of any inducted defensive back, and has been selected as a semifinalist the least of the three so would be the one I would more naturally swap out for Ward), and as with Bill Cowher and Jimmy Johnson being inducted in the Centennial Class and cutting Don Coryell and Tom Flores’ places in line in the process, it’s easy to think his continued visibility on TV has something to do with that, but the most offensive selection to me might be Fred Taylor, who has a grand total of one Pro Bowl to his name, one second-team All-Pro selection, and zero first-team All-Pros, yet is now likely to be inducted before Ricky Watters (0/5 and only two years of eligibility left) or Eddie George (1/4, albeit a lower monitor than Taylor). Larry Czonka and Floyd Little have lower Monitors but both have at least one first-team All-Pro and at least five Pro Bowls; the weakest resume of any inducted running back might be John Riggins’ 1/1/80s, with Little’s 1/5 the weakest of any non-All-Decade Team member, and Taylor can’t even measure up to Riggins before considering he’s not an All-Decade selection. Some might call these “Hall of Very Good” choices.

Based on Monitors these spots should have gone to Steve Smith, Anquan Boldin, and either James Harrison or Ward; if the voters understandably don’t want to add more wideouts to an already clogged category and frustrate the path to induction for the ones already there, the choices become James Harrison, Watters, and then Allen becomes a defensible third choice although Marshall, Ngata, Cornelius Bennett, or Steve Wisniewski, all non-semifinalists, would all have higher Monitors than Allen or Watters (except Bennett compared to Watters). (Watters has also been selected as a semifinalist more in recent years than Rodney Harrison, so would be an alternative pick to fill his spot if the voters didn’t want to bring in Ward or Smith.) The only semifinalists with worse Monitors than Taylor or Rodney Harrison were George and Robert Mathis. PFR’s rough measure of how likely someone is to be inducted isn’t and shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of how deserving one is, and Rodney Harrison does have more first-team All-Pros than Allen (though Allen has more Pro Bowls than any other semifinalist that was left out of the finalists last year except Evans), but Taylor being in line for induction feels really egregious, like the voters have decided that everything’s made up and the awards don’t matter, and James Harrison’s 2/5 would probably be my choice for the player who should most feel robbed, if any.

I suppose with the exception of Rodney Harrison, who really does seem to have “jumped the line”, I can’t say I should be too surprised at this, but it does scramble trying to figure out who might be in line for induction among future eligible players. And maybe I was wrong to say in last year’s Offseason Snapshot that Larry Fitzgerald would be the last player to further clog the wide receiver backlog for a while, because that backlog may extend further back than I thought.

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