Cantonmetrics: 2024 Inductions and Offseason Snapshot

Senior/Coach/Contributor Semifinalists

Congratulations to Julius Peppers, Andre Johnson, Dwight Freeney, Devin Hester, Patrick Willis, Randy Gradishar, and Steve McMichael on their induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Now it’s time to look at how this year’s selection process affects who the players most likely to get in next year are, and with the 2023 season fully at a close, what active and recently-retired players have most built their resumes for eventual induction into Canton. 

Non-Inducted Finalists and Key First-Ballot Candidates for the Class of 2025

These are the finalists that failed to be inducted into Canton this year, plus the first-ballot candidates in next year’s class with the highest Monitor numbers – in other words, the top candidates to be inducted next year. Names in bold are the modern-era players I predict to be inducted, and for those using screen readers, those players will be listed off in the alt text.

In a year where the committee seemingly threw curveballs at every stage, one more came our way with three of the five modern-era inductees failing to get past the cutdown to ten last year, and a fourth being a first-ballot candidate. I’m not sure any of the choices are all that surprising on their own, certainly to eventually get in if not necessarily this year, though Clark Judge expressed surprise that Freeney would get in over Jared Allen; as eyebrow-raising as it is for me that Hester would get in on his third year on the ballot when no other returner is in the Hall at all, that’s something that had been building with his finalist finishes the last two years, and Hester’s resume is stronger than that of the previous consensus best returner of all time, Billy “White Shoes” Johnson. The bigger surprise is who wasn’t inducted: no Antonio Gates was always within the realm of possibility, and the Hall voters did help clear the wide receiver backlog a little (potentially paving the way for Torry Holt to finally get in next year, especially with Reggie Wayne falling out of the final ten), but this is only the second time no offensive linemen were inducted at all since 2005. Had Willie Anderson failed to make the final ten I might have called an audible and switched to Jahri Evans as my choice for induction.

Then there’s the Hall voters rejecting the senior-candidate bid of Art Powell, the first time that’s happened since Dick Stanfel in 2012, and Buddy Parker being the first coach to be rejected since coaches were separated from the player pool. It’s a damning statement, especially considering the perception of a senior-candidate backlog, though whether it’s damning of the modern-era committee, the senior committee, or the candidates is an exercise for the viewer. (It’s worth noting that Powell’s 43.92 Monitor score would have been the third-lowest of any Hall of Fame player, only barely beating out Fred Dean’s 43.85. Of course, Rodney Harrison is only three points higher than that…)

Note how crowded the list of first-year candidates is. If the top five Monitors on the list all make the list of finalists Earl Thomas would still make the All-Snub Team. That doesn’t necessarily mean any of these players warrant immediate induction – even Luke Kuechly’s resume isn’t that much stronger than that of Willis or Zach Thomas, and those two both had waits of decent length (I wouldn’t be surprised if Darren Woodson or even Eric Allen were inducted over Kuechly) – but it does mean some of this year’s more questionable finalists, especially Harrison and Fred Taylor, may turn out to have been placeholders for some of this year’s first-year candidates. Kuechly, Terrell Suggs, and Adam Vinatieri are likely to come under the heaviest scrutiny the earliest, but next year will also mark the start of the Great Debate surrounding Eli Manning. Jim Plunkett is the only multi-time Super Bowl winner not in the Hall of Fame, but the worst resume of the multi-Super-Bowl winners that are in the Hall is Terry Bradshaw’s 1/3/70s, which would seem to be superior to Eli’s 0/4/none. Are two lucky playoff runs, including two of the most iconic plays in Super Bowl history and accounting for two of Tom Brady’s three Super Bowl losses, enough to honor a career that, outside those playoff runs, might not even be considered Hall of Very Good material? And hey, since we brought it up…

All-Snub Team

The following chart contains the top 20 players not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, any other players on the “All-Snub Team” based on the top non-Hall players at each position, and any senior candidates that would fill spots on the All-Snub Team currently filled by modern-era players to form the All-Senior Candidate team. Note that this is based on Pro Football Reference’s Hall of Fame Monitor metric only, so it does not necessarily reflect my opinion about who the best or most deserving players are, and even to the extent that it does, it doesn’t necessarily mean these players should be in the Hall of Fame, especially the players closer to the bottom, nor does it mean I would object to any player not on this list being inducted. It also means the list does not include any players who played the bulk of their career before 1950, as the Hall of Fame Monitor doesn’t include such players. Note also that players who were modern-era finalists in the most recent cycle are generally not considered snubs unless they are new finalists in their last five years of eligibility. In addition, I’ve made one change to this list since last year, a result of my becoming aware of the likely reason why Darren Sharper has not been on the list of modern-era nominees; players that are likely blacklisted, officially or unofficially, by the Hall voters due to offenses to morality they’ve committed have their names strikethroughed and generally do not count towards the top 20 or towards All-Snub or All-Senior Candidate Team membership. In addition to Sharper serving time in prison for rape, this also applies to Jim Tyrer, the highest-scoring player not in the Hall and the only senior candidate with a Monitor score over 86, who ended his life in a murder-suicide.

The All-Snub teams consist of one QB, one RB, two WR, one TE, one flex player (RB/WR/TE), two OT, two G, and one C on offense; and two DE, one DT, three LB, one flex player (DT or LB), and four defensive backs (generally two CB and two S) on defense. Special teams players are not included because there are so few of them in the Hall and they aren’t looked at fondly by the Hall of Fame Monitor. Players on the main list whose position is in bold are on the All-Snub Team, while those in italics are not on the All-Snub Team but are on the All-Senior Candidate team. Years of eligibility are relative to the 2025 cycle, with numbers in bold either already senior candidates or entering their last year of eligibility. In the 2023 and 2024 columns, senior candidates may include an indication of the stage of the senior candidate induction process they reached.

I don’t have much to say about this, and besides what I point out above Steve Wisniewski has only a couple years of modern-era eligibility left (plus the senior committee might have signaled that it’s about to put up a couple more All-Snub Team members up for consideration) so it’ll be at least a few years before this list remains unchanged from one year to the next (and I still reserve the right to place this on a static page I update every year an update is warranted), so instead I want to go on a mini-rant about how HTML tables have become increasingly neglected by browsers, WordPress themes, and seemingly even the W3C itself, resulting in people who want to present data in tabular format increasingly using images to do so. One of the underrated drawbacks of this is that text in images is generally invisible to search engines, so if people are looking for how a particular player might be doing in terms of making it to the Hall of Fame, and I don’t mention them in my write-ups, these posts won’t come up. This is especially a problem for this post where I talk about active players and give assessments of them that aren’t obvious from Pro Football Reference’s Monitor pages alone. Part of it may be a mobile thing; most of these tables would be too wide for the screen on mobile if they were formatted as tables. I’m not sure if going back to my original plan of maintaining a publicly-accessible spreadsheet on Google Drive would help. I considered switching to listing every name in every table in the alt text, but WordPress doesn’t allow you to insert line breaks in alt text so it feels like it would be abusing that by making it go too long.

Top 54 Active Resumes

Bringing back one of my old post concepts, these are the 54 active players with the highest Monitor numbers, bumped up from 50 in its prior incarnation to reflect the number of players on an NFL roster, although the header on the chart still says top 50 because I allow up to four players outside the top 54, but with postseason honors strong enough to warrant at least borderline induction in my view, to bump out players that don’t have strong enough resumes for induction. (Also, once a player makes this list they generally can only leave by retiring.) Please note that this list includes all players that played in the most recently concluded season, as well as any players that missed the season to injury but with every expectation of playing again, including any players that have announced their retirement. This both allows me to hedge my bets against any unretirements, and is more fair to players who might announce their retirement later in the offseason or simply aren’t able to find another team to play for.

The Projection column attempts to assess what the player’s chances of making the Hall would be if they retired today, in other words, it doesn’t attempt to predict the future course of their career. It is based only on All-Decade selections, All-Pro team selections, Pro Bowl selections, and (for quarterbacks only) Super Bowl wins (with some additional consideration given to career yards for wide receivers only), based on the established record of players at their position with similar resumes that played the significant majority of their careers after the AFL-NFL merger. An asterisk in the All-Decade column indicates that the player made the All-Decade team as a returner, not at their primary offensive or defensive position.

I put together this chart on the same sheet as the “key players becoming eligible in five years” list below, which is why the bars next to the Monitor scores are still sized for Tom Brady. Next year Aaron Rodgers should set the standard. Incidentally, here’s the complete list of players with Monitor scores over 200: Jerry Rice (the only player over 300), Brady, Peyton Manning, Reggie White, Lawrence Taylor, Walter Payton, Bruce Smith. That’s seven players and Rodgers may well just need to stay healthy and put together a Pro Bowl season to become the eighth, which is incredible to think about.

A note about Chandler Jones: although he never suited up this season, he remained on the Raiders’ active roster into the season, only being removed from the active roster September 23 and released a week later after an arrest. By my understanding, that means he’s considered to have played this season under the Hall of Fame’s eligibility rules, which means if he never plays again I’ll need to adjust his listed final season from the 2022 listed on Pro Football Reference.

Players to watch

This list consists of all players not on the Top 50 Resumes list above with a weighted approximate value of at least 10 times their number of years in the league, or with Monitor numbers over 20, and whose AV for the most recently completed season is at least twice their number of years in the league. It is intended to provide a look at players on pace to at least potentially enter the Hall of Fame conversation, but without a long enough career to rack up enough of a resume to actually be in that conversation yet. Pro Football Reference only calculates Monitor numbers for players that have played at least 50 games, about three full seasons; for non-qualifying players with weighted career AVs over 30, I’ve attempted to calculate their Monitor number by hand (or at least in Excel), indicated by italics. (Because AV is displayed on the PFR site only as whole numbers, and each whole-number point of weighted AV is worth half a Monitor point, italicized Monitor calculations are necessarily approximate.) Non-qualifying players with weighted AV too low to justify hand-calculating them are sorted by weighted AV.

Note that I wouldn’t normally have calculated Sauce Gardner’s Monitor if it weren’t for Justin Fields’ being so low. As with last year, some of the biggest star quarterbacks have surprisingly low Monitors; besides Jared Goff (and Kirk Cousins’ journeyman career being good enough for the main list), Dak Prescott and even Derek Carr (!) both have Monitor scores over 40, placing them ahead of the likes of Josh Allen, Jalen Hurts, Justin Herbert, and Joe Burrow. For Allen, Herbert, and Burrow, sharing a conference with Patrick Mahomes and Lamar Jackson obviously doesn’t help when it comes to getting named to Pro Bowls or making Super Bowls, and Goff, Prescott, and Carr have the benefit of two more seasons than Allen and four more than the other three, but it’s a reminder that some of these players have gotten more hype than their actual accomplishments have warranted, and that these QBs might have to catch up to Mahomes and Jackson pretty quick if they want to put together resumes that can be remotely considered Hall of Fame-worthy.

Key players becoming eligible in 2028

This list consists of any players that made the top 54 list above last year that did not play this year and may not ever play again.

Now, I said I considered Chandler Jones to still be active this season because he remained on the active roster during the season, but DeSean Jackson did the whole “one-day contract to retire for the team he’s most known for playing for” trick during the season, and I can’t imagine that would be considered being active for the Hall of Fame’s purposes. I talked about Tom Brady and J.J. Watt last year; Matt Ryan never announced his retirement but that may have been for monetary purposes more than anything else and while there was occasional chatter about another team picking him up he seemed content to spend the whole season in the CBS booth. Ndamukong Suh and Chris Harris both seemed interested in playing again and even seemed to have some reported interest, but if you missed a year because no one was willing to bring you on and have you play, I can’t assume that’s going to change next year. (For all the accolades about Joe Flacco coming off the couch to lead the Browns to the playoffs, it’s worth noting that he did start four games for the Jets last year, so it’s not like he was that removed from the game.)