Starting this year, the Pro Football Hall of Fame is naming at least 50 modern-era players (more if there’s a tie for the last spot), narrowed down from the nominees named in September, who played at least part of their careers in the past 25 years and have been retired at least 5, as candidates for induction to the Hall of Fame. No more than five modern-era players are inducted each year, so at least 90% of the players listed below won’t be inducted this year and most might not be inducted at all, and this list was determined by a “screening committee” separate from the main group of Hall of Fame voters so there isn’t necessarily any correlation with what Hall voters are thinking. Still, it’s useful to see what players the screening committee members see as potentially induction-worthy, and we can look at their relevant honors and argue over which players are worthy of 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; during the selection process first-year eligible players are listed at the top of whatever category seems appropriate based on their Hall of Fame Monitor number from Pro Football Reference (not the stage I necessarily think they’ll reach). 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, 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 (historically held during Super Bowl weekend and still announced then, but deliberations seem to have been held earlier, in mid-to-late January, in recent years).
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 “Notables Not Advancing” section displays selected nominees not named among the list of 50 candidates. Because this is the first year of this stage, this includes any player that was previously a semifinalist, any first-year eligible player with a Monitor score over 60, any other nominee with one of the top 50 Monitor scores, and any nominee that just lost their last chance not to fall into the senior pool. (Going forward, the rules will be similar to that used for semifinalists in past years, which mostly amounts to dropping the top-50-scores rule.) These players are included purely for reference and interest and shouldn’t imply anything about how “deserving” they are of being nominated (much less inducted). While there’s no history to determine the chances that someone not named at this stage eventually gets inducted, and the pool of voters may have higher opinions of some candidates than the screening committee does, the fact that it would take half of a player’s modern-era eligibility to induct all the players listed here is not a good sign for the chances of someone not listed here to be inducted before falling into the senior pool.
Without further ado, here are the 50 modern-era players chosen by the screening committee for consideration for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2025:
On a cursory glimpse, the verdict of the screening committee isn’t too much of a departure from what the main group of Hall of Fame voters have signaled in the past, with every past semifinalist making the cut. In addition, every first-year eligible player with a Monitor over 64 was chosen, while no first-year eligible player below that mark was, so that looks broadly “reasonable” as well.
Where the head-scratching choices come is on the margin with candidates that have been eligible for a few years, and the really quite glaring choice here is Kam Chancellor. Being a Seattleite, you might think I’d love this, but looking at it objectively, Chancellor has the second-lowest Monitor of any of the quarterfinalists by 14 points over the next-lowest non-special-teams player, and would be the lowest inducted player by a good 10 points. Nor does looking solely at the postseason honors help; players with no first-team All-Pros rarely get inducted, especially outside quarterback and offensive skill positions. Yet the screening committee saw fit to include him over some rather glaring omissions.
Rod Smith has the highest Monitor of the non-included nominees but he also doesn’t have any first-team All-Pros so he might not be that big a loss. NaVorro Bowman, with the next-highest Monitor, is significantly more eyebrow-raising, but to me, the true stunning omission is Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson. My philosophy is that it’s the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Great, and there’s no disputing that Johnson was one of the biggest stars in the game, certainly outside quarterbacks, for an extended period, a star on par with the recently-inducted Terrell Owens. I fully expected his brash approach to the game not to endear him to the sportswriters that make up the Hall of Fame voters, and given his mediocre Monitor I wouldn’t be heartbroken if he never gets inducted, but I expected the screening committee, with its different membership and larger size of the group it’s tasked to select, to have some more respect for his impact on his era.
But I’m not sure Johnson is a more offensive omission – certainly it’s not more shocking – than Shane Lechler, who was named to the NFL 100 All-Time Team as one of the two greatest punters of all time, and in fact has the highest Monitor score of any punter by over ten points. I would seriously ask the screening committee members if they think the induction of Ray Guy was a mistake, because it’s hard to defend that and yet say that Lechler is less deserving of consideration than Kam freaking Chancellor. (Or, for that matter, than Gary Anderson, who did play a more prominent position and has a higher Monitor, third-highest of any kicker, but wasn’t really on my radar for consideration and whose Monitor is still nearly 30 points behind Adam Vinatieri, the second-highest kicker.) There was some concern that the screening committees being made up primarily of existing Hall of Famers might skew their results, and I can’t help but wonder if that might have something to do with Chancellor’s selection, or, perhaps, some of the omissions.
(On Talk of Fame Two, both Clark Judge and John Turney expressed disappointment that Randall Cunningham wasn’t selected either. His Monitor is low enough that it’s not entirely a surprise, but considering he was a precursor to the multiple-threat quarterbacks of today, he certainly had a case that would have been stronger than his resume on paper. Turney was also disappointed in Lechler’s non-selection despite having his own misgivings about him.)
Also, given the mess that was the nomenclature for the senior candidates last year, I’m not sure I blame the Hall for not providing a name to distinguish the group of candidates chosen by the screening committee from the other rounds of consideration, but you can see how awkward it was for me to write this post without having an official name for it, and at least for the modern-era candidates, “quarterfinalists” is both unambiguous and fitting considering the semifinalist stage will cut this list in half.
Speaking of the senior candidates, their list, having already been pared down to 50 by their own screening committee two weeks earlier, was further cut down to 25 the day before the modern-era screening committee finally announced the results of their work. For this list, candidates with the same selection history over the last two years are ordered based on their age before how long they’ve been in the pool, with living players listed oldest-first followed by dead players by year of eligibility, as the committees are likely to place a premium on candidates that are still alive to enjoy their selection but might not be for much longer. In the list of nominated players not advanced by the screening committee, in addition to Lavvie Dilweg as the player that made the list of 25 two years ago but not since, I’ve included the players that have newly entered the senior pool that were preliminary candidates in the past in the modern-era pool, any players qualifying for the All-Snub Team with top-20 Monitor scores, the highest-Monitor defensive tackle as a position without anyone advanced by the senior committee, the player that, along with Dilweg, was most mentioned as the biggest senior-screening-committee snub at Talk of Fame Two, and the player that I think is the oldest living nominee – although when I attempted to look for the oldest living NFL players I saw a number of versions of the same out-of-date listicle that included players younger than Billy Howton but not Howton himself, despite one of them citing Pro Football Reference for its stats, so I don’t know if the original was wrong or if Howton’s actually dead and PFR (and Wikipedia) missed it. For any other relevant notes, see last year’s post on early-round senior candidates.
The biggest eyebrow-raiser in both of these rounds was Jim Tyrer making it past both cuts – the eligible player with the highest Monitor not to either be inducted or be a modern-era finalist last year, but whose life ended in a murder-suicide. I had thought Tyrer had been unofficially blackballed given those circumstances. I could see why he would make it past the screening committee if that group was focused primarily on his actual playing career and on-paper credentials and was unaware of or discounted the circumstances that explain why he hadn’t previously received consideration, but the cutdown to 25 was made by the main senior committee that’s been responsible for making the cutdowns in years past. Did they assume the screening committee took the end of Tyrer’s life fully into account and sent a signal that it would be okay to induct him now? Or did they decide it was fine to advance him on their own? Or is this on the Hall for including him on the list of nominated senior candidates to begin with?
Whatever the case, this raises questions about Darren Sharper, who like Tyrer has a Monitor strong enough to make the All-Snub Team but hasn’t so much as been nominated since entering the modern-era pool. Though Sharper never ended a life to my knowledge, you could certainly make the argument that his crimes are worse than Tyrer’s – a string of incidents where he drugged and/or raped and/or presented women to others to be raped, resulting in him in the midst of spending over a decade in prison. That’s the sort of thing that points to a deep-seated character flaw, as opposed to Tyrer who doesn’t seem to be known to have done anything bad before his murder-suicide, suggesting more of a problem with mental illness towards the end of his life exacerbated by business failures. It’s especially easy to be sympathetic to Tyrer given what we’ve learned about the impact of concussions in recent decades. Turney’s article on the cutdown to 25 notes some key points that may be contributing to Tyrer’s advancement through the process: the likely contributing factors of CTE and depression, and also that his wife’s family has forgiven him.
That doesn’t make Tyrer good, per se, or even the sort of person you’d want to embrace – witness how WWE continues to “un-person” Chris Benoit whose life ended in similar fashion – but you could make an argument that it makes him more sympathetic than O.J. Simpson (even though Simpson was inducted well before the events of 1994 and probably wouldn’t have been inducted if he’d only been considered afterwards), who lived past his wife’s death to beat the rap, be perceived by many Americans as having used his wealth and fame to get away with murder, became associated with a book that made him even more of a laughingstock and that the families of the deceased considered a confession, and develop a general air of scumminess around him – not to mention the history of spousal abuse even before the murders, or that “if he did it” it would have been motivated by jealousy. (As an aside, there’s a bit in that video that comes off as a hopelessly naive relic of a pre-presidential-candidate-Trump era. Also, I found that video while looking for Keith Olbermann raising the possibility that Simpson’s crimes might have been exacerbated by concussions, which I remembered him doing around the same time period.)
I don’t know if Tyrer should be inducted, and I doubt he will be inducted – at least not this year. And if he isn’t I’ll probably continue to cross out his name on the All-Snub Team and not count him towards any of its thresholds – though if he makes it to the next stage of consideration I’ll have to think about it long and hard. But while my initial reaction to Tyrer making the cutdown to 25 was that there was no longer any excuse not to nominate Sharper, I wouldn’t be surprised or offended if he continued not to be nominated, because Jim Tyrer is not Darren Sharper, nor is he O.J. Simpson, and he might not even be Chris Benoit (who not only took his wife with him, as Tyrer did, but his son as well). I don’t know if you’d want to induct him, but as wife-murderers go, he’s about as sympathetic as you can get – and the circumstances just might have aligned in the right way to make induction at least vaguely defensible.
Good read Morgan and thanks for commenting on Zoneblitz.com. As you can see, we are rabid and passionate about our own subjective, player wishlists for the HOF …