Offseason Snapshot | Player Quarterfinalists
This week, as part of its revised selection process, the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s committees to advance candidates in the Coach and Contributor categories reduced the number of candidates from 12 or 25, respectively, earlier in the month to nine “semifinalists” in each category. Each committee will meet virtually later this month to choose one finalist in each category to advance to the full selection committee this January, who will compete with each other and three senior candidates for up to three slots for induction. As such most, if not all, of these candidates won’t be inducted this year and may not be inducted at all, but we can still see who the Hall of Fame voters consider most worthy among the candidates in each category, who might be likely to be chosen by the committees in future years, and look at the relevant honors and argue over who should be inducted.
Candidates are generally sorted according to their performance on last year’s ballot, with those candidates that have advanced the furthest listed above those that haven’t advanced as far. Generally, the order in which candidates are listed will only change to arrange them based on the stage reached in the most recent year. Note that I’ve indicated the intermediate cutdowns within the final round of consideration for 2023’s combined coach/contributor group, but to my knowledge those intermediate cutdowns weren’t reported for 2024’s group, so I’ve marked them all as reaching the final twelve with an asterisk.
For (head) coaches only, I’ve listed the closest analogues to the categories that matter the most for players: whether they were selected to an All-Decade Team (all inactive coaches that have been named to All-Decade Teams are already in the Hall), their win-loss record, their championships won, and any Coach of the Year awards won (though this last category doesn’t necessarily correspond with Hall of Fame-worthiness, as it tends to go to coaches who led teams that weren’t expected to do as well as they did, neglecting coaches who engage in year-to-year excellence; no coaches on the list below won both Super Bowls and Coach of the Year awards). For contributors, who can cover a very diverse range of categories, some of which can’t be clearly quantified at all, I’ve attempted to summarize their accomplishments based on the Hall of Fame’s descriptions and what I know of them; I’ve also resorted to short summaries for candidates in the coach category that seem to have been nominated primarily for their accomplishments as assistants.
Coaches
I talked about the vanishingly small rate of induction for coaches and contributors under the new format, but to bring the point home, even though these are arguably the categories that pushed me to start Cantonmetrics to begin with, I’m honestly not sure I’m going to do this post in future years. I mentioned when the new process was announced that the commenters on Zoneblitz preferred if the three slots for people other than modern-era players all went to senior candidates for the foreseeable future, with the only exceptions being Bill Belichick and Robert Kraft, and that my impression was that the voters might be inclined to oblige. That means that until the process changes again, these two categories might not have much turnover from year to year, even to the point of who gets advanced to the full selection committee considering they wouldn’t be voted down so much as just getting squeezed out by the other candidates, resulting in little signal to the committees that they should advance someone else. (Considering it was these categories that pushed me away from using Google Sheets to host most of the data, it’s particularly ironic that it’s the same categories that might push me in that direction again, making it less necessary to make full-fledged posts each year.)
Then again, unlike the senior committee, the coaches committee actually took the hint from last year’s rejection of Buddy Parker and didn’t even name him to the initially-announced list of 25 candidates (whether or not they should have, considering the consensus seemed to have been that he was a more unjust snub than Art Powell, is another matter), and as I thought might be the case, didn’t list Belichick either despite it becoming clear that he was, in fact, eligible the year immediately after his last year coaching. Regardless of what the Hall’s eligibility rules say, the voters don’t want to induct a coach that still intends to return to coaching.
Perhaps underscoring the lack of qualified coaches past Belichick, there seem to be a lot of candidates here whose careers were more long than distinguished. Every fully-retired coach with over 150 regular-season wins not already inducted was included on the list of 12 candidates, and a number were known in their time primarily for their mediocrity and lack of success, being just successful enough to avoid getting fired; by the time Jeff Fisher’s career ended the tendency of his teams to go 8-8 or 9-7 every year had become a meme. Mike Holmgren and Mike Shanahan have strong enough cases as coaches of Super Bowl-winning teams that I wouldn’t object to their induction, but this sort of drives home that by including every coach in the final 12, I’m including candidates that might not even pass the sort of muster required to make the modern-era nominees list.
(Though before coaches were split from the modern-era player pool, Richie Petitbon was listed among the nominees six straight years from 2014 to 2019; of the other coaches that haven’t yet been inducted, only Holmgren, Parker, Dan Reeves, and Clark Shaughnessy were named as pre-2020 nominees alongside the modern era players. Yet this is Petitbon’s first time appearing on a publicly-released list since then, and he got left at the altar at the cutdown to nine.)
Contributors
Last year I mentioned that what was then the combined coach/contributor committee seemed to be very consistent in terms of what stage they advanced candidates, to a degree not the case with the senior committee. The coaches committee remained more or less consistent, advancing every coach other than Parker to make last year’s final twelve (though helped by the fact that only two coaches in the final 25 got lost in the cut to 12, one of which didn’t advance to the final nine this year), but the contributor committee did not, with five candidates that made last year’s list of 25 combined coaches and contributors failing to make this year’s list of 25 contributors alone, including one that made it to last year’s final twelve.
The remaining four contributors to make last year’s final twelve were advanced to the “November Nine” as it were, and all but one of the others in the final nine were on last year’s list of 25. The remaining one, however, is more than a little eyebrow-raising to the point of being outrageous. Doug Williams’ blurb on the Hall of Fame’s announcements of each cutdown talks almost entirely about his career as a player, with the only thing contributor-y being the vague “credited with creating opportunities for future Black athletes”, which could just as easily refer to the milestones he achieved as a player than anything else. Williams did work in a number of football-adjacent capacities after his playing career ended, including some short stints as a scout for NFL teams, but hadn’t had a stable non-coaching job until he was hired by the Washington front office in 2014, which seems like a pretty short window to build a Hall of Fame-worthy resume as a contributor, especially considering Washington’s mediocrity over that period. It seems to me that this might be an attempt to circumvent a resume as a player that’s rather lacking on an objective basis (a Monitor barely over 30 and not even a single Pro Bowl selection), which would set a really bad precedent.
Clark Judge questions why he’s even eligible (and also explains some of the push behind him). I do have to quibble with the notion that any former player can’t be considered a contributor; Bucko Kilroy was All-Decade as a player and John Wooten has a 1/2 resume (one first-team All-Pro, two Pro Bowls), but both are clearly on the list in non-player roles, whereas this seems to be exploiting their precedent as a loophole (and elsewhere Judge notes that Williams was actually on the list of senior-candidate nominees, raising the prospect of him reaching the finalists twice in different capacities, which is more serious than the situation with Kilroy or Wooten).
Williams clearly represents a milestone in the history of the game, but I agree with Judge that the Ralph Hay Pioneer Award would be the appropriate level of recognition for him; but if Judge’s last sentence, that “he belongs in Canton, but as a player”, is meant to be an endorsement of actual induction, I can’t agree with that. Doug Williams is not Jackie Robinson, in terms of his importance to the game or society, and certainly not in terms of the caliber of his play as a player; you can make the argument that he basically piggybacked off of an all-time defense and a Hall of Fame coach to his Super Bowl appearances. No Hall of Fame player has a Monitor under 40; even questionable selections, or people arguably selected more for what they did after leaving the game than during their playing career (like Dick LeBeau), had significantly more distinguished careers than Williams. In terms of his on-the-field accomplishments he’d be the least distinguished Hall of Famer by a wide margin. Give him the Pioneer Award and call it a day.
(Not that it matters in the short term, because Kraft is probably the odds-on favorite to be chosen by the committee and potentially inducted; Don Van Natta’s ESPN piece this summer about Kraft’s quest for induction showed how his overbearing efforts to get himself inducted, including his creative control over the recent “The Dynasty” documentary, may have actually hurt his chances among the people controlling his fate, but the piece itself may ultimately grease his path to induction. One of my takeaways was that a major reason voters have been reticent to induct Kraft is because of their belief, without any real evidence, that he knew more about the Spygate scandal than has so far been known – but I guarantee that just about every one of them would have voted to induct Belichick, who actually did the spying, on the first ballot if the eligibility rules hadn’t changed, and it doesn’t make sense to me to hold Spygate against Kraft but not Belichick. Van Natta notes that three owners with arguably weaker resumes have entered Canton ahead of Kraft in the last decade, but while Kraft may be older than them, Eddie DeBartolo, Jerry Jones, and Pat Bowlen all owned their respective franchises long before Kraft bought the Patriots, so it’s easier to argue that it was their “turn” or at least that they had more time to build a resume out of sheer longevity.)