Morgan Wick’s Shadow Pro Football Hall of Fame: Initial Ballot

As I wrote earlier, I’m working on a “shadow Hall of Fame” to settle the debate over how exclusive the Pro Football Hall of Fame is by sorting players into five tiers, adopting Bill Simmons’ “pyramid” model for Halls of Fame. You can help by voting on the initial ballot, which contains 500 players, 50 coaches, and 50 contributors, telling me which level you think each player should be inducted to or if they should be inducted at all.

The players listed on the ballot consist of:

  • All current Hall of Famers
  • All players to make at least the final 50 modern-era or senior candidate lists in the 2025 round of balloting, and have a Hall of Fame Monitor at Pro Football Reference over 40
  • Any other players with a Monitor over 60
  • Any players that started their career before 1955 and therefore don’t have a Monitor that made the list of preliminary senior candidates
  • Any players that have been inducted as part of Not In Hall Of Fame‘s Hall of Fame Revisited project because of their contributions in the NFL
  • Other players added at my discretion, with a broad goal of 375 players with Monitor scores and 125 without

This does not include a number of players that people have called for induction; you may add them in the Other category or leave a comment here or elsewhere vouching for them. The coaches and contributors consist of current Hall of Famers and people on the current ballots that I consider particularly deserving or likely to be inducted; these are subject to straight up/down votes, but you can also vote on if they should be sorted into tiers like the players.

The ballot is located HERE.

After the jump, if you need more help to decide what level to vote players to, I’ve adapted Simmons’ descriptions of each level in his proposed baseball and basketball Halls to the football context to serve as rules of thumb. Note that these have been only lightly edited from what Simmons wrote in each context and don’t necessarily translate to the football Hall, and I don’t necessarily agree that these are or should be criteria to separate the levels.

Read more

Introducing Morgan Wick’s Shadow Pro Football Hall of Fame

Less than a week after the Class of 2022 was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Deion Sanders implicitly trashed it. In a video running just over a minute and 45 seconds, Sanders claimed that “the Hall of Fame ain’t the Hall of Fame no more”, that it had become a “free for all” where players that were merely good could be inducted, that the Hall should be for “people who changed the game” and not those who just had “three or four good years”.

Sanders didn’t name any names of any specific players that he felt didn’t belong in Canton, but a fellow Hall of Famer did call out a specific member of the 2022 class as undeserving and even problematic. Two months earlier, Bruce Smith, the NFL’s all-time sack leader, questioned the reasoning behind the induction of Tony Boselli as part of the 2022 class, specifically that people were citing Boselli’s performance against Smith in a 1996 playoff game. Using players’ performances against other Hall of Famers as criteria for induction, in Smith’s view, would erode the “exclusive fraternity” of Hall of Famers by incentivizing players to play up their performance against other Hall of Famers, creating “friction and discord”. Smith also noted that Boselli’s accomplishments weren’t quite comparable to other left tackles since the quarterback he was protecting, Mark Brunell, was left-handed, meaning Boselli wasn’t protecting his blind side.

Boselli had a relatively brief seven-year career, but was highly acclaimed with five Pro Bowl selections and was named first-team All-Pro three times as well as being selected to the All-Decade Team of the 1990s. It would certainly seem that the people who watched him play felt he could have protected the blind side of a right-handed quarterback at a level comparable to the best to do so, and the 1996 playoff game is just a single piece of evidence in favor of that. His Hall of Fame Monitor score at Pro Football Reference is 80.68, behind only two tackles not in Canton: Jim Tyrer and the only-recently-retired Jason Peters.

A more questionable 2022 inductee, if you wanted to do so, would be Sam Mills, who was named first-team All-Pro by the AP only once (though he was named to the first team by other selectors on two other occasions) in an 11-year career that got him named to the Pro Bowl five times (tied for the fewest of any post-merger linebacker in Canton), resulting in a Monitor score of only 55.78. Dave Wilcox is the only linebacker with a lower score in Canton, and among inside linebackers Mills has the lowest score by over seven points. Also worth noting is that year’s senior inductee, Cliff Branch, whose 8685 receiving yards is the second-fewest of any wide receiver in Canton who played his entire career after the merger (not counting Devin Hester), and Drew Pearson, unlike Branch, was named to an All-Decade team.

Read more