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.
Two years later, the Hall announced sweeping changes to its induction process, including the introduction of new screening committees, a majority of each consisting of Hall of Famers themselves, that would narrow down the lists of over 100 modern-era and senior nominees to 50 players each before the selection committee would work to narrow them down further. The Hall also changed the rules for the final stage of induction by making the selection committee consider more candidates than the number of slots available – seven modern-era players for five slots, and a combined five senior candidates, coaches, and contributors for three slots – rather than simply giving each candidate a straight up-down vote, moving closer to the process used by the Baseball Hall of Fame.
But everyone hates the Baseball Hall’s process, and many observers and voters didn’t like these changes either. To these people, the problem with the Hall is that it has too few inductees, not too many, especially from the period before the merger, with concern that the new process will result in the existing senior candidate backlog getting worse. (Notably, the Pro Football Hall has a significantly lower percentage of all the players to ever play the game in its walls than most comparable Halls.) Voters might be fine in theory with making it harder to get into Canton, but not with putting the onus on the senior candidates to do so by making them compete for spots with coaches and contributors, and even the tighter modern-era process could result in more players slipping through the cracks and being left to the senior committee to induct, making more players have to wait longer. Hall of Famers like Sanders and Smith would prefer if their gold jackets were as exclusive as possible, but that doesn’t mean that players like Boselli aren’t deserving.
I hadn’t heard of Sanders’ comments at the time, but at least among the commenters on Zoneblitz, the consensus seemed to be that the Hall was responding to him and his concerns specifically. But Sanders didn’t call for making it more difficult to be inducted; in fact he specifically said that “I think all the guys that are inducted definitely are deserving”. Rather, his solution was very different:
It needs to be a different color jacket. My jacket’s got to be a different color. It needs to be a starting 11, it needs to be an upper room. My head [bust] don’t belong with some of these other heads that’s in the Hall of Fame…Put my head where my head is supposed to be. My head isn’t supposed to be by them.
In other words, Sanders is vouching for Bill Simmons’ “pyramid” idea.
Simmons first publicly proposed the idea of a Hall of Fame “pyramid” in the context of baseball in 2002 based on a conversation he and some friends had had several years prior (and also acknowledged that they had independently come up with an idea similar to one laid out by Bill James). If you search for “bill simmons hall of fame pyramid”, though, the vast majority of the results will talk about it in the context of basketball, where Simmons not only laid out the idea but dedicated over a third of his The Book of Basketball, originally published in 2009, to ranking the top 96 players in NBA history and assigning each one to a level of his pyramid.
Like Sanders, Simmons doesn’t think the greatest players of all time should necessarily be lumped together with marginal players that only barely made the Hall. He instead proposes breaking up the Hall into five levels, with more distinguished players being selected for a higher level. Someone visiting the Hall would slowly work their way from the bottom floor and the Level 1 Hall of Famers all the way up to the Pantheon, the Level 5 space reserved for the greatest players of all time. In the context of football, Sanders and Smith could rightfully take their place in the Pantheon while Boselli would be down at level 2 or something.
I actually don’t think this idea necessarily works as well for football as it does baseball and basketball. In those sports, the value of each position is relatively equal – pitchers are more valuable than position players, but not that much more (especially since they tend to be very weak hitters when they bat at all). That’s especially the case in basketball, where someone might not even know or care what position a player played. But in football, the quarterback is clearly the star of the team ahead of any other position, and even the best offensive linemen, especially outside left tackle, are relatively anonymous – before even getting into special teams where only four primarily-special teams players have been inducted at all.
The center with the highest Monitor score is Dermontti Dawson at 123.50, below eight quarterbacks and enough other players at other positions that I’m not even sure he’d make the Pantheon at all without any sort of positional quota. (Of course, the Monitor doesn’t cover the whole history of pro football and it’s entirely possible, nay likely, that Mel Hein, who played in the 30s and 40s, would be considered Pantheon-worthy, although it’s worth noting that a) Hein played both offense and defense and b) no pure center ranked higher than 63rd on NFL Network’s 2010 list of the 100 greatest players, with Hein at #96, low enough that I’d still find it doubtful that any would make the Pantheon.) That’s the problem with Sanders’ “starting 11” idea – it would still conflate players of vastly varying importance based on the importance and fame of their positions, giving Dawson or Hein a place of greater honor than Peyton Manning. (On top of that, the raw number of inductees could result in over 40 Pantheon members even before getting to Dawson, some of which could be decidedly obscure by modern standards, and that might not make it look particularly exclusive.)
Nonetheless, perhaps this is the best way to settle the difference between those in favor of a smaller Hall and those that think the Hall hasn’t inducted enough players, between players who want their status in the Hall to remain exclusive and those that want to honor those unjustly left out. Sanders and Smith can tout their membership in the Pantheon while other deserving players can fill in the lower levels; if you’re a “small Hall” person, you can consider your Hall to consist only of those on levels 2 or 3 or above, or even just the Pantheon if you’re particularly exclusive about it.
So let’s refine Simmons’ idea to something that can work in the real world. Referring to “level 2” or “level 3” Hall of Famers sounds clunky, so let’s replace it with a star system, where someone could be a “2-Star Hall of Famer” or a “4-Star Hall of Famer”. Sanders wants to give higher-level Hall of Famers different colored jackets; let’s differentiate them by the busts or plaques themselves. 1-Star Hall of Famers could have a plain stone bust, 2-Stars through 4-Stars work their way up through bronze, silver, and gold, and 5-Stars are not only rendered in marble but have full-on statues instead of just busts.
Most Halls of Fame are single rooms or halls in larger museums, and football’s simple busts especially lend themselves to being placed in a small area, so it’s not clear how separating them onto different levels would work in practice. I’d previously proposed a spiral working its way up the building going from 1-Stars to 4-Stars leading up to the Pantheon taking up the top floor, but there are other ways you could organize it – perhaps a series of concentric circles (which might be particularly appropriate to football and its individual teams’ “rings of honor”) or a spiral-shaped room, or even just letting the bust/plaque be the sole means of distinguishing them? It would certainly probably be better organized than the way Halls of Fame are organized now, which tends to be by year of induction – a practical way to keep from having to do much reorganizing with each class, but not necessarily intuitive, and meaning that even once a long-snubbed player is finally inducted their long wait is still represented physically by their placement in the hall. (If the baseball Hall ever changes its stance on the steroid era the steroids inductees will still stick out like a sore thumb.)
But then, one of the notable elements of this system is the way that it incentivizes changes in the way we induct Hall of Famers to begin with. It’s hard to see how this star system would work with also having players wait different amounts of time before induction. There’s nothing keeping Halls of Fame from holding a single up/down vote on each player five years after retirement as it is, other than the Hall wanting to make sure there are some inductions each year. (It certainly isn’t effective at drawing people to each induction ceremony by spacing out the ones most likely to draw a crowd, because the best players in the game inevitably go in first ballot.) But this is where the pyramid/spiral/whatever idea does work well for the football Hall and its larger number of inductees; there are 327 players in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, more than the total number of inductees in the baseball Hall despite pro football having a significantly shorter history, or a little over three for each year of the NFL’s existence, and with the Hall generally inducting five players a year as it is that number keeps ticking up. If anything the factor with the football Hall is keeping each ceremony from getting too crowded, and striking a balance between inducting recent players that will draw a crowd even if they’re only 2-Star at best and old-timers that can serve as an undercard.
I argued eleven years ago that the fates of would-be inductees should reflect how they were actually seen at the time and thus should be in the hands of those that actually saw them play. That’s not so much the case with the football Hall, which was founded at a late enough date that some older players had already faded in memory too much to be recognized even if they might be deserving of being 3- or even 4-Star inductees; if anything today’s voters might adhere too much to the notion of not wanting to re-litigate cases that previous generations of Hall of Fame voters were perceived to have rejected.
But I also think Simmons has a point when he argues in The Book of Basketball in favor of discounting players that put up good credentials in an era before Bill Russell came into the NBA and changed the game, putting most of the “pioneers” from the NBA’s first decade in a separate exhibit in the basement of his proposed Hall in lieu of actually putting them in the Hall itself. It’s not just that the NFL only really started becoming popular with the American public in the 50s and 60s with the advent of television and the AFL, which is what spurred the Hall of Fame to finally be created in the early 60s; it’s that the NFL spent most of that time in the shadow of college football and didn’t always see the best college players move on to it. Only one of the first five Heisman Trophy winners played in the NFL, and of the ten Heisman winners in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, only two, Doak Walker and Paul Hornung, won their Heismans before the Hall opened in 1963. Pre-50s NFL players not only played in relative anonymity but weren’t necessarily the best football players of their era. Roughly a quarter of the current inductees in Canton started their careers too early (before 1955) to have Monitor scores, which seems about right to me – inducting pre-1955 players at about half the rate of later ones – though the proportion on the senior-candidate ballot is much more tilted towards latter-day players.
So what I would do is hold one big vote where the current crop of eligible players could be voted to a level, or left out of the Hall entirely, with current Hall of Famers not given any sort of edge other than being guaranteed a spot on the ballot. Then each year’s crop of newly eligible players would be subject to a vote each year and inducted to the appropriate level they’re voted to. I don’t believe a player’s fate should be solely determined by a single vote at an arbitrary point in time, so it is possible for a player to be re-voted to a higher level at a later date, but the bar to do so should be relatively high and get higher as time passes. Among other things, that means that, for the most part, the placement of players within each tier can be sorted by the era in which they played without needing to physically move them later. My post from eleven years ago (which I’m not linking a third time in this post) has more details about how the voting might work for a real Hall of Fame.
But why wait? As I teased when the Hall announced their changes to the selection process, I’m starting a new “Shadow Hall of Fame” to recognize players based on the tier system. Within the next 24 hours I’ll post the initial ballot with 500 players and 50 coaches and contributors each. You can vote for the level you think each player should be inducted to and help me decide whether coaches and contributors should be similarly sorted or just honored as single groups. I’ll have the final say over where each player gets inducted, but the result of the vote will help me figure out where to draw the lines between each tier and how to sort pre-AFL players for whom stats and postseason honors (especially Pro Bowls, which didn’t become a regular thing until 1951) are lacking compared to players from later eras. The plan was to at least start announcing the initial sort the week of the Super Bowl, but that was when I was planning to hold the initial vote throughout the season; still, if I see enough interest in this project I might have something to produce at that point, even if it’s just the standards I use to sort players, or at least open the voting for players becoming eligible in 2026. Perhaps this can provide a place to honor all the great players in NFL history while still holding an exclusive place for the best of the best, making some effort to keep everyone, from Hall of Famers wanting to keep their club exclusive to historians wanting more people (especially from older eras) inducted, happy.
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