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.
- Level 1: Just-made-it/borderline Hall of Famers or better, either because of the Sterling Sharpe factor (great career, not long enough) or the Hines Ward factor (very good for a long time, rarely/never great). (The names chosen are only because I think their careers might be illustrative and don’t imply anything about where, if at all, they should be inducted.)
- Level 2: Definite Hall of Famers that couldn’t crack the higher levels for one of several reasons: they never won a title as an elite guy (less relevant in this context than in baseball or basketball – few would put Dan Marino below level 4), something was missing from their career totals, they were never the best at their position (that is, they weren’t worthy of first-team All-Pro) at least for more than a year, or their careers were shortened by injury or rapidly declining skills.
- Level 3: No-doubt-about-it Hall of Famers who were among the best for an extended period with every “resume” statistic to match (for those positions for which statistics are relevant).
- Level 4: Basically Level 3 guys, only there’s just something inherently “greater” about them. Some possible indications: Do you have to consider them in any “best of all time” discussions? Are they in the mix for some all-time benchmarks? Did they have transcendent games or memorable moments? Were they just dominant at times? Will you always remember watching them play, even when you’re 90 years old and incontinent?
- Level 5: The greatest of all time, the best of the best, the Pantheon.