Each September, the Pro Football Hall of Fame typically names around 95-125 modern-era players, who played at least part of their careers in the past 25 years and have been retired at least 5, as nominees for induction to the Hall of Fame. No more than five modern-era players are inducted each year, so the vast majority of players listed below won’t be inducted this year and most probably won’t be inducted at all. Still, it’s useful to have a baseline to look at them, show their relevant stats and 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 (this one), “Qtr” if they were named to the final 50 candidates (announced in October of last year only), “Semi” if they were among the 25 semifinalists (announced in November), and “T15”, “T10”, or “T7” if they were among the finalists announced in January and were eliminated at the first stage of deliberation, second stage of deliberation, or last year, did not receive the necessary 80 percent of the vote for induction (historically held during Super Bowl weekend and still announced then, but deliberations seem to have been held earlier, in mid-to-late January, since the pandemic).
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. Note that the listed Monitor number will differ from the number published at PFR for players that have reached the semifinalist stage; PFR applies bonuses to the Monitor for reaching the semifinalist and finalist stages, but removes them once a player is actually inducted, and the ordering of the players already reflects the stages each player has reached. 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. To the right of the Monitor are those statistical categories that feed into the Monitor at each position: yards and touchdowns for offensive skill positions (and kick returners in the latter case), sacks and interceptions for various defensive positions, field goals for kickers, plus specific positions if multiple positions have been merged into a single table. These right-side columns will be removed in latter stages of deliberation when all players are listed on a single table.
Finally, the “Notables Not Listed” section displays selected non-nominees, including any player that was on the nominees list the previous year (and most other players recently nominated), any first-year eligible player with a Monitor score over 40 (as well as any over 35 that are the highest-rated non-selected players at their position), any player I deem noteworthy (generally those previously nominated or that have particularly high Monitor scores) that just lost their last chance not to fall into the senior pool, and the non-selected player still on the ballot with the highest Monitor score if they don’t fit either of the first two categories (as well as any other high scores I deem worth including). 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). It’s worth noting, though, that players can be and have jumped from not being nominated at all to eventually making the Hall of Fame, with Sam Mills and Rickey Jackson standing as players that made the Hall of Fame in the last 15 years as modern-era players despite not necessarily being on the list of nominees every year of their eligibility, while Everson Walls and Willie Anderson have made the finals recently despite being off the list of nominees not long before.
Without further ado, here are the 128 modern-era nominees for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2025:
Offense
A quick note: my plan was to roll out a revamped version of Cantonmetrics this summer that would rely on a dynamically-updated Google spreadsheet in lieu of individual posts, but I haven’t finished working on it yet, and I may yet continue making posts on the list of nominees in future years to break up the massive list of players the spreadsheet would use, point out non-nominated players that won’t end up on the spreadsheet, and include the stats that appear on the right side of the Monitor.
With that out of the way, after two years of the list of nominees ballooning to massive size, the Hall, for whatever reason and by whatever mechanism, has pared the list back down to a level more consistent with those seen before 2024, removing most of the marginal candidates added to the ballot then while mostly leaving players on the list that had been genuine omissions, such as Rich Gannon on the chart above; of the players removed, only three have Monitors over 50. The number of candidates removed is significantly more than the 40 suggested by comparing this year’s count of nominees to last year’s because of a number of additions to the list, making me wonder, as I did when the list of nominees ballooned to begin with, exactly how candidates get removed from the list of nominees once they’re suggested. (Notably, there are still some questionable inclusions on the list of nominees, and only a handful of the new inclusions were listed as “Notables Not Listed” last year, all on defense.) I can’t help but wonder if the new screening committee introduced last year told the Hall that a bunch of last year’s nominees were really questionable while suggesting some players they felt were left out; if this year’s final 50 includes any of this year’s new nominees we’ll know the screening committee had a hand in this year’s list of nominees.
Still, at least at quarterback the result is a much more agreeable list of nominees. Drew Bledsoe and Carson Palmer remain the highest-Monitor quarterbacks to be left out, but only three nominated QBs have lower Monitors than them (including first-year eligible Alex Smith), and only Jake Delhomme, who had been a perennial nominee even before 2024, could really be considered questionable.
I suppose I should probably mention our other two first-year eligible quarterbacks, Drew Brees and Philip Rivers, if only so this post shows up in a search for them. Brees should in all likelihood go in first-ballot, but with no rings and no first-team All-Pros, I was skeptical of Rivers’ candidacy even before the change in the Hall’s induction procedures. Monitors over 90 are historically near-locks for eventual induction barring extenuating circumstances, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Rivers was looking at perennial semifinalist status.
Running back was one of the positions that had been one of the biggest beneficiaries from the ballooning of the nominee list, and furthering my speculation as to who’s responsible for paring down the list and whether there was turnover there, three fullbacks were removed from the list while Mike Alstott was added back. Arian Foster also joins the list of nominees for the first time, alongside first-year eligibles Frank Gore and LeSean McCoy.
Skipping past Larry Fitzgerald’s contribution to the wide receiver backlog (about which I already said enough on the Offseason Snapshot post linked above), here’s where things start to go off the rails. All three of last year’s nominees to be left out this year seemed like they were defensible picks to at least be nominated; that’s not the case with Brandon Lloyd, who is one of three new nominees this year with Monitors below 20, out of four overall. No previous nominee that’s currently Modern-Era-eligible has had a Monitor that low without being a fullback or making their mark primarily on special teams, which means that, while clearing out some of the crud that had built up on the nominee list, whoever’s in charge of nominating players threw in some nominees that are arguably less defensible than any of the ones that bloated the nominee list the past two years. Considering what they did with Kam Chancellor last year, I wouldn’t rule out the screening committee having their fingerprints on this, though I doubt it’s the whole explanation.
And right away we get to our second super-low Monitor inclusion. Did you know there were two tight ends named Zach Miller that played roughly contemporaneously? I’m assuming the one with a higher Monitor that actually made a Pro Bowl is the one the Hall nominated, but that’s still someone with a lower Monitor than any non-special teams player to be previously nominated at any point among currently-Modern-Era-eligible players. I saw a suggestion that someone got mixed up and meant to nominate Heath Miller, but he’d been unnominated the last three years and has the lowest Monitor of the previously-nominated tight ends not to be nominated this year, so it’s not odd for him not to be nominated this year.
Speaking of previous nominees not to be nominated this year, and following up on last year’s post, both of this year’s first-year eligible candidates, Jason Witten and Greg Olsen, keep Jeremy Shockey from having the highest Monitor of all non-inducted Modern Era tight ends. Olsen seems unlikely to be inducted, and Witten is likely looking at a decent-length wait depending on how long the Hall sticks by last year’s new induction procedures.
Chris Snee is our first player with a Monitor over 50 to drop out of the list of nominees, and his Monitor only barely tops that mark; also dropping out is Dave Szott, who I’d called out as the nominated offensive lineman with the lowest Monitor. Of the five offensive linemen to drop out, three have lower Monitors than new addition Ryan Clady. I did a Twitter poll on Maurkice Pouncey’s chances of making the Hall when he announced his retirement, but that was before the change in the Hall’s induction procedures, which could make simply making the finals a tall order if the change isn’t reversed, especially considering some of the players coming down the pike.
Defense/Special Teams
As at quarterback, most of the defensive tackles to join the nominee list in 2024 drop out – as does Casey Hampton, who’d been a perennial nominee but had the lowest Monitor of any still-eligible 2023 nominee – but Ted Washington and his over-50 Monitor stays put, while first-year eligible Geno Atkins is the only new addition.
Defensive end didn’t have any new additions the last two years unless you count Clyde Simmons, a nominee in 2023, returning to the ballot in his last year of eligibility last year, but whoever’s in charge of culling the list of nominees saw fit to cut perennial nominee Justin Tuck. But they also made two new additions, and while both of them have lower Monitors than Tuck, Elvis Dumervil sparked an “oh, I heard of him” reaction from me, and his stats and postseason honors outpace Tuck, Kevin Carter and his highest Monitor among non-nominated Modern Era defensive ends, fellow new nominee Jay Ratliff, and first-year eligible Jurrell Casey, who brings the lowest Monitor of any of this year’s first-year nominees.
Linebacker was another position that saw a lot of new additions in 2024, and this year’s list clears out most of them while adding Clay Matthews III, probably the most glaring omission on past ballots to be nominated this year (an honor that would have gone to Hardy Nickerson or Joey Porter, still the highest-Monitor non-nominated non-rapists in general, if they’d gotten the nod). But they kept the somewhat questionable (though defensible, if only because he’s in his last year of eligibility) Lee Woodall and added the downright indefensible Dat Nguyen, the non-special teams player with the lowest Monitor of any currently-Modern-Era player to have been nominated at least once. At least Lloyd and Zach Miller (?) got Pro Bowl selections; Nguyen didn’t even get that much, nor did he rack up the sort of stats 2024 nominee Karlos Dansby did to make up for that, and his career was a somewhat brief six seasons to boot. Meanwhile, among last year’s nominees to drop out are Willie McGinest, Jessie Armstead, and Bill Romanowski, all of whom have better Monitors than all but four actually-nominated players not to make last year’s final 50, including first-year eligible Thomas Jones – and in Romanowski’s case it’s all but three players as his Monitor tops Matthews’.
Matthews is the highest-Monitor player to be nominated for the first time this year after being left off of past ballots, but Carnell Lake is the highest-Monitor player to join the list of nominees at all after being nominated in 2024, although it may be a last-year-of-eligibility surge as much as anything else. But that’s just part of perhaps the strangest set of turnover at any position this year: six of last year’s nominated players drop out, only one of whom was not a nominee before 2024, to be replaced by five new ones, with Lake being the only one with a larger Monitor than Sam Madison, the highest-Monitor DB not to be either nominated or in prison, and Lake and Asante Samuel the only two with higher Monitors than Aqib Talib, the highest-Monitor player to drop out. At least Patrick Surtain, the lowest-Monitor new addition, still has a higher Monitor than three of the dropped players.
The irony of the “lowest non-special-teams Monitor” nominees is that whoever’s in charge of this year’s nominees absolutely decimated the special teams category. More than half of last year’s nominees that I’d categorized as special teams players drop out, including Darren Sproles, who was already the highest-Monitor first-year eligible player not to make the cut down to 50 last year and now becomes the highest-Monitor non-nominated player not to be either a linebacker or convicted felon, and Stephen Gostkowski, the highest-Monitor first-year eligible player at any position not to be nominated, one of only two first-year eligible players with Monitors over 40 not to be nominated, and a player I’d thought was prominent enough during his career to score a nomination regardless of what the numbers said. (Considering Shane Lechler’s own omission from the list of quarterfinalists last year despite his placement on the NFL’s 100th-anniversary All-Time Team, this might actively lend support to the notion that the screening committee put their thumb on the scale of this year’s list of nominees.)
Most of the other special teams players to drop out had been pretty questionable – besides Sproles, only two other players to drop out had better Monitors than Jason Elam, who now has the second-lowest Monitor among nominated special teams players – but it’s astounding to me that Darren Sproles would drop out while Allen Rossum and his sub-10 Monitor would keep Nguyen from having the lowest Monitor of this year’s nominees overall. Even discounting his accolades at running back, the position the Hall lists him under, both times Sproles was named first-team All-Pro it was as a returner, giving him two more years where he was named All-Pro than Rossum, as well as one more return touchdown. (As in past years, players get categorized as returners if their highest-level postseason honors were at returner, regardless of what the Hall lists them as.) That’s before even getting into Dante Hall, the man who kept newly-minted Hall of Famer Devin Hester from the first team of the 2000s All-Decade team, and his sterling return resume. There is no way Rossum is one of the three best returners of the Modern Era group, nor is he late enough in his eligibility for whoever’s in charge of the list of nominees to have him cut the line.
(The Hall listed Rossum at defensive back, but two interceptions in a twelve-year career – both the same year – is pathetic for someone vying to be a Hall of Fame DB, his one Pro Bowl selection – the same year as his interceptions – was as a replacement kick returner, he never was so much as named second-team All-Pro at either DB or returner, and being nominated with a resume that lacking would be questionable enough without claiming that it wasn’t for his special teams work.)