Over the course of the past week, the Pro Football Hall of Fame announced the figures to advance to the next stage of consideration in all four of the categories from which people can potentially be inducted into Canton, which makes it as good a time as any to roll out the next evolution of the Cantonmetrics feature.
The main change is that the charts that have made up the Cantonmetrics posts in the past can now be found on a searchable Google spreadsheet, which can be found HERE.
In addition to dynamically updating the lists of retired players, coaches, and contributors after each cutdown announcement, as well as the list of active players after each season is complete, the spreadsheet also contains tabs for the All-Snub Team and my attempt to track the contenders for the All-Decade Team of the 2020s. In addition to the metrics already being tracked and the Hall of Fame Monitor, all tabs now contain the Legends Score, an attempt to measure players based on postseason honors only based on a measure devised by the Future Football Legends website, but which I’ve made some adjustments to. I expect to make more changes, adjustments, and improvements next offseason as well.
This page contains more information about how to read the spreadsheet as well as a general introduction to the concept of Cantonmetrics, and I’m adding a link to the top bar as well. I may decide to embed the spreadsheet directly onto a static page, but I’m not sure exactly what to include on it to justify the separate existence of the introduction page, if in fact I need to justify not simply placing it on there to begin with.
After the jump, some thoughts about this particular round of cuts.
- Geno Atkins just got a one-way ticket to the All-Snub Team, and it’s a pretty glaring omission. Last year the only players with a Monitor over 70 not to make the quarterfinals were Rod Smith and non-nominated rapist Darren Sharper, and Atkins actually has a higher Monitor than Sharper by nearly a full point. I find it eyebrow-raising that this is at the same position, defensive tackle, where Kevin Williams has become the most glaring omission from the Hall itself… except that it’s the screening committee making this omission, with a completely different makeup from the selection committee proper. Jeff Saturday, also an All-Snub Team member with a higher Monitor than Smith and half a point lower than Sharper, actually drops out of the list of quarterfinalists.
- On the plus side, the screening committee does correct last year’s omission of Shane Lechler while leaving out Kam Chancellor, though Charles Tillman’s Monitor is only four points higher than Chancellor’s. (Asante Samuel going straight from being unnominated to the quarterfinals in a single year isn’t surprising considering the different makeup of the screening committee; if anything the fact he’s the only one making that leap casts doubt on the notion that the screening committee had any influence on this year’s list of nominees.)
- Lester Hayes, who was part of the final group of nine senior candidates last year, doesn’t even make it past the cut to 25. I suppose I should expect more turnover in the senior list which has always been a bit more unpredictable, and there were three final-25 candidates last year that didn’t get advanced by the screening committee this year, but still. What stands out more to me is that the instant Lavvie Dilweg (beloved by historians) and Bobby Boyd (an All-Snub Team member) were advanced by the screening committee, they passed the cut to 25 as well, which might cast some doubt on how well last year’s screening committee did their jobs. (In that light, the fact that this year’s screening committee didn’t advance Ox Emerson, another beloved-by-historians player – though maybe not as much as Dilweg – that made it past the final-25 cutdown last year, might be eyebrow-raising.)