Congratulations to Drew Brees, Larry Fitzgerald, Luke Kuechly, Adam Vinatieri, and Roger Craig on their induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Now it’s time to look at how this year’s selection process affects who the players most likely to get in next year are, and with the 2025 season fully at a close, what active and recently-retired players have most built their resumes for eventual induction into Canton.
Most of the tables I’d previously included in this post are now part of the Cantonmetrics spreadsheet, so you can refer there to see the highest-Monitor active players, the players that didn’t play this season, and the updated list of modern-era candidates (although I may end up making changes to how I update the spreadsheet at the end of the season considering how long it took, though being distracted by the Olympics didn’t help). The spreadsheet does not include the Players to Watch, though, as that’s much more a product of a specific moment in time, so this post will contain that, some high-level thoughts on this year’s induction process, and other relevant points in bullet point form.
The big story to come out of the Hall of Fame induction process, and perhaps the biggest story involving the Hall of Fame in years, is that Bill Belichick, the second-winningest coach of all time and the coach with the most championships, was not a first-ballot inductee. This was reported more than a week before NFL Honors, let alone the Super Bowl, and dominated the news cycle for days as Belichick’s defenders cried outrage that perhaps the greatest coach of all time would be denied first-ballot status. It was certainly surprising; I had thought the Coach and Contributor committees had advanced Belichick and Robert Kraft as finalists to set up the two architects of the Patriots dynasty to go into Canton together, but not only was Belichick kept out, a week later it was reported that Kraft had been denied as well.
The report that Belichick had been denied induction suggested that Bill Polian had lobbied the voters to make Belichick wait a year as punishment for the Spygate scandal, which Polian categorically denied but didn’t help his case by claiming he “couldn’t remember” if he personally voted for Belichick. As the story developed, though, I felt it became more and more doubtful that Polian had much to do with it, whatever he did or didn’t do. Spygate certainly would have been a valid knock against Belichick; in 2024 Don Van Natta Jr., whose name was also on the Belichick non-induction report, filed a long piece about Kraft’s long wait for Canton where he indicated that one of the main reasons for voters’ reluctance was questions over just how much Kraft knew about Spygate. It didn’t make sense to me to punish Kraft for Spygate when Belichick, who actually did the spying, would surely go in first-ballot, but in retrospect it should have been a sign of the obstacles facing Belichick.
Also a knock against Belichick was that his record without Tom Brady, both before and after Brady’s tenure with the Patriots (as well as during periods when Brady was injured), was decidedly mediocre. It’s also possible that the Hall’s change of rules last year to make coaches eligible after only one year away from the game, which seemed to me to be a transparent ploy to goose induction weekend attendance and interest by getting Belichick in sooner, backfired on them by making voters hesitant to induct Belichick so soon; I wondered if the voters didn’t want to induct Belichick when there was still a chance for him to return to coaching (a fate that kept his mentor Bill Parcells out of Canton until his tenure with the Cowboys was over, which prompted the re-imposition of the five-year waiting period for coaches and which I would have thought would keep the Hall from shortening it again), while Colin Cowherd wondered if the voters just didn’t want to induct Belichick so soon when even the coaches that did go in first-ballot, like Don Shula, had to wait five years. (Pablo Torre suggested the former reason, as well as the Spygate and Brady reasons, were in fact factors.) But as actual voters began speaking up, it became apparent that it was the other rule change to come out of last year’s process that most tripped up Belichick.
Starting last year, the Hall changed the modern-era selection process so that the number of candidates would only be narrowed to seven before voters had to pick five of the seven for induction. At the same time, the Hall threw the other three categories of finalists – three senior finalists, a coach, and a contributor – into a single pool and forced voters to choose three of the five. This was perceived to be a response to Hall of Famers including Deion Sanders complaining about the Hall being “watered down” by inducting marginal candidates, never mind that Deion, at least publicly, claimed that everyone who’d been inducted was deserving and that he only wanted the best of the best to receive a higher level of recognition. The Hall hoped that, by forcing smaller class sizes, it would force the voters to raise their standards for who was a Hall of Famer, but after last year, when Eric Allen – a deserving candidate but not someone that it would be an outrage if they never made Canton – was inducted from the modern-era pool over the likes of Torry Holt, it was apparent to me that the voters instead decided to rush to induct players before it was too late. (This may have also led to Kevin Williams, who wasn’t even a semifinalist last year, joining the finalists this year.) Now, that mentality has become undeniable, at the expense of Belichick and Kraft – an outcome that Deion himself objected to.
At the same time that the coach and contributor committees were advancing Belichick and Kraft, the senior committee advanced one of the best groups of senior finalists I’ve seen in a long time: Roger Craig, L.C. Greenwood, and Ken Anderson, All-Snub Team members all and all often mentioned as among Canton’s biggest snubs even outside of the context of the Monitor-driven All-Snub Team. (Of the other candidates to reach the final stage of senior-committee voting, only Henry Ellard had a higher Monitor than any of them.) This was a strange decision if you thought that Belichick was a shoo-in for first-ballot induction and that most of the second votes would go to Kraft; I would have thought the senior committee would instead throw up three sacrificial lambs, not completely undeserving by any means but not so pressing that too many people would worry about their rejection, for reasons outside their control, hurting their chances of being voted in in the future. (For example, perhaps they could have advanced two of Ellard, Stanley Morgan, Eddie Meador, and Joe Jacoby, and given the third spot to one of the three they actually did advance in hopes that the voters coalescing around Belichick and Kraft would allow for that third candidate to get in as well.) In retrospect, I have to wonder what the senior committee thought of Belichick’s worthiness of first-ballot induction, and whether they deliberately sabotaged him and Kraft by advancing the strongest candidates they had.
The Kansas City Star‘s Vahe Gregorian was the first to publicly come out as not voting for either Belichick or Kraft, instead voting for the three senior candidates, because while Belichick and Kraft would always have plenty of opportunities to be inducted in the future, this might be the last chance for the three seniors:
In fact, I didn’t vote against Belichick or Kraft. I voted for the three senior candidates: Ken Anderson, Roger Craig and L.C. Greenwood…All of that went into why I felt duty-bound to vote for the richly deserving seniors, who most likely won’t ever have a hearing again as more senior candidates enter the pool and fresh cases get made for others. Meanwhile, Belichick is inevitable soon … as he should be. At the risk of contradicting my own vote, really, he shouldn’t even have to wait. I understand why people are offended that he isn’t going in the first moment he can.
In the end, though, I felt more compelled by what I perceive to be last chances and looming lost causes within the system as we have it — a system I hope the Hall will see fit to change now.
Other voters that spoke up, such as Mike Sando, Tony Grossi, Paul Kuharsky, Lindsay Jones, and Tony Dungy, pointed the finger at the “pick three of five” rule as well, regardless of whether or not they claimed to vote for Belichick or Kraft – with Dungy doing so during the Super Bowl pregame show. Various other commentators expressed surprise at how the selection process works and called for it to change. It seemed like the one silver lining about the Belichick snub was that it would force the Hall back to reality and sanity and lead them to walk back last year’s changes to the process.
But on Super Bowl weekend, Hall of Fame president Jim Porter laid out a number of potential changes to the voting process: reducing the size of the selection committee from its current 50 members, including game historians and former GMs in the panel (you know, former GMs like Polian who allegedly undermined Belichick’s case because of a personal grudge), reducing the number of modern-era finalists from its current 15, and making the votes public. Some of these changes, specifically including historians in the panel and making votes public, are potentially worthy, but none of them would actually address what happened to Belichick, and in the case of reducing the number of modern-era finalists, would amount to doubling down. It’s apparent that Porter still thinks he can force voters to raise their standards of who belongs in Canton and is effectively threatening to strip some of their votes if they don’t comply (pointing out that voting as Gregorian did is outright against the rules), even though the backlash made clear that no one wanted this, and the only people who actually want smaller classes are Hall of Famers themselves who are concerned about the exclusivity of the honor.
What Porter doesn’t seem to have fully internalized is that there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. Every player, once inducted, is never un-inducted. OJ Simpson remains a Hall of Famer even though there’s no way he’d have been inducted at any point after 1994 (despite the Hall’s supposed prohibition on considering off-field activity). There’s no justification for Isaac Bruce being in the Hall of Fame while Holt, clearly a bigger contributor to the Greatest Show on Turf, isn’t. The same goes for every other Hall of Famer the existing group of Hall of Famers resent. Every Hall of Famer becomes a benchmark that all the other candidates get measured against; “if this person is in, why isn’t that person?” Nothing will change how Hall-worthy certain candidates may or may not be, only whether they’re actually in Canton, and as long as that’s the case, of course voters will prioritize making sure players they consider worthy eventually get in over voting in the most worthy players. All last year’s changes did was make the Hall of Fame’s induction process closer to the process for baseball’s Hall of Fame that no one likes. Maybe if the Hall adopted that process it would actually achieve their goals of getting only the most deserving candidates in, or maybe it would just create even more outrage.
Relative to the number of people who have ever played the game, the Pro Football Hall of Fame is already the most exclusive in professional sports. It may have more members than other Halls of Fame, but there are so many people on a football field that it still inducts a smaller fraction than others. Among pretty much everyone besides Porter and Hall of Famers themselves, the problem with the Hall is that it has too few members, not too many – that countless senior candidates haven’t so much as had a chance to have their say in the room, let alone get inducted, and more deserving candidates fall into the senior pool every year. If there’s a problem with the candidates the Hall has inducted in the past, it’s more with who got inducted than how many – three of this year’s finalists, Holt, Reggie Wayne, and Willie Anderson, were finalists for the Class of 2022 that prompted the complaints of Sanders and Bruce Smith, and Holt, Wayne, and Williams all have Monitor scores over 100, higher than any of that year’s actual inductees with only Richard Seymour coming within ten points of any of them.
I don’t know what sort of changes the Hall should make to the selection process. Getting more historians in the room should help, and I would separate senior candidates from coaches and contributors again (Clark Judge proposes the opposite, grouping seniors with coaches and contributors from the start), but the only change I would make to the modern-era process is to restore the status quo ante, except with the addition of the screening committee naming a final 50 candidates introduced last year. There should be changes to make the committee be more mindful of the caliber of candidates they’re inducting, but other than changing the makeup of the committee I don’t know what that would involve. What I do know is that Porter should tell people like Sanders and Smith to pound sand, because they don’t run the Hall of Fame, nor are they on the selection committee, nor should they be, and everyone other than them wants there to be more Hall of Famers, not fewer, but at this point it’s pretty clear he has no intention of doing so.
Other thoughts on the changes to the spreadsheet:
- I thought that last year’s senior/coach/contributor voting only producing one inductee despite two candidates that clearly didn’t have enough support suggested that it would be very rare that more than the bare minimum number of candidates would get inducted in either category, but this year the voters inducted four modern-era candidates. Having two obvious first-ballot candidates helped with that, but with an 80% threshold for induction it’s still remarkable that that many voters coalesced around two non-first-ballot candidates, especially with one of them being Adam Vinatieri, a kicker who would not necessarily be my first choice for induction among special teams players, certainly not on the second ballot. I would have expected the nod to go to Willie Anderson, the one player not in his first three years of eligibility to make the final seven; I saw some suggestion that he and Marshal Yanda split the vote, but I doubt that’s the whole story under the circumstances.
- Holt not making it past the first cut is not a good sign, but Sando suggested that Holt and Wayne were cast aside because of Fitzgerald’s presence more than anything else, and it’s not a sign that the voters are turning against them.
- Next year’s class will see four first-year candidates with Monitor scores over 100: Adrian Peterson, Rob Gronkowski, Antonio Brown, and Ben Roethlisberger. Peterson and Gronk will be strong candidates for first-ballot induction, but after Antonio Gates didn’t get in first-ballot, I wouldn’t be too quick to assume Gronk will. Roethlisberger will have a decent case but Brown could be stuck in All-Snub Team purgatory for a while because of a long off-field rap sheet. That could allow Richard Sherman to escape the All-Snub Team and become a finalist in his first year. Eric Weddle would also make the All-Snub Team if he’s not a finalist his first year.
- My tentative prediction in the event next year’s class is a full five members: Peterson, Holt, Anderson, Terrell Suggs, Darren Woodson.
- Steve Smith falling out of the finalists means he gets re-added to the All-Snub Team, and with Williams becoming a finalist he joins Jim Tyrer as the only snubs with Monitor scores over 90. LeSean McCoy replaces Craig as the All-Snub running back, with Cookie Gilchrist taking the honors on the All-Senior Candidate list. Steve Wisniewski and Mark Stepnoski aging into the senior pool result in their taking All-Senior Candidate spots from Nate Newton and Jay Hilgenberg respectively.
- The good news, if the Hall insists on staying the course with the current process, is that 2030 should be a bit of a breather year. Only three players that were inactive this year have Monitors high enough to make the All-Snub Team: two offensive linemen and Justin Tucker, someone else whose off-field shenanigans are likely to weigh heavily on the minds of Hall of Fame voters. I don’t think either of the offensive linemen are likely to be first-ballot threats even in ideal circumstances, and only two other players (the ones with Monitors in the 60s) are likely to advance very far in the process.
- I’m starting to adjust my projections based on whether or not I think players will make the All-Decade Team of the 2020s; only seven players named to the 2010s All-Decade Team at non-special teams positions remain active. This especially affects Myles Garrett, who has a strong enough resume to make Canton, or at least the All-Snub Team, just in this decade alone, and who I’d officially be shocked to see miss the All-Decade Team. No post-merger defensive ends have been inducted on the first ballot without making the All-Decade Team, but I’m still willing to list Garrett as “borderline first ballot” at this point. With an All-Decade selection his resume would already be a skosh superior to Jack Youngblood, so with another Pro Bowl I’d move him up to “probable first ballot”, but he might need two more Pro Bowls to match Julius Peppers’ count before I can bump him up to surefire. This is also why I have T.J. Watt as “borderline first ballot” even though even the players I have listed as the best non-first-ballot linebackers were All-Decade.
- I don’t consider MVPs in my Hall of Fame projections, so that honor doesn’t help Matthew Stafford much. Roger Staubach is the only post-merger quarterback in Canton without being named first-team All-Pro at least once by at least one selector, and he has twice as many Pro Bowls as Stafford, so being named first-team All-Pro is more important to Stafford’s chances in my book. Even then his points of comparison are Jim Kelly (no Super Bowls but two more Pro Bowls), Terry Bradshaw (same resume of All-Pros and Pro Bowls but an All-Decade selection Stafford’s unlikely to get and three more Super Bowls), and Kurt Warner (same number of Super Bowls and likely non-All-Decade status but one more All-Pro and Pro Bowl each), so I may still be being generous towards Stafford by listing him as “borderline HOF”. Roethlisberger and/or Eli Manning eventually getting in would help my assessment of Stafford’s chances considerably, as neither of them were ever named first-team All-Pro or All-Decade, but even they have more Pro Bowls.
- I’m assuming Pro Football Reference is giving Philip Rivers credit for making it to the semifinalist stage of Hall of Fame voting before unretiring, which I don’t take into account in my version of the Monitor, which is why my Monitor is a half-point lower than PFR’s.
Players to watch
This list consists of all players not on the Active Players list with a weighted approximate value of at least 10 times their number of years in the league, or with Monitor numbers over 20, and whose AV for the most recently completed season is at least twice their number of years in the league. It is intended to provide a look at players on pace to at least potentially enter the Hall of Fame conversation, but without a long enough career to rack up enough of a resume to actually be in that conversation yet. Pro Football Reference only calculates Monitor numbers for players that have played at least 50 games, about three full seasons; for non-qualifying players with weighted career AVs over 30, I’ve attempted to calculate their Monitor number by hand (or at least in Excel), indicated by italics. (Because AV is displayed on the PFR site only as whole numbers, and each whole-number point of weighted AV is worth half a Monitor point, italicized Monitor calculations are necessarily approximate, although my experience with the All-Decade tab suggests that PFR calculates weighted AV based on the whole-number AV of each individual year so it may be possible to calculate the Monitor more precisely.) Non-qualifying players with weighted AV too low to justify hand-calculating them are sorted by weighted AV.
I feel like it’s no longer surprising that certain quarterbacks that haven’t graduated to the main list aren’t Hall of Fame-level already; the biggest remaining case of “don’t be so quick to assume he’s a Hall of Famer”, Josh Allen, is rising up the Active tab fast enough that he may qualify for the All-Snub Team in a year or two, leaving Justin Herbert, who isn’t generally discussed as a potential Hall of Famer yet anyway, and Joe Burrow, whose career has been so derailed by injuries that I feel like it’s no longer controversial to talk about him as a case of wasted potential, as the biggest eyebrow-raisers. Still, Herbert’s Monitor trailing Baker Mayfield’s, and Burrow’s trailing Kyler Murray’s, are not what you’d expect. (Sam Darnold having a higher Monitor than Burrow isn’t as surprising given his last two seasons culminating in a Super Bowl win.)