Two years after the introduction of the biggest change to its selection process since at least 2004, on Friday the Pro Football Hall of Fame announced what may be the biggest change to its selection process ever.
Much like the 2024 changes, these changes have two main components to them. First, the main selection committee is being reduced in size from 50 members to 28, three of which will be designated nonvoting participants each year. This means it is no longer possible for there to be representatives for each of the 32 NFL teams, as was the case with the prior makeup of the selection committee; all 27 selectors (outside the representative of the Pro Football Writers of America) will be chosen at large.
The bigger change, though, at least from the perspective of fans, is the elimination of the Senior category. All players, regardless of how long they have been retired, will be considered in a single pool. 13 players will be named as finalists and be considered alongside one coach and one contributor, each chosen by subcommittees. (In one sense, this is something of a return to the status quo prior to the centennial class of 2020, when coaches moved through the same selection process as players.) The definition of a contributor is also expanding to encompass candidates’ “full football resume that may include playing, coaching and other contributions to the sport”; I don’t know if that effectively serves as a way to create a potential 14th player or coach slot, or if this is just a way of sanctioning something like Doug Williams’ inclusion in the 2025 contributor process (and also potentially making it easier for influential assistant coaches like Clark Shaughnessy to find a way in).
The Hall claims that this is the result of a two-and-a-half-year process of reviewing the selection procedures with input from Hall of Fame staff and board members, selectors, and Hall of Famers. President and CEO Jim Porter says that the previous selection process “left open the possibility of ‘unintended biases’ in three key areas”. The first is “the disparate skills of the individuals making the initial presentations of nominees for election at the annual meeting”, which will be addressed by having a single person, not a member of the selection committee, make all presentations at the meeting. This seems logical enough to me, though I worry that it will introduce new biases if the presenter isn’t as familiar with older players or really wants some players to be inducted more than others. Relatedly, the second is “the assignment of a Selector to each of the NFL’s 32 member clubs”, which doesn’t specify how that may or may not have introduced biases. If anything, the intention of that rule would seem to have been to reduce club bias by at least making sure every club had a voice in the room; the new committee could end up consisting of people primarily familiar with the handful of clubs they followed during their career, leaving clubs unrepresented on the panel at a disadvantage.
The third is “issues related to players reaching their final years of eligibility in the Modern-Era Players category”, which is the one most evident to even casual observers of the Hall’s selection process, but also potentially the most telling. In fact, it points to why I’m skeptical that these changes are really two and a half years in the making, because all of these changes point to developments that have come up in just the past year.
The change that made the most headlines in 2024 was the reduction of the waiting period for coaches to a single year, which was widely perceived as a way to get Bill Belichick into the Hall sooner, but the one that was most impactful to Hall watchers – and, as it turned out, to Belichick himself – was the decision to force Hall voters to leave two candidates off their ballot in the very last phase of voting. When it came time to make their last up/down votes for who would be inducted, selectors had to choose five out of seven modern-era players, and three individuals out of a single pool of three senior candidates, one coach, and one contributor. This was widely perceived as a response to Hall of Famers that had criticized recent inductions and complained about the “watering down” of the honor of induction (though that was an oversimplification of their complaints, at least publicly), serving to reduce the size of each class.
The intent was that by forcing voters to pit candidates against one another, they would vote for only the best of the best to be inducted. But both voters and Hall watchers had their own standard for who qualified as a Hall of Famer, one that functioned as a simple yes/no question – you’re either deserving of induction or you’re not – and felt that there was already a backlog of deserving senior candidates whose chances of induction were fading, and were now smaller than ever. At the least, once someone is inducted, they are never un-inducted, and they become a benchmark for comparison for other candidates’ credentials. So rather than simply vote for the best of the best, voters opted to rush in candidates whose prospects of induction would otherwise be decidedly dimmer under the new process, voting in Eric Allen in 2025 in one of his last years of eligibility on the modern-era ballot, despite Torry Holt seemingly having clearly superior credentials. Then in 2026, the selection process changes officially blew up in the Hall’s faces, when Belichick, considered by some the greatest coach of all time, was deprived of the honor of first-ballot induction, no thanks to the presence of three of the more deserving senior candidates on the ballot, with Roger Craig being the only candidate inducted from the senior/coach/contributor group.
Porter’s response to the controversy, and specifically to Belichick’s non-induction being leaked more than a week before the actual announcement of the new class, was to implicitly threaten to replace voters who leaked the results of the vote (never mind that Belichick would have known he wasn’t being inducted just by not receiving “the knock” and could have leaked it himself from there) or didn’t vote in the manner he would have preferred. This casts a dark cloud on the decision to reduce the size of the selection committee, which just might be defensible on its own, because it raises the prospect of it being an attempt by Porter to get the selection committee he wants by throwing out voters who won’t vote in the way he likes, even if they might be more qualified – especially when it comes to assessing the merits of older players – than the ones left.
The decision to put all players in a single pool regardless of their time out of the game also comes off more as a response to the results of the last two cycles than something that’s really been two and a half years in the making. On paper, it should relieve the pressure of feeling like voters need to vote for candidates before they age out of the modern-era pool or whenever the senior committee sees fit to give them a chance they may not get again. But there’s a reason most Halls of Fame have older players considered in a separate pool; both the baseball and basketball Halls of Fame do so, and while the Hockey Hall of Fame eliminated its veteran category in 2000 after just twelve years producing eleven inductees, that came after no veteran players were inducted in two out of three years, when senior candidates failing to be inducted into Canton had become rare to nonexistent at the time of the 2024 changes. Active sportswriters are likely to be more familiar with more recent players, and putting older players in a separate category allows them to be assessed primarily by those sportswriters with enough experience to have actually seen them play and/or with a proper appreciation of their place in history. (As it stands the senior induction process has been sufficiently focused on players from the 80s and 90s in recent years that some have called for the creation of a “super-senior” category for older potential inductees, similar to how baseball’s Hall has separate subcommittees for players from before or after 1980.)
The Class of 2027 ballot will have twelve players with higher scores in Pro Football Reference’s Hall of Fame Monitor than Larry Grantham, the senior candidate with the highest Monitor (not counting Jim Tyrer), with more becoming eligible every year. That means there’s a very real chance that, even just on their merits, older players could be squeezed out entirely in the coming years. But it’s not just them; as the case of Eric Allen suggests, the prospect of aging into the senior pool can have a big impact on modern-era candidates’ prospects as they get later into the ballot, and might be a significant factor in breaking the positional backlogs that crop up from time to time. I’m more pessimistic about Holt’s chances of induction in the near term, for one, than I was before these changes. (My prediction of who gets in this year is still much the same as it was in February, but I now suspect the likely induction of Belichick and Robert Kraft is likely to come at the expense of Holt.)
The Hall didn’t get into the process of voting for finalists, but reportedly it will be much the same as it was after the 2024 changes, with the 15 finalists being cut down to 10 and then seven, only now voters will be able to vote for six of the seven. That’s a big change when it comes to figuring out how many players might be inducted. Before, splitting the selection committee’s five votes across seven finalists would have resulted in each getting 35-36 votes compared to the induction threshold of 40, meaning there would be a very real chance of the bare minimum number of inductees; now splitting the votes evenly would result in each getting 21-22 votes, enough to induct all seven. More agreement on who deserves to be inducted would actually likely result in smaller classes; it’s now theoretically possible for a class to consist of as few as three people, but that would likely result in those three people being unanimous and the voters splitting the remaining three votes across the other four candidates, resulting in them getting only 18-19 votes each. I would therefore expect each class to come in between four to six inductees, successfully reducing the size of each class the way the Hall wanted (considering there were at least seven inductees every year in the twelve years leading up to the 2024 changes) without feeling like the Hall is falling too far behind.
As such, despite my suspicions about the motives behind the changes to the selection committee’s makeup and my concern about the fate of senior candidates, I’m actually cautiously optimistic about these changes’ impact on who gets inducted and how many; if no changes had been made to the final stage of voting, I might have seriously thought about reaching out to ousted voters to help form a “shadow Hall of Fame” like I proposed last year. That being said, I’d still want to make a few tweaks. For one, I would impose a requirement that at least one finalist be someone who would have qualified for senior candidate status under the old rules, ensuring they at least get a hearing in the room, and I’d also have no more than two finalists at any one position (though that might be difficult to gauge, especially for older players). I would also have a group of historians draft a one-time list of candidates from before the Hall’s opening to fast-track to the final stage of consideration, allowing players that didn’t get a fair shot at consideration before aging out of the memories of the selectors a chance to get in before the door likely closes forever. (The Centennial Class of 2020 should have been an opportunity to clear this senior backlog, but a lot of the candidates chosen were not the most impressive, and I suspect the class would have looked very different if it was known that the path to induction for seniors, and especially super seniors, would be dramatically narrowed in the coming years.)
Beyond improving the prospects of senior candidates, if the list of nominees ends up encompassing most of the separate lists of nominees for modern-era and senior players, numbering 200 or even 300 or more, I would consider introducing an intermediate cutdown to 100 before the existing cutdown to 50 introduced in 2024. As a matter of personal preference, I liked that the old modern-era finalist cutdown process reduced the pool of candidates by five players each time before reaching a final group of five, and as such, if we’re still going to be reducing the number of candidates to seven instead of five, I’d get rid of the intermediate cutdown to ten, instead having the voters reduce the field by roughly half before casting their final votes. And I wouldn’t have made any changes to the selection committee itself, because the changes to the selection process may have obviated much of the reason the Hall wanted to mess with the committee.
In any case, the biggest sign of whether these changes end up being a net positive or negative might be the Hall’s own confidence in them. I find it telling that the Hall’s official Twitter account never tweeted the announcement of these changes, unlike the 2024 changes. While it’s entirely possible that whoever is running the account simply dropped the ball, it sure smacks of the Hall trying to bury what they know will be controversial changes and trying to minimize the backlash, at least in the replies on their own account. On some level, they may know that for many historically-oriented fans, allowing modern-era candidates to be inducted at much the same pace as before 2024 won’t outweigh effectively shutting the door on the backlog of deserving senior candidates, not to mention potentially making the committee tasked with inducting those players worse.