Introducing Morgan Wick’s Shadow Pro Football Hall of Fame

Less than a week after the Class of 2022 was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Deion Sanders implicitly trashed it. In a video running just over a minute and 45 seconds, Sanders claimed that “the Hall of Fame ain’t the Hall of Fame no more”, that it had become a “free for all” where players that were merely good could be inducted, that the Hall should be for “people who changed the game” and not those who just had “three or four good years”.

Sanders didn’t name any names of any specific players that he felt didn’t belong in Canton, but a fellow Hall of Famer did call out a specific member of the 2022 class as undeserving and even problematic. Two months earlier, Bruce Smith, the NFL’s all-time sack leader, questioned the reasoning behind the induction of Tony Boselli as part of the 2022 class, specifically that people were citing Boselli’s performance against Smith in a 1996 playoff game. Using players’ performances against other Hall of Famers as criteria for induction, in Smith’s view, would erode the “exclusive fraternity” of Hall of Famers by incentivizing players to play up their performance against other Hall of Famers, creating “friction and discord”. Smith also noted that Boselli’s accomplishments weren’t quite comparable to other left tackles since the quarterback he was protecting, Mark Brunell, was left-handed, meaning Boselli wasn’t protecting his blind side.

Boselli had a relatively brief seven-year career, but was highly acclaimed with five Pro Bowl selections and was named first-team All-Pro three times as well as being selected to the All-Decade Team of the 1990s. It would certainly seem that the people who watched him play felt he could have protected the blind side of a right-handed quarterback at a level comparable to the best to do so, and the 1996 playoff game is just a single piece of evidence in favor of that. His Hall of Fame Monitor score at Pro Football Reference is 80.68, behind only two tackles not in Canton: Jim Tyrer and the only-recently-retired Jason Peters.

A more questionable 2022 inductee, if you wanted to do so, would be Sam Mills, who was named first-team All-Pro by the AP only once (though he was named to the first team by other selectors on two other occasions) in an 11-year career that got him named to the Pro Bowl five times (tied for the fewest of any post-merger linebacker in Canton), resulting in a Monitor score of only 55.78. Dave Wilcox is the only linebacker with a lower score in Canton, and among inside linebackers Mills has the lowest score by over seven points. Also worth noting is that year’s senior inductee, Cliff Branch, whose 8685 receiving yards is the second-fewest of any wide receiver in Canton who played his entire career after the merger (not counting Devin Hester), and Drew Pearson, unlike Branch, was named to an All-Decade team.

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An even less belated blog-day.

A year ago at this time, I expressed optimism that this would be the year that this long period where I’ve felt like I’ve completely wasted my life would come to an end. That… has not happened.

I had grand plans for what to do with Da Blog in 2024, ranging from completing series that I hadn’t finished to starting new ones. I even had an idea to start a podcast, representing the biggest evolution of my “brand” since I wrote my book in 2015. Before, during, and after the election, I wanted to make posts exploring what went wrong in American and global politics for things to get to the point where a Donald Trump could get within a thousand miles of the White House once, let alone three times, let alone win the popular vote – including some posts I’ve been sitting on since his first campaign in 2016, if not longer. It would close the loop on the core issue that’s been the monkey on my back for the past eight years.

Instead, this is only the 31st post since my last blog-day post, the lowest total in three years but still a step ahead of the nadir of my productivity. The podcast involved way more work than I was comfortable with putting in, but the politics posts were a real disappointment for me. At least in 2016, even though I didn’t write many posts before the election, I got in a decent number of posts after it, including ones that went pretty far in-depth, despite also juggling the Flex Schedule Watch. This year, my last politics-related post was published the day before the election. I even tried to come up with a new strategy to commit to doing a certain amount of writing every day, but that fell apart remarkably quickly. I don’t know how much of it is my sleep schedule still being out of whack, certain other activities falling at awkward times, continuing to hold myself to too high a standard for how alert I need to be to write at the standard I’d like, having too many frivolous activities on my plate, if I’m just not in the right place to put the sort of energy into writing posts that would be necessary to maintain the pace I want to, or if there’s something psychologically wrong with me on a deep level, or even just that I’ve grown too old, even at only 36, to maintain the posting levels of Da Blog’s halcyon days. What I do know is that I think I absolutely need therapy, or some sort of professional help, if I’m ever going to get back to the level of productivity I want.

Year Eighteen of Da Blog marked a decade since I moved to Los Angeles with my dad, meaning more than half the time since Da Blog launched has been in LA – a move that was supposed to allow me to focus on Da Blog full-time, but has only really been productive for the first year and a half while I was writing the book, and even that wasn’t up to the level I’d like. I do intend to get some political posts in between now and the inauguration, but if I haven’t done any work on them up to this point there’s little realistic reason to think another month will be much of an improvement, aside from the Flex Schedule Watch ending for the season (I hope to get the Week 16 post up in the next 24 hours). The one source of optimism, besides my renewed commitment to getting some sort of help to make me more productive, is that my thinking about politics ended up pushing me in the direction of a larger project I hinted at in this post, but that won’t necessarily result in a burst of new posts in the short term and I’m not sure how willing or able I am to put in the consistent work on it I’d like.

I’m feeling like I’m entering Year Nineteen with less false optimism about my ability to pull myself out of my almost decade-long funk on my own. Whether that’s a good thing, because it’ll lead me to get the help I need, or a bad thing, because it’ll lead me to succumb to despair and frustration at my inability to live up to my own image of myself, is something only time will tell. Either way, this stands to be a pivotal year for Da Blog and my life.

Assessing the Impact of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s New Selection Process

On Friday the Pro Football Hall of Fame announced the biggest change to its selection process since the introduction of the semifinalist stage in 2004 – if not longer.

Last year’s selection process saw some head-scratching moves at each stage of the process. The list of preliminary nominees, once numbering fewer than 100, ballooned to 173, yet still saw some head-scratching omissions, with Eric Berry, a member of the All-Decade Team of the 2010s, probably being the most glaring. The list of semifinalists wasn’t too bad, but then the finalists saw the inclusion of the highly marginal resumes of Fred Taylor and Rodney Harrison, seemingly putting them in line for almost certain induction. What attracted the most attention, though, wasn’t anything to do with the modern-era selections, but the selection committee rejecting the senior-candidate bid of Art Powell – the first time a senior candidate had been rejected in 12 years – as well as coach/contributor finalist Buddy Parker. Some of the changes the Hall made should address the odd list of nominees we saw last year, but the changes later in the process aren’t necessarily related – and might make the actual issues the Hall faces worse.

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The Game to Show the Games Podcast: Episode 1 (of 1?)


I don’t know if I’m going to do any more of these. I’m glad I did it, I’m glad I had the opportunity to do it, and I won’t rule out doing more audio stuff in the future (weird voice and all), but it took a lot out of me, chewed up most of my week, and I realized that if I were to spend more of it speaking off the cuff – even (perhaps especially) if I had a cohost – I’d probably leave a lot of dead air as I thought about what to say, which wouldn’t mesh well with the gimmick I came up with, and which would be a problem when writing a script takes almost as much effort for each topic as a full-fledged blog post would. (I mention I have a partially-written post on Pat McAfee sitting in my drafts, and I may end up publishing it largely adapted from what I say about him here.) It’s an interesting idea and I think you’ll find the result interesting as well, but I’m not sure this format is for me.

After the jump, timestamps and relevant links for each segment. 

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A slightly less belated blog-day.

This is the 39th post since my last blog-day post, a slight improvement over a mark that I remarked at the time was the most I’d had since 2018, and in fact that mark was close enough to the 2018 mark that this is actually the most posts I’ve had since the start of my posting drought in 2016. So you might think this was a year for optimism about my ability to climb out of that drought, start posting more regularly again, and if not return to the halcyon days of the site, at least return to a place where I could put together some sizable projects that would give this site life outside football season.

It hasn’t felt that way, though, and the reality has been decidedly more mixed. I did get in a number of posts about the evolution of sports on television, and the linear television industry more generally, but they often came out well after the point where they were relevant. I put together a series of posts about a college football super league, but I’ve been sitting on the last part of the series and I’m not completely confident I’ll complete it in time for the national championship game. I said on the last blog-day post that I’d been sitting on a good old-fashioned long-form series for the past month or two, and I only managed to post one part of it all year and made virtually zero progress on the rest of it, and now I’m not confident I’ll ever return to it, especially since I’ve been sitting on two more long posts for months (though one of them is something like 95% complete and should be coming out before the new year). Last year I managed to sprinkle in some non-football posts amongst the Flex Schedule Watch; this year the Watch (and Cantonmetrics) completely took over the blog from October onwards, though a lot of that had to do with a) figuring out how the new rules would affect flex scheduling and b) the need to fill out the opening section of the new Flex Schedule Watch posts.

Basically, while I’ve improved my productivity some, I still haven’t been able to squeeze in enough time, and be awake and alert enough at those times, to write long-form posts at the rate I’d like. When I get going I can write most of a long-form post in a single session, but the prospect of it still seems daunting. I might be able to at least somewhat reduce the time I spend goofing off on my phone, but it’s possible that further increasing my level of productivity will require therapy, or perhaps a change in medication, and I’m not sure how able I’ll be to get either of those.

In the end, that might be the biggest cause for optimism to come out of Year Seventeen of Da Blog. It’s not that I started putting together long-form posts more often than I used to; it’s that I actually have something resembling a concrete path to improving things further. Coupled with my sleep schedule approaching something resembling normalcy and some other ideas I have for branching out into new areas, there’s a very real possibility that Year Eighteen marks the year where this wasted period of my life fully and completely comes to an end.

NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch: Week 14

So in the early part of this year’s iteration of this feature, I was able to fill this introductory section with some discussion of how the week’s results shaped the flex scheduling picture on a high level, leaving the details for the body of the post. In the middle portion, there seemed to be new articles or news about flex scheduling just about every week, and this section became invaluable as a place for me to leave my comments about them. Now we’re hitting the last few weeks, with only two flex scheduling weeks left, and I’m not sure what to put here. That was already the case a few weeks ago when the surprise announcement of the Week 15 flexes before the Week 13 games bailed me out, but it’s even more acute here. There’s not much in the way of anything general I could say that would apply to both weeks, although the situation in the NFC North does apply to both, and for the most part, the situations themselves are cases where I’m basically twiddling my thumbs waiting for the clock to run out. In the past this would be the last week before a decision on Week 17 flexing needed to be made, but now that there’s a formal six-day window involved there’s one more week to go through before it’s time to make any sort of firm prediction.

I will say that, despite it being responsible for knocking out a week of the Flex Schedule Watch entirely some years ago, and the NFL rendering it worthless last year, I do intend to calculate the percentage chances of each game being moved to Sunday night again. Call me crazy, but as long as I’m doing this feature I should provide some sort of structure and context to the options for the final week as we come down the stretch. Right now I’m mostly providing shots in the dark in terms of what games are in the running and why, and I should get down to business trying to figure out what the actual scenarios are. But it means next week’s post could take a long time to put together again, especially since I’m flying to Seattle next Wednesday, and also I expect John Ourand’s year-end predictions column Monday so I’d likely need to find time to squeeze that and the annual blog-day post in over the course of the week.

How NFL flexible scheduling works: (see also the NFL’s own page on flex schedule procedures)

  • Up to two games in Weeks 5-10 (the “early flex” period), and any number of games from Week 11 onward, may be flexed into Sunday Night Football. Any number of games from Week 12 onward may be flexed into Monday Night Football, and up to two games from Week 13 onward may be flexed into Thursday Night Football. In addition, in select weeks in December a number of games may be listed as “TBD”, with two or three of those games being assigned to be played on Saturday. Note that I only cover early flexes if a star player on one of the teams is injured.
  • Only games scheduled for Sunday afternoon, or set aside for a potential move to Saturday, may be flexed into one of the flex-eligible windows – not existing primetime games or games in other standalone windows. The game currently listed in the flex-eligible window will take the flexed-in game’s space on the Sunday afternoon slate, generally on the network that the flexed-in game was originally scheduled for. The league may also move Sunday afternoon games between 1 PM ET and 4:05 or 4:25 PM ET.
  • Thursday Night Football flex moves must be announced 28 days in advance. Sunday and Monday Night Football moves must be announced 12 days in advance, except for Sunday night games in Week 14 onward, which can be announced at any point up until 6 days in advance.
  • CBS and Fox have the right to protect one game each per week, among the games scheduled for their networks, from being flexed into primetime windows. During the early flex period, they may protect games at any point once the league tells them they’re thinking of pulling the flex. It’s not known when they must protect games in the main flex period, only that it’s “significantly closer to each game date” relative to the old deadline of Week 5. My assumption is that protections are due five weeks in advance, in accordance with the 28-day deadline for TNF flexes. Protections have never been officially publicized, and have not leaked en masse since 2014, so can only be speculated on.
  • Supposedly, CBS and Fox are also guaranteed one half of each division rivalry. Notably, some Week 18 games (see below) have their other halves scheduled for the other conference’s network, though none are scheduled for primetime.
  • No team may appear more than seven times in primetime windows – six scheduled before the season plus one flexed in. This appears to consider only the actual time the game is played; Amazon’s Black Friday game does not count even though the rest of their TNF slate does, and NBC’s Saturday afternoon game Week 16 doesn’t count but their Peacock game that night does. This post contains a list of all teams’ primetime appearances entering the season.
  • Teams may play no more than two Thursday games following Sunday games, and (apparently) no more than one of them can be on the road.
  • In Week 18 the entire schedule, consisting entirely of games between divisional opponents, is set on six days’ notice, usually during the previous week’s Sunday night game. One game will be scheduled for Sunday night, usually a game that decides who wins the division, a game where the winner is guaranteed to make the playoffs while the loser is out, or a game where one team makes the playoffs with a win but falls behind the winner of another game, and thus loses the division and/or misses the playoffs, with a loss. Two more games with playoff implications are scheduled for Saturday on ABC and ESPN, with the remaining games doled out to CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoon, with the league generally trying to maximize what each team has to play for. Protections and appearance limits do not apply to Week 18.
  • Click here to learn how to read the charts.

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Introducing the New NFL Flexible Scheduling Watch

The Bengals have had an unexpectedly slow start to the season with Joe Burrow not being the Joe Burrow the team needs him to be. The much-hyped arrival of Aaron Rodgers with the New York Jets came to an abrupt halt after four plays and no pass attempts – and yet the Jets with Zach Wilson still might be the better New York team, no thanks to Daniel Jones outright regressing after what seemed like a coming out party last year, leaving the Giants to stink up the joint in their primetime appearances so far. The honeymoon for Mac Jones in New England appears to be fast coming to an end as the Belichick-era Patriots may be reaching the end of their relevance. The Bears and Raiders, already questionable choices to get as many featured windows as they got, have been looking downright woeful – at least until the Bears got an unexpected win in Landover on Thursday night. The idea that Sean Payton might be able to fix what went wrong with Russell Wilson last season doesn’t seem to have panned out.

Add it all up, and we could be in for one of the most active seasons for flexible scheduling in a long time… as the NFL’s flexible scheduling regime enters uncharted territory.

I’ve put quite a bit of thought into what I want the Flex Schedule Watch to be since the schedule release back in May, and as I gleaned as much as I could about how flex scheduling will work going forward, I fairly quickly settled on the bones of a new format that I think best reflects how I’ve been conducting the Flex Schedule Watch in recent years, how the NFL has been conducting flex scheduling, and the changes to the flex scheduling regime. Gone are the regimented bullet points of the past, which had become as much restricting as guiding, and in is a new tabular format and more freeform, in-depth analysis. I’m not sure exactly how it’ll work yet – I might not have much to say about most weeks until a couple weeks until the decision has to come down – and I’ll probably work things out as the season goes along, but I have the basic idea at least. In this post I’ll walk through how it works with reference to several key weeks on the schedule. 

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Thoughts on the Future of the Flex Schedule Watch (and Primetime Appearance Counts)

2023 marks the beginning of the NFL’s new TV contracts including substantial changes to how flex scheduling works, not all of the details of which are known: six-day Sunday night flexing in December, Monday night flexing, and potentially even Thursday night flexing. With that will likely come substantial changes to how the Flex Schedule Watch works, which I’ve only recently started seriously thinking about… partly spurred by learning of a possible change to how flex scheduling works that could make the former format almost entirely obsolete. 

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NFL Week 18 Schedule Post-Mortem

Obviously the attention of the NFL world in the past two weeks has been focused on Damar Hamlin and the aftermath of his collapse in the first quarter of what was supposed to be a huge Monday night game between the Bills and Bengals. Thankfully his condition is not nearly as bad as was feared at the time, and less than a week after his collapse he was discharged from the hospital and returned to Buffalo with his release from a Buffalo hospital coming only nine days after the incident, and the NFL world seems to be moving on and returning to a semblance of normalcy, even if the NFL did end up imposing some odd contingencies to make up for the pivotal game that ended up being abandoned (though not nearly as odd as some of the proposals for delaying the playoffs that were floating around, including from me). Still, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m diminishing the Hamlin situation or anything. To be sure, certain forms of empathy don’t come as naturally to me as to most people, and I might sometimes come off as indifferent in my reaction to certain tragedies, but I think since writing that post I’ve come to a better understanding of why people react in the way that they do in those sorts of circumstances, maybe a better one than society itself has, and understand why those things have the import they do even if I don’t necessarily feel it myself.

Nonetheless, I also don’t feel that just because of the undeniably unfortunate situation the NFL world has gone through in the last week, that means the league should be off the hook for what they did in the 24 hours before Hamlin collapsed. Because as it turned out, the decision to flex Steelers-Ravens into the preceding Sunday night, which I called potentially the worst flex decision since 2015, was only a prelude to what, before the Sunday night game was even announced, would be the absolute worst flex decision of the entire flex scheduling era, and it’s not even close. Were it not for Hamlin’s collapse and the way the league dealt with it, the NFL’s boneheaded decisions about which games to move to Saturday could have had a material impact on what teams make the playoffs in both conferences (and the Sunday night pick could still have had that impact in the NFC), and it was entirely avoidable. 

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Cantonmetrics: The Pro Football Hall of Fame All-Snub Team

Who are the best players not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame?

The following chart contains the top 20 players not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, any other players on the “All-Snub Team” based on the top non-Hall players at each position, and any senior candidates that would fill spots on the All-Snub Team currently filled by modern-era players to form the All-Senior Candidate team. Note that this is based on Pro Football Reference’s Hall of Fame Monitor metric only, so it does not necessarily reflect my opinion about who the best or most deserving players are, and even to the extent that it does, it doesn’t necessarily mean these players should be in the Hall of Fame, especially the players closer to the bottom, nor does it mean I would object to any player not on this list being inducted. It also means the list does not include any players who played the bulk of their career before 1950, as the Hall of Fame Monitor doesn’t include such players.

Note also that players who were modern-era finalists in the most recent cycle are generally not considered snubs unless they are new finalists in their last five years of eligibility. Most players who became finalists before their last five years of eligibility, all but a handful who got there before their last eight, and to my knowledge, every player since 2002 who got there before their last ten, eventually made the Hall of Fame. Since 2002, Bob Kuechenberg is the only player who was a finalist for at least the last four years of his eligibility who did not get inducted before his eligibility ran out, and since the introduction of the two-tier cutdown of finalists in 2005, the only player to make the cut to the final 10 before his last three years of eligibility not to be inducted. This explains why I’m rolling this out right after the announcement of the finalists rather than waiting to see who gets inducted. 

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