Thoughts On The HOF

It's been a hell of a week, friends.  I mentioned that my company was being acquired by another Fortune 500 company, and the deal went final yesterday.  I worked about 60 hours this week, and as of this morning, my boss was still calling me about minutiae.  I had very little time to write about football, or do much of anything this week, so I apologize for my silence for the last few days.

Today, I want to briefly talk about the Hall of Fame.  I started a longer post about football economics, that I am about halfway done with, and which posted accidentally for a little while a couple days ago, but that will be out in the middle of this coming week.  I have analyzed the Colts and Saints to death the last couple weeks, and I don't particularly want to duplicate those efforts.  Here, we'll be quick and to the point, so y'all can get back to your weekend activities.

This HOF class is kind of interesting.  I think three really borderline guys got in, and some obvious ones didn't.  Jerry Rice, Emmitt Smith, and Dick LeBeau were locks.  Beyond that, it was anybody's guess who was going to make it.  You may know that it's a deeply held belief of mine that reporters shouldn't be voting for anything important.  I believe that as deeply as many people believe in their religions.  

Reporters find stuff out by asking other people questions, and then they report on what people who know stuff tell them.  That doesn't qualify you to do the evaluation needed for something like electing Hall of Famers.  On top of that, I think the sort of work that reporters do leads to personal relationships, grudges, slights, and other things which make objectivity impossible.  

There are great players who aren't in the Hall of Fame because they didn't curry favor with the reporters who do the voting.  Sterling Sharpe is the second best WR I've seen play, and he was not far behind Jerry Rice at all.  He was a great, great player.  Michael Irvin wasn't as good as him, and neither were Cris Carter or Andre Reed.  None of the players playing today are as good as he was, either.  He absolutely dominated football games, with his precision, strength, physicality, intelligence, and hands.

Sharpe has never been near making it into Canton, and he never will be.  His career was cut short by a serious neck injury, but that should be irrelevant.  He was so good, you wouldn't believe it.  Sharpe refused to speak to the media during his career, and that has certainly hurt him.  Reporters have an undoubtedly tough job, finding stuff out from self-important people who mostly look down on them and blow them off, so they hold on to slights.  Even if they weren't the ones slighted, an NFL reporter from Miami will empathize with his counterpart from Wisconsin, and penalize the standoffish player.

Well, as a Broncos fan, I am not too happy that Sterling's brother Shannon got denied again.  He is obviously a Hall of Famer, and it makes my blood boil when I see a complete moron like John Clayton say that voters are considering him to be the same things as a WR.  That is so asinine, on so many levels, and Clayton's implicit endorsement of that thinking is awful.  History is not as reporters wish to make it.  History is stuff that actually happened.  I wrote this last year, when Shannon was first screwed, if you're interested.  It meanders a little, but that's how I roll sometimes.

Anyway, I thought the voters this year went out of their way to put in non-skill players, due to the presence of Smith and Rice.  All three are Hall of Good to Hall of Very Good to me.  Rickey Jackson was a good pass rusher in his day, but he was nowhere near as good as Richard Dent and Charles Haley, who didn't make it this year.  I think this is an example of reporters thinking in terms of what would be a good story.  Hey, the Saints are in the Super Bowl!  Let's put one of their better players into the Hall of Fame too!  It would be a great story!  If they wanted a Saint, the best player on those defenses was Sam Mills, anyway.  He's dead, so that wouldn't be as cool a story, right?

John Randle was another guy who was good, but there were much better players in this class who didn't make it.  He was a top notch pass rusher from inside, but he was mostly a liability in the running game, especially as his career got on.  His 137.5 sacks are the most ever for a DT, I get that, but there's a lot more to playing that position than getting sacks.  Randle benefited from stats more than anybody.

Russ Grimm is the most egregiously questionable selection, in my opinion.  He was a good player, who played on a cohesive, over-hyped unit, the Hogs.  I actually have seen reporters say that since no member of the Hogs are HOFers, that Grimm has to get in.  That's stupid, stupid thinking, and it goes against what the Hall of Fame is supposed to be.  Well-marketed and cleverly-named position groups need a Hall of Famer, huh?  I wonder when Vance Johnson is going to get the call, for being the best of the 3 Amigos.  Grimm was good, but he was never a dominant player.  He made 4 Pro Bowls, but that was with the benefit of the Hogs hype.  Of the 17 finalists, Grimm would have been 17th on my list.

A guy who deserved to get in was Floyd Little, and I am very happy for him.  He was a guy who was always hurt by his stats, and the inability of reporters to understand that the era he played in was vastly different than the one that they "learned" the game in.  In Floyd's day, rushing for 1,000 yards in a 14 game season was a big accomplishment,  Nowadays, teams have two players do it one year sometimes.  Every starter is expected to be over 1,000.  That's hard for many of these weak-minded types to understand.

I once said on Mile High Report that I didn't think I could say Floyd was a HOFer.  This was before I had any reputation there, and I got hammered for it.  One of the regulars, firstfan, even bought me Floyd's book on Amazon.com, so I could be better educated.  Floyd retired two years before I was born, so I never got to see him play in his era.  I've seen a lot of highlights, and if you haven't, I recommend you check this out.  

Floyd Little was like a much better every-down back version of Reggie Bush, and he played on some historically terrible Broncos teams.  His best QB was Steve Tensi.  The biggest reason I love Floyd is that he is the reason there is a team called the Denver Broncos.  The team was doing terribly in the 60s, and there were discussions underway of moving them to Chicago or Birmingham.  There was also a risk that the NFL wouldn't take them, with the rest of the AFL teams.  That all changed when Floyd signed with the team.  He gave them instant credibility, and even though they didn't start winning until a few years after he retired, Floyd Little was the Denver Broncos.  Congratulations to The Franchise on his well-deserved election.

To my friends in the Broncos community, I hope to see you in Canton next summer.  I live an hour north, and if a lot of people are coming, I may help to organize some events, given my geographical proximity.  Hopefully, we're there two years in row, when Shannon Sharpe gets in next year.  I hope y'all have a great weekend, and good parties tomorrow.  I'll have a short-ish game review Monday morning, (I can't write while a guest at the party I am going to,) and a longer Tuesday column this week.  Do you have any HOF thoughts?  I'd love to read them.