Over the last decade, tens of millions of dollars have flowed through Canton, Ohio, to enhance the Pro Football Hall of Fame to a year-round football mecca. The stadium has expanded, the Hall of Fame Village has added a small theme park and restaurants, and you can even rent out space for your company outings.
Those are millions of dollars we now know have been wasted. There is no need to go to the Pro Football Hall of Fame anymore. If Bill Belichick is not a first ballot member of the hall, then it is not a hall at all.
ESPN first reported Tuesday, and CBS Sports confirmed, Belichick will not be enshrined into the Hall of Fame in his first year on the ballot. It is unclear how many of the 50 committee members did not vote for Belichick, but more than 10 did not.
When it comes to sports honors, this is the grossest miscarriage of justice in sports history. It has no equal. Even if Belichick gets voted in next year, this remains true.
I could take up plenty of internet space listing off Belichick’s career achievements. His six Super Bowl titles as a head coach — two more than anyone else. Or his two as the Giants defensive coordinator. Or the other three he coached in but didn’t win. How his 302 career wins are third all time and how his 31 postseason wins are more than anyone else. Truly, the list could keep going.
But I shouldn’t have to. In the past, obvious first balloters haven’t needed all that. In 1993, the committee speech to discuss Walter Payton’s candidacy was simply the words “Walter Payton.” Similar versions of that speech were given for the likes of Joe Montana, Dan Marino, John Elway and Brett Favre. In a few years, the same will be said for Tom Brady.
And that’s all that should have been needed for Belichick. But some group of these 50 voters decided to disgrace the hall they represent with such a disgusting decision.
CBS Sports Research
I am honored to be a voter for the Associated Press awards like the All Pro teams and Most Valuable Player. I had to make a very difficult decision at MVP last year and just had to make a hard one a few weeks ago. I take it very seriously, and I try to make my decisions without bias. Last year, the AP surprised some voters by revealing everyone’s ballots, and some voters were quite upset even though they were informed from the start this could happen. I did not mind it because the publicizing of the votes wouldn’t change my votes. If you vote with integrity, you have nothing to be afraid of or mad about.
But I have said to people before that if I were to ever be in a position to be a HOF voter, I probably would not accept it. It’s too big. It is literally someone’s entire professional legacy. It can go on their tombstone. Their children and their children’s children get to be known by it. I can accept the weight of making a tough decision to leave someone off the All Pro second team — and dammit, that’s really hard. Doing that to someone deserving of the HOF is so much heavier.
But to do that to someone like Belichick — someone so obviously deserving of a first ballot and the prestige that comes with that honor, and not even a discussion beyond that — is a blackhole type of weight. How does one take themselves seriously as a student or protector of the game?
And I can only imagine the hurt Belichick must have felt when he got the call that he’s not in. He had to have gone through every emotion. A man who is a walking football encyclopedia denied its greatest library.
If the HOF wants to save a shred of integrity, it will begin to make votes public. I do not think there’s any chance we ever learn all the people who did not vote for Belichick, so demanding that is useless. If other HOF voters want to anonymously leak who they know did not vote for Belichick, this is one of the rare instances where snitching is preferred.
Making the votes public will mean several voters will drop out. So be it. If they get something like this wrong, clearly changes need to be made anyway.
This useless collection of voters who went against Belichick would likely bring up Spygate, the 2007 controversy that resulted in punishment by the league and a permanent mark on Belichick’s record. Take it at its worst and then ask: Is the wage of that sin death? Of course not.
Deflategate can be simply explained by the Ideal Gas Law. The Patriots still have their website going deep into scientific detail debunking the supposed myths around that controversy.
Was Belichick unfriendly with the media? Yes. Who cares? Is he tarnishing his legacy by being part of monthly tabloid stories while struggling against low-level ACC competition at my alma mater? Almost certainly. It does not keep him out of Canton a single day.
Remember, this is the same hall that felt the urge to issue a statement after O.J. Simpson’s death confirming his forever-place in a hall that doesn’t need Belichick just yet. It’s a hall that kept Terrell Owens out for two years for nebulous reasons that somehow tied his off-field behavior into on-field … what, exactly? The HOF is supposed to be only about what happens on the field.
And let’s be clear, Belichick’s Year 1 omission blows Barry Bonds missing Cooperstown out of the water. Those voters — so many of whom misuse the honor of such a vote the same way the kid you couldn’t stand in school thought being a hall monitor gave him power over his peers — decided someone who probably (most definitely) took steroids shouldn’t be in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. But others who probably (most likely) took steroids should be in, and with great haste. As hypocritical as it was, and as much as I disagree with the decision, they at least had some faulty leg to stand on.
Maybe Belichick gets in next year. As much as he reveres football history, would he even show up? Would he hold what these ridiculous voters did to him against the institution? Would you?
His relationship soured with the Patriots and owner Robert Kraft when the credit he rightly deserved for building the dynasty was retroactively taken from him, and all the blame for the failures placed on him in the form of an Apple TV docuseries. It follows that his relationship with the Hall of Fame would suffer from a similar spit in the face.
The hall has to overhaul its process after omitting Belichick. Have a page on its website that lists all 50 voters and how they vote each year. This injustice must be the catalyst.
And if Belichick can be the reason for a better Hall of Fame process then, well, that should be a part of his Hall of Fame résumé, too.
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