Denver Native (Carol)
02-03-2010, 10:22 PM
http://blogs.denverpost.com/sports/2010/02/03/football-hall-of-fame-voting-too-much-power-in-the-hands-of-too-few/
4 voters include many men and women I know and respect, and I’m sure I’d respect all 44 if I had met them. The list is impressive; it’s just not long enough. I am not belitting any individual’s qualifications to be a voter. I’m criticizing a system in which 44 people — any 44 people — have that much power.
Even the U.S. Senate has 100 members.
(Supply your own punchline.)
The point is, in the Hall of Fame voting, individual vendettas can amount to vetoes. That’s the reason former Broncos linebacker Randy Gradishar isn’t in the Hall of Fame — the petty vendetta of an outspoken single voter who had immense influence in the discussion and the voting. One person ridiculously saying, “Aw, the 3-4 defense inflates linebacker’s statistics, and, on top of that, they exaggerated their tackle statistics in Denver,” was enough to keep Gradishar out in the early years of his eligibility, when he should have bebrainer selection. After that, it became, “Well, these newly eligible candidates are more deserving, and if he was so hot, why isn’t he in already?” As younger voters entered the process, they trusted the voters before them — and assumed that the guy with 27 different colored pens in his pocket charting punting hang time during pregame warmup must have known what he was talking about.
There are too many voters in baseball’s Hall of Fame voting.
There aren’t enough in football. It’s awkward for representatives of each NFL city to assume the role of proponent for candidates from “their” teams, especially because they might not have worked in those markets when they players in question were in their primes. Horse trading — you vote for my guy, I’ll vote for yours — goes on, mostly subtly. The bottom line is some great players don’t even get a sniff. Case in point: Roger Wehrli couldn’t carry Louis Wright’s, um, helmet. Yet Wehrli is in the Hall of Fame and Wright never even gets mentioned.
I’m not belittling the voters. I’m disdainful of the limited voting pool and the process, including the fact that the voting takes place on a Saturday morning in the Super Bowl city, which means that it’s at the tail end of a week in which media members typically spend a lot of time scrambling to round up extra tickets to the commissioner’s party. And then the pressure is on to make the decisions quickly enough to make arrangements for the announcements and the conference calls.
This year, the major candidates include three men I did cover stories on during my tenure at The Sporting News — first-time eligibles Jerry Rice and Emmitt Smith, and holdover eligible Richard Dent. Rice and Smith are shoo-ins; Dent should be, but faces an uphill battle. Also, by all means, I can’t see how the voting body could be so petty as to not rubber-stamp the selection of Floyd Little as a veterans committee-advanced candidate. When I moved to Denver in 1972 after my father became the Broncos’ offensive line coach, I saw what Floyd meant to this franchise and to Denver, and you’re darned right, that should enter into it. But he also can stand on his own two bowed legs, and deserved to be in long ago.
The TSN covers for my stories on Rice, Smith, and Dent pieces are below. I visited Rice in Mississippi in an offseason. I met with Smith and the Bills’ Thurman Thomas at their joint birthday party in Dallas, and then at training camps to write a piece about their friendship. And I wrote a dual profile and strategy piece about Dent and Packers’ offensive tackle Ken Ruettgers to stand as an example of a left tackle vs. pass rushing specialist intradivisional battle that took place twice a season for years.b (And, yes, somebody had to explain the “Headbangers Ball” headline to me. I wasn’t a big MTV fan at the time.)
4 voters include many men and women I know and respect, and I’m sure I’d respect all 44 if I had met them. The list is impressive; it’s just not long enough. I am not belitting any individual’s qualifications to be a voter. I’m criticizing a system in which 44 people — any 44 people — have that much power.
Even the U.S. Senate has 100 members.
(Supply your own punchline.)
The point is, in the Hall of Fame voting, individual vendettas can amount to vetoes. That’s the reason former Broncos linebacker Randy Gradishar isn’t in the Hall of Fame — the petty vendetta of an outspoken single voter who had immense influence in the discussion and the voting. One person ridiculously saying, “Aw, the 3-4 defense inflates linebacker’s statistics, and, on top of that, they exaggerated their tackle statistics in Denver,” was enough to keep Gradishar out in the early years of his eligibility, when he should have bebrainer selection. After that, it became, “Well, these newly eligible candidates are more deserving, and if he was so hot, why isn’t he in already?” As younger voters entered the process, they trusted the voters before them — and assumed that the guy with 27 different colored pens in his pocket charting punting hang time during pregame warmup must have known what he was talking about.
There are too many voters in baseball’s Hall of Fame voting.
There aren’t enough in football. It’s awkward for representatives of each NFL city to assume the role of proponent for candidates from “their” teams, especially because they might not have worked in those markets when they players in question were in their primes. Horse trading — you vote for my guy, I’ll vote for yours — goes on, mostly subtly. The bottom line is some great players don’t even get a sniff. Case in point: Roger Wehrli couldn’t carry Louis Wright’s, um, helmet. Yet Wehrli is in the Hall of Fame and Wright never even gets mentioned.
I’m not belittling the voters. I’m disdainful of the limited voting pool and the process, including the fact that the voting takes place on a Saturday morning in the Super Bowl city, which means that it’s at the tail end of a week in which media members typically spend a lot of time scrambling to round up extra tickets to the commissioner’s party. And then the pressure is on to make the decisions quickly enough to make arrangements for the announcements and the conference calls.
This year, the major candidates include three men I did cover stories on during my tenure at The Sporting News — first-time eligibles Jerry Rice and Emmitt Smith, and holdover eligible Richard Dent. Rice and Smith are shoo-ins; Dent should be, but faces an uphill battle. Also, by all means, I can’t see how the voting body could be so petty as to not rubber-stamp the selection of Floyd Little as a veterans committee-advanced candidate. When I moved to Denver in 1972 after my father became the Broncos’ offensive line coach, I saw what Floyd meant to this franchise and to Denver, and you’re darned right, that should enter into it. But he also can stand on his own two bowed legs, and deserved to be in long ago.
The TSN covers for my stories on Rice, Smith, and Dent pieces are below. I visited Rice in Mississippi in an offseason. I met with Smith and the Bills’ Thurman Thomas at their joint birthday party in Dallas, and then at training camps to write a piece about their friendship. And I wrote a dual profile and strategy piece about Dent and Packers’ offensive tackle Ken Ruettgers to stand as an example of a left tackle vs. pass rushing specialist intradivisional battle that took place twice a season for years.b (And, yes, somebody had to explain the “Headbangers Ball” headline to me. I wasn’t a big MTV fan at the time.)