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Easy Bill Belichick Hall of Fame vote becomes embarrassing | Opinion
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- Easy Bill Belichick Hall of Fame vote becomes embarrassing | Opinion
I knew about, or knew personally, most of the Pro Football Hall of Fame voters during a 20-year period when I found myself at Super Bowls .
I hung out for a week at a time in New Orleans , San Diego, Phoenix, San Francisco or wherever else the game was that year. I was enjoying an ice cream in the press box in Atlanta when the call came in, two hours before the Patriots kicked off against the Rams, that my grandson Leo was two minutes old.
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One time when the Super Bowl was in Miami the media hotel was right by the ocean. I thought I worked hard at Super Bowls. The job seemed easier that year.
One year it was in Detroit .
What was the Canton Repository doing at so many Super Bowls?
One, it was a good place to dig up Browns-related stories, even though the Browns were never there. Bruce Arians told such good ones. It seemed I was talking to Canton's Josh McDaniels , there with the Patriots , almost every year.
New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady talks with head coach Bill Belichick and offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels before a home game against the Buffalo Bills, Dec. 24, 2017.
Two, it was the NFL's biggest week, and the league was founded in Canton.
Three, the Hall of Fame is in Canton, and the elections throughout my 20 Super Bowl years were conducted the weekend of the Super Bowl, in the Super Bowl city, with the latest class introduced at the game.
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I never had a vote, although now and then there was talk about giving one to someone from Canton. I came to know and respect some of the longtime voters. The funniest, or at least the most interesting, was Paul Zimmerman, who went by "Dr. Z" when he was the top NFL dog at Sports Illustrated.
Dr. Z was a huge fan of Canton's Marion Motley .
Over time, I've conversed with a fair number of voters still active now.
It's a good year not to be a Hall of Fame voter, in that it was assumed Bill Belichick would get in , and it is embarrassing that he didn't.
A Hall of Fame circus legend, P.T. Barnum, said there's no such thing as bad publicity, and if that is true, this is great for the Hall because everybody's talking about the Belichick snub.
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Joining the 2026 circus as a fellow snubee is Robert Kraft, the Patriots owner whose credentials seem notably superior to those of Dallas ringmaster Jerry Jones.
The Kraft vs. Jones comparison is detailed in another article.
New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is presented with the Vince Lombardi Trophy after the Patriots' win over the St. Louis Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI at the Superdome in New Orleans on Feb. 3, 2002.
Jones was elected in 2017, the day before Kraft's Patriots lost a Super Bowl game in Minneapolis. I was in town. I fell on the ice.
Kraft's team made the Super Bowl and won a year later in Atlanta, up the hill from a downtown Ferris wheel. Now his Patriots are in San Francisco for a Super Bowl that is a 40-minute bus ride from the Golden Gate Bridge.
Belichick was the New England head coach in those two Super Bowls and seven others. Andy Reid and Don Shula are the head coaches with the next-most Super Bowl appearances with six apiece.
New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick (left) greets team owner Robert Kraft before a game at the New York Jets, Nov. 22, 2012.
In past conversations with voters, I learned that in some years there was very little discussion about candidates who were obvious Hall of Famers.
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As noted above, all of the voters were in the same room in the Super Bowl city, the day before the Super Bowl, and not, as after the change, on a video conference some odd numbers of days in advance of the game.
In the pre-COVID-19 election rooms, someone would bring up an obvious first-ballot Hall of Famer and say something like, "Do we need to talk about this guy?"
The discussion might last two minutes, and then the vote would be taken, and the obvious guy would whisk in.
This happened with first-balloters Jerry Rice in 2010, Brett Favre in 2016 and Tony Gonzalez in 2019.
The 2019 election ran into the end of my and numerous other people's assignments to Super Bowls. COVID-19 hit in 2020. Financial struggles in the newspaper industry changed the body of the 50 voters, enough to matter.
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Video conferences became necessary because of COVID-19 and later because voters weren't being sent to Super Bowls. I haven't been in the video sessions, but does even an AI robot named Hal think this remote meeting is as good as face to face?
New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick celebrates a touchdown against the Arizona Cardinals in the second half, Dec. 12, 2022, in Glendale, Arizona.
By now you probably have heard that Belichick came one vote short, reportedly garnering 39 of the needed 40 votes from among 50 voters.
Here's my bottom line, relative to Belichick.
Maybe the discussion on him should have lasted four minutes, not two, to cover this issue and that issue.
After that, he should have been a really easy in.
Reach Steve at steve.doerschuk@cantonrep.com
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The Canton Repository sports department can be contacted via email at sports@cantonrep.com .
This article originally appeared on The Repository: Bill Belichick, Robert Kraft are clear Hall of Fame snubs | Opinion
