All in All, It's Just Another Post on the Hall

This post isn't really all that related to fantasy football, but it's something for the people who bring you the People's Pigskin to get off their chest.

Anyone who reads more than one article ever written by Peter King will know that he's one of the people who selects the inductees for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. And in this week's Monday Morning Quarterback, King was bemoaning the fact that nonplayers and noncoaches like Ed Sabol, the man who gave us the invaluable NFL Films, has not made the Hall yet. Then he offered a couple of ideas for changing the selection process to help people like Sabol and Ron Wolf get into the Hall.

Here's how it currently works: The selectors get a premilinary list of modern-era candidates in October and are asked to whittle that list down to 25 semifinalists. The semifinalist list goes to the selectors in November to be whittled down to 15. Then on Super Bowl weekend, those 15 candidates are pared down to 10. Then the selectors vote again to pare those 10 candidates down to 5. Then the selectors vote yes or no on each of those 5 candidates. Any candidate who gets 80% "yes" votes in that last round are elected and are inducted the following August.

A separate process can produce up to 2 "senior" inductees each year, so you can have up to 7 people inducted each year.

Here's what Peter King proposes to change this:

1. Take one of "senior" selections either every year or every other year and designate it for a noncoaching "contributor."

2. "Take the two non-modern-era-candidate slots and make them fit for all other candidates -- seniors, scouts, etc."

Those are nice ideas, but they don't go nearly far enough.

In this season of peace on earth, it's time to blow up the Hall of Fame selection process.

The problem is the seven-enshrinee maximum, which makes it feel as if the selectors are filling a quota instead of a hall. The last year more than seven people were enshrined was 1967, when eight people, including Paul Brown and Chuck Bednarik, were inducted. That year, the National Football League had only 16 teams -- half the number it has now. (The NFL-AFL merger was several years away.) That year, the Green Bay Packers had 43 players on its roster, according to ProFootballReference.com; now their roster has 53 players at any given time. And the Packers had 7 coaches that year, including Vince Lombardi; now they have 21.

In short, the Hall of Fame selection process was designed for a league that no longer exists. There are far more players, coaches and contributors in the NFL now, so it makes sense that there would be more people worthy of induction now. If you look at players alone, there is a glut of worthy candidates getting squeezed out by the numbers game, and that glut will only get worse as time marches on. If Tim Brown has a hard time getting attention in this atmosphere, imagine what Ed Sabol must go through.

The Hall of Fame should give football fans everywhere the Christmas gift of a new rule: We'll start inducting the exact number of people we deem worthy of induction, whether it's 1 or 5 or 25. And yes, they should start with Ed Sabol.

We'll be back with some fresh predictions.