The Saturday before the Super Bowl has become a sort of Super Bowl pregame party. Regular season award winners including Most Valuable Player are announced. So is the upcoming Pro Football Hall of Fame class.
At some point in the day last Saturday, ESPN proudly informed you that the HOF Class of 2013 will include two current ESPN contributors – Super Bowl-winning head coach Bill Parcells and Cris Carter, arguably the second-greatest wide receiver in NFL history (no, not behind Randy Moss) – and some other guys. The other guys are all first-ballot inductees: defensive tackle Warren Sapp, offensive tackle Jonathan Ogden and offensive guard Larry Allen.
The fact that only five “non-senior” members may be enshrined in a given year means that some very talented players were left off this year’s list. Who missed it this year that should make it next year? Who will join them next year as first-ballot inductees? There are several possibilities, but some people are more likely to make it than others. I think these five guys are the most likely Class of 2014 inductees, and they would make a very colorful class (and more interesting than this year’s, which features two offensive linemen).
Derrick Brooks
One of two first-time candidates who should get inducted next year, Derrick Brooks is considered to be one of the greatest outside linebackers of all time. He spent all of his 14 NFL seasons with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, during which time he recorded 1,715 tackles. He wasn’t a sack master the way some of today’s elite linebackers are, but he was killer in coverage, totaling 25 interceptions and six defensive touchdowns in his career. Brooks was named a Pro Bowler eleven times and an All-Pro nine times, in addition to winning Super Bowl XXXVII, the 2002 NFL Defensive Player of the Year, and the Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year Award. His first-ballot induction should be a no-brainer.
Michael Strahan
Strahan just missed out on the Hall this year, his first year as a candidate. Did Jonathan Ogden and Larry Allen deserve to be enshrined over him? It is debatable, but with a weaker class of first-timers hitting the ballot next year, his induction should be a gimme. Strahan’s résumé is too impressive to pass over again: holder of the single-season sacks record, with 22.5 in 2001. More career sacks (141.5) than all but four players in league history. Seven Pro Bowl appearances and four First Team All-Pro nominations. Ninety-ninth best player in league history, according to the NFL Films special “The Top 100: NFL’s Greatest Players.” Until Ray Lewis did last Sunday, the current Live! with Kelly and Michael was the most recent star player to “go out on top” by winning a Super Bowl in the final game of his career. Plus, who doesn’t want to hear his acceptance speech?
Kevin Greene
Remember how I said only four players in league history have more career sacks than Michael Strahan? Kevin Greene is one of them. In fact, Greene is third behind only the great Bruce Smith and Reggie White, with 160 sacks. That’s also most for any linebacker in league history, more than Hall of Fame linebackers Lawrence Taylor, Rickey Jackson, Derrick Thomas, and Andre Tippet. He’s been a semi-finalist for the Hall the last six years, but it’s a crime that Greene has been denied a bust in Canton for so long. The linebacker spent his fifteen-year career with the Rams, Steelers, Panthers and 49ers. Greene currently coaches Clay Matthews and others as the Green Bay Packers outside linebackers coach. They’re learning from the best. And the best deserve to be enshrined.
(I briefly considered putting Charles Haley here instead, but, despite Haley’s record five Super Bowl rings, Greene deserves it more based on statistics. Haley has 100.5 career sacks.)
Jerome Bettis
But enough about sacks and defensive players. “The Bus” deserves a bust in 2014. He’s been eligible since 2011 and missed out on enshrinement each year since, but Bettis, the sixth-leading rusher in NFL history, needs to be enshrined eventually. Why not 2014? He’s one of the best players remaining. With 13,662 yards, the former Ram and Steeler has more rushing yards than all-time greats Erick Dickerson, Tony Dorsett, and Jim Brown. Bettis was a six-time Pro Bowler and, like the aforementioned Strahan and Lewis, went out on top, retiring after winning Super Bowl XL over the Seattle Seahawks, in his hometown of Detroit, no less. Throw in 94 career touchdowns and the Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year Award, and you have a Hall of Famer.
This would make back-to-back years with a head coach being enshrined. The other first-ballot candidate I see being inducted in 2014 besides Derrick Brooks is Brooks’s former coach in Tampa Bay. Though it was Jon Gruden who led Tampa Bay to Super Bowl XXXVII victory, Dungy was responsible for forming much of the core of that team. He also did get his Super Bowl ring later on with Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts. That Dungy is the only African-American head coach to win a Super Bowl surely won’t be lost on voters. Though he doesn’t have as impressive a résumé as Bill Parcells’s, Dungy won’t have to wait long to be inducted.
Honorable mentions, who will probably be among the fifteen finalists heading into Super Bowl Saturday, 2014:
Andre Reed
Now that we have Cris Carter out of the way, the logjam of wide receivers waiting for Hall induction will soon begin to clear up. In the past, Carter, Andre Reed and Tim Brown have been all waiting for enough votes, as voters can’t agree on which one should get their votes sooner than others. While it’s unfair for voters to consistently make them lower priority than other candidates (why do they get to say “You’re a Hall of Famer, just not for a few years” anyway?), Reed and Brown belong in the Hall of Fame like Carter does. Reed has a better chance to make it next year because he got further than Brown in the voting process this year (both were in the final 15, but Reed made the final ten), though Brown statistically had a better career.
Walter Jones
Left tackles Walter Jones and Orlando Pace both entered the NFL in 1997. Both retired after the 2009 season and will be eligible for the Hall of Fame for the first time in 2014. They are considered to be two of the greatest left tackles of the modern era, and their careers will forever be entwined and compared. I believe Jones has a better chance than Pace does to make it on the first ballot; it’s hard to compare offensive linemen on statistics, but Jones has the edge on Pace in Pro Bowls (nine to seven) and All-Pro teams (seven to five). Despite all this, there are too many flashy names for any offensive linemen to make it in 2014.
Kurt Warner
While Reed, Brown, Jones, and Pace will all be eventual Hall of Famers, there is more debate about if Warner will get in than when. If he had led the Arizona Cardinals to win Super Bowl XLIII over the Steelers, Warner would be viewed as a virtual lock. Because he didn’t, more voters will be skeptic about voting for him, especially if they also consider the lost years: the end of his time in St. Louis and his lone year with the New York Giants. Still, the guy won a Super Bowl two years after bagging groceries for a living, lost another to Tom Brady, and came close to winning one with a different team blank years later. I think he eventually gets in, but not next year.
