Lenny Pasta got one thing right – Whitlock is an idiot. And as they say, it takes one to know one!

Read the whole story. Not as long as they get paid for storys would they have proper creditability. And your wrong about your analogy of Obama, its the wrong analogy because we have a vote when it comes to his contempt for the consitution.. We can replace him. We don’t have a vote when it come to the HOF.

The big problem here as far as I can see is with the Seniors. Jack Butler was very much deserving and was rightly voted in, but denying Dick Stanfel was yet another “shame on you” moment for the general voting body that also rejected Claude Humphrey a couple years ago while electing the likes of Floyd Little, Emmitt Thomas, and Dick LeBeau. For a change over the last two years, the Senior nominating committee did a good job — it was the rank-and-file electorate that screwed up here re Stanfel.

The three things that would help the process here would be:

–scrap the current Seniors approach. In its place, appoint a committee of football historians who research, nominate, and elect the Seniors, bypassing the current voters entirely. It’s been made abundantly clear that there’s no guarantee the current Senior nominating committee will consistently come up with good candidates, nor that the general voting group has any clue on how to evaluate the worth nominees once presented to them.

–have a separately nominated Coach/Contributor candidate, to be voted on in thumbs up/thumbs down manner as currently happens with the Seniors. This will help ease some of the player logjams.

–make the full voting results public. Voters should be held publicly responsible for their decisions, and bad-quality voters can be more easily screened out if they don’t shape up. A committee member who has an eccentric position (such as happened for years with John Steadman, the Baltimore rep who consistently tanked John Mackey’s candidacy until his behavior was exposed by a fellow city sportswriter and finally relented) would not be able to hide behind a cloak of secrecy. And when a voter decides to vote “no” on a good-quality Senior, they should be prepared to explain their decision.

Carter wouldn’t be such an issue if he was not working for ESPN and Parcells deserves to get in but I am happy it was not in his first year of eligibility.

I personally think that something like the last five classes of inductees should have votes in addition to small changes to the currentl electorate.

If the HOF was to really be meaning it should be voted by guys who are in the hall or actually played the game.

But, the process must start with the removal of clearly biased writers like Peter King. He openly flaunts his love of the Packers, Giants, Steelers and (especially) the Patriots.

King’s bitter vendettas against the 1970s Raiders and Cowboys are at the root of the problem and it’s only getting worse as other writers are bringing their own personal agendas to the table.

Reform the process now and remove King and any writer who openly campaigns for/against players.

Make it a mix of coaches and former players and keep guys like King away from it.

The greatest Tackel in NFL history has to wait?

Unless your a flashy stat guy like a Deion Sanders or a Marshal Faulk your not gonna make it in on the first shot.

Let the media do it and it’s all about the stats and highlights.

Let pleyers and coaches do it that way technique , skil, and knowledge of craft actually mean something

In what world was Tim Brown better than Andre Reed? When Reed retired he had the 3rd most receptions of all-time behind only Jerry Rice and Art Monk. Maybe you don’t remember how good he was, but that Bills offense of the 90′s revolutionized football.

However, they should both be in ahead of Michael Irvin, which was the HOFs biggest miss.

How can any lunatic voter in his right mind think that Cortez Kennedy or Chris Doleman has meant more to the game of Pro Football than Chris Carter, Charles Haley or Bill Parcells….

Too many voters are weak insecure idiots who did not like the way some of these players/coaches treated them..well..Man Up and shut up..and like someone else said….learn the game before your little club decides who gets in..totally BS

You mean Dan Wiederer? Can you at least get his name right?

And what about Sam Kouvaris, who is on the committee? He’s not even an NFL writer. He’s a sports anchor on a Jacksonville TV station. Why that seat on the committee isn’t covered by the Jaguars beat writer for the Times-Union or CBS writer Pete Prisco (former Times-Union writer and based in Jacksonville) is beyond me.

I always hear about Parcell’s coaching tree as some indication that he was deserving. Well a simple search shows that out of 11 head coaches from his tree only 3 have or had any success. 8 were failures as head coaches to this point. Coaches are recycled so much that it seems ridiculous to say any head coach created good ones or bad ones alone.

Some voters because of age only saw players from the 70′s and later, others saw player from the 50′s and later. How to compare?

Stats lie so unless you see someone how can you vote accurately.

Leave it alone and move on. Celebrate the ones in and hope for your favorites in the future.

Isn’t that like saying you can’t have an opinion on Obama because most of us haven’t been president? Many have credible understandings of the sports they cover. Some just get to be too big and become lazy.

Who’s doing the evaluating each year as to whether a given person is the “the best person actively covering that team to hold the vote” (your words) for each season?

What’s to stop that group from pressuring current or potential vote holders into electing the candidates they want?

The best solution has to involve a lifetime measure to prevent such abuses, but there should be some sort of balance instituted as well.

For example, something like: “a single organzation cannot hold more than 7% of the vote of the membership, otherwise membership must be revoked from the appropriate number of people until compliance with this rule is achieved. Individuals whose membership have been revoked for this purpose may become a non-voting/advisory member”.

Also, I don’t care if a voter who covers some team last year that they represent. As long as they covered the NFL in during a time when the current HOF-eligible players played, that’s ok by me. But I agree they should be somewhat connected to the league within reason.

For example, “if a voting member has not been actively covering the team they are representing in the last 10 years, they may become a non-voting/advisory member, and a qualified voting replacement representing the same team shall be found.”

The reason for the 7 year policy on latter should be that it doesn’t matter whether a voting member covered the team last year or not, no one that was on that team was eligible anyway. There should be some accountability to it, but I’d rather those with votes covered the guys they’re voting on more than I care whether or not they covered the guys last year who aren’t on the ballot at all.

I regress.

I hadn’t read “larryravor” s comment.

My post should read: “The guys except larry.”

As mentioned earlier in a comments, they are like the Supreme Court. They get lifetime appointments.

The HOF committee should be replaced every 2 years and none allowed to return to the committee for 10 years. I mean every person on the committee replaced every 2 years. No one hanging around from previous committee. Like that there are fresh faces and thoughts every 2 years.

Its my opinion, even in private business (which the NFL technically is, although it needs anti-trust status to be considered a legal private business) we should model or institutions with checks and balances. We need to limit power of these former-to-quazi-to-non athletes and make the process more fair, more democratic.

Also, if you dont want to change it too much, do like Mike is saying (and what Julius Caesar did), get more voters (senators)…just be careful Mike, the Belzers of the world are just like the Brutus’ of Caesar’s day; they don’t want their power and status challenged.