Here is what happened this week with voting for the Pro Football Hall of Fame as just enough point missers decided that Bill Belichick, who only won six Super Bowls as a head coach, wasn’t worthy of being a first-ballot selection: They made their membership look as silly as if it were the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Not the Golden Globe Awards in this case. The Gold Jacket Awards.
There are 50 voters in all, mostly media members, but also Hall of Famers like Tony Dungy and Dan Fouts and James Lofton and Bill Polian. You need 40 votes to make it. Belichick, who has won more NFL championships than any coach in the history of the sport, didn’t get to 40. So it took just over 20% to make the rest of them look like a clown college.
I’ve said this before: You have a right not to like everything — or even anything — about how this is all done in baseball with the Baseball Writers Association of America. You can say that the voting should be open to broadcasters, too, and you’d be right about that all day long. But there are around 400 voting members in the BBWAA, and here’s what they don’t do: Go into a room and debate — and lobby — about who should receive the sport’s highest honor and who has to wait, sometimes forever. It makes the way we do it in baseball look like church in comparison.
Vahe Gregorian from Kansas City at least did the stand-up thing and explained not voting for Belichick, essentially writing that he felt badly for senior players who might be facing their last chance to make it to Canton. So Gregorian kicked the can on Belichick down the road, but not before adding this to his column: “[Belichick’s induction] is inevitable soon … as he should be. At the risk of contradicting my own vote, really, he shouldn’t even have to wait.”
He makes it sound as if he almost had no choice in doing that. Only he did. All those who didn’t vote for Belichick had the same choice, and came to the same wrong conclusion, no matter how right — or righteous — they thought they were. ESPN’s Adam Schefter, a former voter himself, put it this way: “They made an embarrassing mistake.”
They did. In lights. This isn’t about whether or not Belichick will get in next year, which he will, now that the whole chuckleheaded process has been laid bare. I realize Joe DiMaggio didn’t make it to Cooperstown until his fourth year on the ballot. I know that there were probably different agendas working hard against Belichick, from Spygate to Deflategate. But in the end, what we got were 11 pro football voters exactly like the point misser who kept Derek Jeter from being a unanimous first-ballot selection to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
“Insane,” Patrick Mahomes tweeted on X. “Don’t know how this could be possible.”
And here is what Tom Brady, who sure ought to know what he’s talking about when talking about his former coach, said:
“If [Belichick’s] not a first-ballot Hall of Famer, there’s really no coach that should ever be a first-ballot Hall of Famer, which is completely ridiculous because people deserve it.”
Again: The whole process is ridiculous. In the old days, the voters would come out of those rooms and I’d hear stories about the lobbying that had gone on: You vote for my guy this year, I’ll vote for your guy next year. As Jimmy Breslin used to say, absolutely marvelous.
And if you don’t think regional bias comes into play — there are pro football writers voting from each NFL city, two from New York and Los Angeles — you need to think again. It would be impossible to prove it with the members of this Star Chamber, but I believe some of that bias is coming into play with Eli Manning, who should have been a first-ballot selection last year and just got passed over again. He was never going to be the kind of slam dunk that Belichick should have been. But he still ought to be a Hall of Famer by now.
Something you hear about Eli: Well, his lifetime record in the regular season was only .500. Somehow that is supposed to be more important than beating Belichick and Brady twice in Super Bowls. Think about it: Eli and the Giants are the reason why Belichick hasn’t won eight Lombardi Trophies and Brady nine, including the one he won with the Bucs after he left the Patriots.
There is only one other quarterback who’s won two Super Bowls who hasn’t made it to Canton, and that’s Jim Plunkett; Plunkett won his two after leaving the Patriots for the Raiders. But he didn’t have one that compared with Super Bowl XLII, one of the most famous pro football games ever played, the Giants knocking off the Patriots and keeping them from going 19-0 that year. You know who’s in the Pro Football Hall of Fame for winning one of the most famous games of them all? Joe Namath is who. He never did it again. Eli did. No matter. He has to wait another year, and who knows how long after that.
Of course Eli’s candidacy, as strong and enduring as it is, isn’t Bill Belichick’s. He became, in all the big ways, the Vince Lombardi of his time. There is no Mount Rushmore of NFL coaches without him, the way there isn’t one without Lombardi, and Don Shula, who won more games than anybody in history, and Chuck Noll, who won four Super Bowls in a decade with the Steelers. But 11 voters were allowed to insult him this way. A real good football number, eleven. Except no one would want to pick these 11 if you were choosing up sides, whatever their tortured reasons for ignoring a record like Belichick’s, at least for now. Maybe they don’t like his new girlfriend.
My pal Bill Madden, a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, has always said that all it takes to set some crazy market for baseball players is one dumb owner. It wasn’t just one voter this time. It was more than that. They sure did some job on Belichick. He always said, “Do you job.” They didn’t.
There are plenty of BBWAA voters who vote every year for players associated with performance-enhancing drugs: Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, now Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez. If some writers believe those players belong in Cooperstown, all power to them. But I don’t lobby against the steroid guys, even if they’ve never gotten my vote.
We hear now that the people in charge of the football Hall realize how flawed their cockeyed system still is, now that it has embarrassed them with arguably the greatest coach of all time. Because if Bill Belichick isn’t a first-ballot Hall of Famer, they ought to turn the place into a bowling alley.
YANKEES NEED TO WIN MORE THAN THE MESSAGING, NOT A GIANT LOSS & THE KAT BLAME GAME …
Brian Cashman basically said this week that the Yankees shouldn’t be defined by the way the Blue Jays boat-raced them in that division series last October.
He and Aaron Boone must also think that the 27-36 slog that the Yankees had in the middle of the season was some kind of aberration, as well.
Except that something like it seems to happen to the Cashman/Boone Yankees every year at some point, if not always for a stretch of 60 dreary games.
But Yankee fans get the messaging by now, they do:
The people in charge are right, they’re wrong.
The truth is, the Yankees aren’t defined by losing that one series.
What they have now been defined by, since 2009, is all the playoff series that stopped them short of the World Series before 2024.
Then losing — oh, don’t you know, as John Sterling would say — in five games when they did make it back.
Maybe this is the year when it all changes, despite not very many big changes since Game 4 against the Blue Jays.
We’re going to find out if this is finally the Yankee team that is good enough.
Todd Monken was a good offensive coordinator for John Harbaugh in Baltimore, but it’s not as if the Giants just lost out on Bill Walsh.
Somehow Tom Thibodeau coached up Karl-Anthony Towns well enough for him to be third-team All-NBA last season, to average 24 points a game and nearly 13 rebounds, and to be the center on a team that made it to the Eastern Conference finals.
Suddenly, though, Towns is the one to blame for the Knicks not running away with the conference, which the owner of the team clearly thought they were poised to do.
By the way?
If St. John’s somehow flames out early again in the NCAA Tournament, I fully expect KAT to get blamed for that, too.
How’s the Rangers’ reboot going so far?
In the final of the French Open, Carlos Alcaraz played five hours and 29 minutes against Jannik Sinner, came from two sets (and three match points) down and finally beat him in a fifth-set tiebreaker.
In the semis of the Australian Open the other day, Alcaraz played five hours and 27 minutes against Sascha Zverev after winning the first two sets this time, lost two straight tiebreakers, got behind 5-3 in the fifth, then won the last four games and the match.
If blessed with good health, he’s going to be the next male player to win 20 majors or more, whether he’s completed the career Grand Slam by the time you read this or not.
I might be wrong about this, but I think that the Super Bowl pre-game just started.
One more thing about Belichick:
His owner might make the Hall before he does.
Got it.
