The Pro Football Hall of Fame announced yesterday its list of 17 finalists for induction this year. The 2007 inductees will be announced before the Super Bowl in Miami.

 

Once again, defensive players get short shrift from folks who should know better, the people entrusted with handing out NFL immortality. We've come to expect Heisman and NFL MVP voters to ignore defensive players. We expect a bit more from Hall of Fame voters.

 

Our expectations are a little too high, apparently.

 

The list of 17 finalists includes 16 players: one punter, 10 offensive players and 5 defensive players. As Cold, Hard Football Facts readers have come to learn, offensive players in the Live Ball Era enter the Hall of Fame at a rate of nearly 3-to-1 over defensive players. It looks like there will be a 2-to-1 ratio here in 2007.

 

Even the punter on the list, Ray Guy, is a product of media hype and not on-field performance. Somewhere, sombody along the way declared Guy a great punter. The truth is that he ranks nowhere among the all-time leaders in any punting category. He averaged 42.4 yards per punt for his career, well below the near 45.0 yards per punt of the all-time leaders. The record-holder, current Oakland punter Shane Lechler, has averaged 46.1 yards per punt in his career. Guy isn't even in close.

 

Oh, sure, he played in 207 consecutive games. But as we learned last week, that's far from the record for a punter.

 

In any case, here's a look at the complete HOF bias chronicles, including:

Subscribe to RSS	XML
R|Mail