Congratulations to Antonio Gates, Jared Allen, Eric Allen, and Sterling Sharpe on their induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Now it’s time to look at how this year’s selection process affects who the players most likely to get in next year are, and with the 2024 season fully at a close, what active and recently-retired players have most built their resumes for eventual induction into Canton.
Non-Inducted Finalists and Key First-Ballot Candidates for the Class of 2026
These are the finalists that failed to be inducted into Canton this year, plus the first-ballot candidates in next year’s class with the highest Monitor numbers – in other words, the top candidates to be inducted next year. Names in bold are the modern-era players I predict to be inducted, and for those using screen readers, those players will be listed off in the alt text.
Let’s get this out of the way first: this year’s changes to the Hall of Fame induction process, at least when it comes to the cutdowns for finalists, are officially a mistake. To be sure, having smaller classes was the entire point of the changes, and mission accomplished on that front, but this underscores that the only people who really wanted a smaller Hall were the Hall of Famers themselves, and for everyone else it’s just going to make the Hall’s existing backlogs worse.
It’s actually the senior/coach/contributor voting that most underscores the problem; I thought it was obvious that, rightly or wrongly, Jim Tyrer and Ralph Hay didn’t have enough support for induction, and thus that the voters would coalesce on the other non-modern-era player candidates to maximize the size of the class. I could see Maxie Baughan not having enough support, but Mike Holmgren’s non-induction is genuinely shocking to me. Unless more voters than have heretofore been apparent genuinely think he doesn’t deserve to get in, it’s evident that even when the candidates with the most support are clearly apparent, and thus there’s an obvious vote to cast to induct the most candidates, it’s going to be very rare that more than the bare minimum of candidates get inducted. With an 80% threshold for induction, the Hall of Fame has turned into the baseball Hall, where a handful of grandstanding voters can make or break candidates’ chances, and which pretty much everyone hates.
But if the senior/coach/contributor voting underscores the impact of the rule change in general, it’s the modern-era vote that produced the specific result that’s most telling. I’m not going to quibble with not inducting any first-year eligible players, and while Jared Allen over Torry Holt is deeply concerning (Holt has been on the ballot six years longer, has a much higher Monitor, and arguably has a better resume despite the lack of first-team All-Pros) I doubt anyone would seriously question Allen’s worthiness for induction. Eric Allen, on the other hand, suggests the rule changes haven’t even done anything to address the problem they’re supposed to, the idea that players are getting inducted who existing Hall of Famers don’t consider worthy.
I’m not going to say Eric Allen wasn’t worthy of induction, but he did have the third-lowest Monitor of the finalists and a weak enough resume (becoming only the second post-merger cornerback with no more than one first-team All-Pro in Canton) to re-calibrate my standards for projecting active players, and he missed the first cut last year which might have suggested he didn’t have as much support in the room – to say nothing of how last year was his first as a finalist and he hadn’t even made the semis only four years before that. Yet the committee voted for him over Holt, Luke Kuechly, or Willie Anderson. The rule changes didn’t do anything to change who the committee considers worthy of Canton; rather than limit their votes to the most deserving candidates, they decided that with Eric Allen having only one more year of eligibility, they should get him in now and not leave his fate to the senior committee. They effectively defied the likes of Deion Sanders and Bruce Smith who wanted them to have higher standards for induction, by inducting someone that wouldn’t have been a blatant omission over people that arguably would be.
Not helping matters is that there’s another loaded group of candidates becoming eligible next year; even if there were a full five first-year candidates making the finals, and with such a small class there probably won’t be, it would still leave at least one candidate with a Monitor over 80 to fall to the All-Snub Team. If only three first-year candidates make it, you’re looking at someone over 100 on the team, a group that currently consists of only Tyrer and Kevin Williams (and Williams’ chances of modern-era induction, when he hasn’t even made the semis, look decidedly slim right now). The group includes two candidates with Monitors in the 140s, which would ordinarily be pretty good bets for first-ballot induction – yet despite his Monitor being slightly higher than Drew Brees, there’s a chance that Larry Fitzgerald has to wait at least a year by splitting votes with Holt.
Certainly the probability that there’s only one modern-era spot left in the class after Brees and Fitzgerald underscores the hole the Hall has dug for itself; everyone in the final ten is clearly worthy of induction, yet most will have to wait for several years if the Hall doesn’t change course, and Darren Woodson now looks almost certain to fall to the senior pool. For that matter, the senior pool is starting to look like a very real possibility for Holt, as I have to imagine he’d have taken one of the spots that went to the Allens if there weren’t a significant base of voters decidedly more skeptical of his candidacy than I’d have suspected from his resume alone. I can only hope my prediction that the Hall would backtrack on this within a couple years, and particularly if it continued to keep Holt out, proves accurate. (If I’d received even a single vote on the Shadow Hall of Fame ballot I’d be putting a lot of work into it this summer, and I’m sorely tempted to do so anyway.)
One last thing: the Hall’s announcement of the inductions includes a tidbit about the new rule changes that I don’t recall having seen before, namely that the candidates that reached the final seven but weren’t inducted will move directly to the finals next year. It doesn’t actually matter because a candidate falling out of the finals entirely the year after making even the final ten is basically unheard of without aging out of the modern-era pool, but it could complicate how I sort and count players in the earlier stages, as well as some plans I have for the future of Cantonmetrics going forward.
All-Snub Team
The following chart contains the top 20 players not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, any other players on the “All-Snub Team” based on the top non-Hall players at each position, and any senior candidates that would fill spots on the All-Snub Team currently filled by modern-era players to form the All-Senior Candidate team. Note that this is based on Pro Football Reference’s Hall of Fame Monitor metric only, so it does not necessarily reflect my opinion about who the best or most deserving players are, and even to the extent that it does, it doesn’t necessarily mean these players should be in the Hall of Fame, especially the players closer to the bottom, nor does it mean I would object to any player not on this list being inducted. It also means the list does not include any players who played the bulk of their career before 1950, as the Hall of Fame Monitor doesn’t include such players. Note also that players who were modern-era finalists in the most recent cycle are generally not considered snubs unless they are new finalists in their last five years of eligibility. Players that are likely blacklisted, officially or unofficially, by the Hall voters due to offenses to morality they’ve committed have their names strikethroughed and generally do not count towards the top 20 or towards All-Snub or All-Senior Candidate Team membership (I have not changed the treatment of Jim Tyrer in this category).
The All-Snub teams consist of one QB, one RB, two WR, one TE, one flex player (RB/WR/TE), two OT, two G, and one C on offense; and two DE, one DT, three LB, one flex player (DT or LB), and four defensive backs (generally two CB and two S) on defense. Special teams players are not included because there are so few of them in the Hall and they aren’t looked at fondly by the Hall of Fame Monitor. Players on the main list whose position is in bold are on the All-Snub Team, while those in italics are not on the All-Snub Team but are on the All-Senior Candidate team. Years of eligibility are relative to the 2026 cycle, with numbers in bold denoting senior candidates. Senior candidates include an indication of the stage of the senior candidate induction process they reached in the last three years.
Not much to say here; Steve Smith making the finals pushes down the All-Snub wide receiver group with Harold Jackson being promoted from mere All-Senior Candidate status, while conversely Earl Thomas demotes Jimmy Patton to the All-Senior team. The expanded senior candidate process also gives us more insight as to which senior candidates are considered most worthy by the senior committee.
Top 54 Active Resumes
Bringing back one of my old post concepts, these are the 54 active players with the highest Monitor numbers, bumped up from 50 in its prior incarnation to reflect the number of players on an NFL roster, although the header on the chart still says top 50 because I allow up to four players outside the top 54, but with postseason honors strong enough to warrant at least borderline induction in my view, to bump out players that don’t have strong enough resumes for induction. (Also, once a player makes this list they generally can only leave by retiring.) Please note that this list includes all players that played in the most recently concluded season, as well as any players that missed the season to injury but with every expectation of playing again, including any players that have announced their retirement. This both allows me to hedge my bets against any unretirements, and is more fair to players who might announce their retirement later in the offseason or simply aren’t able to find another team to play for.
The Projection column attempts to assess what the player’s chances of making the Hall would be if they retired today, in other words, it doesn’t attempt to predict the future course of their career. It is based only on All-Decade selections, All-Pro team selections, Pro Bowl selections, and (for quarterbacks only) Super Bowl wins (with some additional consideration given to career yards for wide receivers only), based on the established record of players at their position with similar resumes that played the significant majority of their careers after the AFL-NFL merger. An asterisk in the All-Decade column indicates that the player made the All-Decade team as a returner, not at their primary offensive or defensive position.
Josh Allen would have made the main list even if he hadn’t won MVP, but he’d have been behind Kirk Cousins and Jared Goff and wouldn’t have been that far ahead of Derek Carr and Dak Prescott – all of whom have four Pro Bowls each, and no first-team All-Pro selections. This was only the second time he was even named second-team All-Pro. Allen achieved his accolades in at least two fewer seasons than the others, but I don’t factor in MVPs in my projections, so at some point he’s going to have to get past the Patrick Mahomes hump for his resume to match the praise heaped on him – or be the undisputed best quarterback in the league for a year over Mahomes and Lamar Jackson, to say nothing of Joe Burrow or some of the other hot young quarterbacks coming along.
Jason Kelce really was the one active center that had built a career of any relevance – he’d been named first-team All-Pro the last three years of his career and six of the last seven, with the Sporting News giving him the honor the last six years. That hogged all the biggest accolades that could have gone to centers, with the result that now that he’s retired, the top active center has a pretty pathetic resume, with a lower Monitor than a whopping seven members of the Players to Watch list. Not helping matters is that Creed Humphrey, this year’s consensus first-team All-Pro selection, is only on his fourth year in the league; I think even if the Chiefs had won the Super Bowl his Monitor would have fallen just short of Ryan Kelly by less than a tenth of a point, but his chances to improve his resume going forward would seem to be better than Kelly’s. (To be clear, Kelly is not guaranteed to remain on this list in future years.)
Will the scandals that broke out around Justin Tucker this offseason keep him out of Canton? It’s hard to tell what is and isn’t disqualifying, but Hall of Fame voters typically keep a dim enough view of special teams players that it just might be the excuse they need to keep him out.
Players to watch
This list consists of all players not on the Top 50 Resumes list above with a weighted approximate value of at least 10 times their number of years in the league, or with Monitor numbers over 20, and whose AV for the most recently completed season is at least twice their number of years in the league. It is intended to provide a look at players on pace to at least potentially enter the Hall of Fame conversation, but without a long enough career to rack up enough of a resume to actually be in that conversation yet. Pro Football Reference only calculates Monitor numbers for players that have played at least 50 games, about three full seasons; for non-qualifying players with weighted career AVs over 30, I’ve attempted to calculate their Monitor number by hand (or at least in Excel), indicated by italics. (Because AV is displayed on the PFR site only as whole numbers, and each whole-number point of weighted AV is worth half a Monitor point, italicized Monitor calculations are necessarily approximate.) Non-qualifying players with weighted AV too low to justify hand-calculating them are sorted by weighted AV.
For the first time, this list contains some players with Monitors over 40 – and it might be the only time because of the aforementioned potential changes to Cantonmetrics. Tristan Wirfs would have made the main list, except his Monitor dropped a bit between when I looked last week and when I double-checked all the numbers this week, despite not having an obvious reason for the numbers to change.
(Both Wirfs and George Kittle would have been listed as “borderline HOF” but Wirfs’ would have come with the caveat that his resume is really only better than Jimbo Covert’s 2/2/80s among post-merger players, and Covert was inducted as part of the Centennial Class of 2020 so his case wasn’t really considered on his own by the full committee. Kittle’s is a bit iffy as well as his resume isn’t clearly as good as the best post-merger non-All-Decade tight end, Keith Jackson’s 3/5, and my low-end benchmark for borderline status is Ozzie Newsome who has an odd resume where the AP named him first- or second-team All-Pro five times yet he only made three Pro Bowls. But if he makes the All-Decade Team, he already has a better resume than Ben Coates’ 2/5/90s and only needs one more first-team All-Pro to enter the territory of “surefire if All-Decade”, and he’s got a good chance for that as the active tight end with the best Monitor not named Travis Kelce.)
The discussion of quarterbacks with weaker resumes than you might think may have moved to the main list with Josh Allen graduating, but you still see Justin Herbert and Joe Burrow with worse Monitors than Baker Mayfield – in part because Pro Bowl alternate selections, which Mayfield was, do count as actual Pro Bowl selections on players’ resumes despite what I had previously thought, which feels increasingly questionable in an age of rampant opt-outs even with the gimmicky flag-football format and even before considering the lack of Super Bowl players. (Russell Wilson picked up his 10th Pro Bowl this year, which historically all but guarantees induction into Canton, but that was after two initial selections, Allen and Jackson, opted out, and he was named a replacement alongside Drake Maye of all people, which makes me think neither of them would have been picked ahead of Mahomes either.) At least Jalen Hurts looks like he could legitimately enter the Hall of Fame conversation if he can play more consistently like he has in his Super Bowl runs.
Key players becoming eligible in 2029
This list consists of any players that made the top 54 list above last year that did not play this year and may not ever play again.
That’s a lot of players gone from the game (although there’s a clear divide between the top seven players with a realistic shot at Canton and the others), and only Aaron Donald, Jason Kelce, and Fletcher Cox actually announced their retirements. Special mention to Jason Peters, who was on the Seahawks practice squad but I don’t think that qualifies as pushing his Hall of Fame clock forward a year (unlike last year’s Chandler Jones situation), and Jimmy Graham, who semi-intentionally took the year off to row in the Arctic Ocean but whose career seemed to be winding down regardless with no guarantee that he’d find a team next year.