Admitting to being a "Big Hall" believer

Watching Andre Johnson's election to the Hall of Fame, and realizing how lucky we had it.

In watching Andre Johnson’s speech upon being elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, what I felt was validation.

Johnson, who I would describe as not a natural public speaker, went for about 15 minutes. His speech thanked a lot of people who had meant so much to him in becoming the person that he was. The high school coaches, the trainers, the McNairs, his teammates, the fans, the city of Miami as well as Houston. His mother, his daughter. And so on. I only qualified as a fan. But what I left with after watching both his speech and the surrounding discourse around his election was clarity. A clarity about what it means to be the support system around something so great, and how the validation isn't just for Johnson, but for all of us. 

Over the last 30 years, the prevalent discussions of the Hall of Fame have tended to be an analytical and dry discourse about what the Hall of Fame means and who belongs in it. Jay Jaffe's columns and books about the baseball Hall of Fame have been formative for me for decades at this point. I would say the closest we have to this in the NFL world as far as both breadth of knowledge of voters and trends as well as who "belongs" is my Football Outsiders colleague Mike Tanier, though several people have taken up that mantle in various respects. And as I was younger I trended more towards that line of thinking. But over the recent years I have found myself becoming a "Big Hall" guy in most sports. And I think the most obvious way to discuss why that is would be to look at some recent NFL Hall of Fame inductions. The most jarring example to me, a memorable one because of the circumstances, was Junior Seau.

Seau, of course, tragically committed suicide before his induction to the Hall of Fame. His mother cried at the ceremony. His daughter was not allowed to present him in full, instead having to give a pared-down speech compared to the one she fully wrote. To me, the best part of her speech was this:

"Yes, I witnessed his career and accomplishments as a pro athlete, but what I remember most is the way he made me feel. I can honestly say that he made me feel like I was the most important person in the world. The reason why I think he wanted me to present him is because I didn’t know his athletic career but I did know his heart, and I’m blessed to say that I felt his love for 18 beautiful years, and I still feel it to this day."

This isn't life in the trenches, it isn't stuff that a football audience necessarily wants to hear about. But it is an example of what the men being honored by this institution are having validated, what their sacrifices and work meant, and how it impacted those dear to them.

Seau, had he survived to 2015, would have been able to be inducted immediately as a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Sam Mills was posthumously inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2022. Don Coryell and Ken Riley were posthumously inducted in 2023. Steve McMichael was inducted from a hospital bed this year, barely appearing coherent of his surroundings. (He of course actually knows.)

And I think about these people surrounding McMichael, and I think about Sydney Seau, and it makes it really hard for me to -- let me drop dignified tone here for a second -- give a shit about the Hall of Fame rules. There's an arbitrary amount of years we have to wait for a guy to get an arbitrary amount of votes among a bloc of writers, and those writers can only put an arbitrary amount of guys on the ballot. Meanwhile, life moves on. People die, whether by their own hand, or by illness, or by cancer, or by some random act of traffic. And these rules rob us of the ability to celebrate some important figures of the sport fully, because Sam Mills' defenses weren't as good as Mike Singletary's, or Chris Hanburger's Hall of Fame case is more pressing. It really sounds quite stupid when you type it out. 

This isn't an argument that we should just put anybody in the Hall of Fame, but we deprive so many people of so much joy by just letting these rules govern the system. The legends of the game touch and are touched by a lot of people, as we all are, and the longer we do the "is this guy deserving?" dance, the longer we give both them and the people who are important to them to not get to be part of that moment. 

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I am grateful that we got to celebrate Andre Johnson in his prime. I say that because, as you have read, that isn't guaranteed to us. Most of the most important people in his life got to bask in the reflected glory that comes with being the ecosystem around him. It wasn't a humongous crowd -- the team is the youngest in the NFL and the fanbase is still recovering to some extent from three years of Easterby -- but we all got to have that moment. And as I am growing older, I am understanding how important that moment is to everybody. It's not just a validation of what we saw Andre Johnson do every day for 12 years, It's a validation for everyone who poured their life into rooting for him, boosting him, helping him, and so on. We weren't just people, we were people who got to create and enjoy Andre Johnson’s work. 

I sincerely wish that same celebration for the other guys he beat to the punch on the ballot, the Reggie Waynes and Torry Holts of the world. They may not have been Andre Johnson, but they meant just as much to their ecosystems as Andre Johnson did to his. 

And, well, this is why I'm a big Hall guy now. Clearly I watched Johnson and believed he was a Hall of Famer, and one year of waiting on the ballot is minimal compared to several other Hall of Fame or near-Hall of Fame players. But there are other universes -- ones where Wayne or Holt win more rings, ones where Johnson loses a season of his prime to an injury -- where he'd be the one waiting. 

I understand that it's easy -- and fun, too! -- to rank the players we cover. I read lists like that, and I enjoy the arguments being made for certain players over others. I liked when Bill James wrote "pass" on Jeff Bagwell. (Not quite as much of a fan of his recent stuff!) I liked Bryan Frye's enormous Grand List on Football Perspective. But at a certain point, one I think I really got the perspective of after covering these guys and talking to them in locker rooms, I come to root for them as humans too. And I just think the Hall of Fame process could use a better injection of humanity over straight roster-building and head-to-head analysis about who was better.

I'm not saying we must purge the writers. I'm not saying we need to rush everybody into the Hall because their grandma might die tomorrow. I just think we have to unshackle the process. Let writers elect whoever they want. Waive or reduce waiting periods. Let's not sit on our hands and hide behind the process when the process itself is leading to a bunch of posthumous inductions. (And if there were like a Hall of Fame Moment wing, where we inducted a Helmet Catch or something because Eli Manning’s stat line is unelectable, that would be fine with me. Celebrating the biggest bits of NFL lore is something the Pro Football Hall of Fame should be in the business of doing!)

Watching them induct Andre Johnson into the Hall of Fame made me want that kind of moment for as many players and their families as can get it.

They won't all mean the same to me as this one, and that's fine. They will mean that to someone else.