NFL Will Elect Hall Members February 5.

                                                   The NFL will meet and elect the next class of Hall of Famers on February 5.  I’ve been trying to influence those voters that are on Twitter (especially Peter King) for the last few weeks but they seem  to be impervious to my attempts to persuade. 
I will now list the 15 finalists.  I’d like to say that there were only two picks that I had that did not make it, Kevin Greene and Lester Hayes.  Neither of these two made my final eight or even my list of ten.  The two men that the voters have on the list that i don’t are Charles Haley, and Ed Sabol (NFL Films).  

Jerome Bettis	Tim Brown	Cris Carter
Dermontti Dawson	Richard Dent	Chris Doleman
Marshall Faulk	Charles Haley	Cortez Kennedy
Curtis Martin	Andre Reed	Willie Roaf
Ed Sabol	Deion Sanders	Shannon Sharpe

In my previous Post I wrote a lot about the individual accomplishments of each of the nominees. Please take a look at that blog.  For the purposes of analyzing these fiteen We must remove eight to get down to a list of seven.
Easiest first:
Ed Sabol:  While I love what NFL Films has given to the sport of football over the last 40 plus years, I must remove Ed from this list. If there were a seperate ballot for contributors and administrators/owners (as I believe there should be) he’d certainly be a first ballot Hall of Famer.  But with the amount of talent we have here, Ed must be my first scratch.
Cortez Kennedy:  A fantastic career, sadly in my eyes, not quite HOF caliber.
Marshall Faulk: While I’m certainly a fan and appreciate the career that Marshall put together (he’s 10th on the all time rushing list with over 12,000 yds) he too is a victim of a stacked ballot.  We have Martin and Bettis on the same ballot. 
Shannon Sharpe: The Muhammad Ali of trash talking in the NFL.  From high in 3 Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh one could hear Shannon try to get under the skin of opposing defenses.  For me Sharpe is the definition of a bubble boy in the NFL. At his position he distinguished himself.  As an all around football player, I think he’s outside of the top ten of this ballot.
Charles Haley:  He didn’t make my top ten and since I put that list together he didn’t do anything in the playoffs to change my mind.


Andre Reed: I nice resume, a clutch receiver, not a hall of famer.
Chris Doleman: These last two cuts have me really wishing that the NFL would make the max number of entrants a bit larger, at least for a few years.  As it is, I have to cut two more and Doleman is a victim of the numbers.
Richard Dent: It’s hard to leave a Super Bowl Champion out and put in some players that were not SB Champs.  But that’s what I’m going to do. In the end, I simply believe that guys like Roaf and Dawson  were better at their position that Dent was at his.  
Here’s my seven.

Jerome Bettis	Tim Brown
Cris Carter	Dermontti Dawson
Curtis Martin	Willie Roaf
Deion Sanders

Best of luck to all of the nominees.  Regardless, the Hall Of Fame has a great class of 2011 coming.