Who are the Belichick 11?
Eleven is a speculative, presumptive number that roughly represents the 20 percent+ of Pro Football Hall of Fame voters who didn’t put Bill Belichick on their ballot of up to three candidates from a pool of five “contributors” under consideration for this year’s Hall class.
It could be more than 11; any less than 11, and Belichick would have been enshrined on this ballot, his first time in front of the panel.
The Pro Football Hall of Fame has an obvious structural problem, as my colleague Mike Sando expertly described about its new(fangled) voting process, which — on its face in Year 1 of implementation — seems to have provoked more thorny problems than easy solutions.
But the HOF also has an obvious credibility problem, stemming from its lack of transparency.
We are spending today watching voters say “Wasn’t me!” (or, thanks to my colleagues at The Athletic, approaching all the voters to ask how they voted on Belichick). We are spending today wondering which Hall voters could have possibly snubbed Belichick (and why?).
Per Sando, maybe some figured Belichick was a lock and threw their limited votes to other candidates who needed more help. Maybe some were being punitive. Maybe the reason this news leaked a full 12 days before the Super Bowl is that someone recognized this brouhaha was coming and preferred it happen during the dull “week before the week before” the Super Bowl, not 72 hours before kickoff, which would have taken attention from the game itself.
It doesn’t need to be this challenging or convoluted.
There are 50 Pro Football Hall of Fame voters. Depending on your definition of “journalist,” I count 45 voters whose outlets are either journalistic in standards or adjacent as “members of the media.” At this point, the Pro Football Hall is a quasi-public trust among sports fans; that is the vibe that both the Hall and the NFL promote (even if technically it is not even close to that status in its actual operations).
The point is that, as an essential part of NFL fans’ experience, we should know how all 50 voters stand each year they vote. We don’t need transcripts of the debates; voters should have the chance to make their arguments freely and vehemently. But we do deserve a basic floor of transparency on the final results themselves.
One solution is simple: Release every voter’s ballots.
The model is baseball. After decades of an opaque process, the digital era (and shifting norms) allowed National Baseball Hall of Fame voters — mostly working journalists or media members — to not just post their ballots to fans, but also explain themselves. (I’ll proudly point to my colleagues’ effort on that point here, particularly Jayson Stark’s standalone opus.) Fans can disagree (often vehemently), but they also respect the transparency. This is partly why the ongoing mystery of “Which voter left Ichiro off their ballot?” remains fascinating, if maddening.
Like its baseball counterpart, the Pro Football Hall of Fame voters should all release who they voted for. Current guidelines from the Hall “suggest” that voters not make their votes public, but it is not a strict ban. You are seeing voters like my colleague Dan Pompei and ESPN’s Rich Cimini say how they voted (for Belichick), and Sando implied how he voted (for Belichick also). To be sure, transparency can be uncomfortable: Voter and longtime NFL front-office executive Bill Polian initially told ESPN that he couldn’t recall his vote for Belichick — a dubious explanation, at best — then a few hours later insisted he voted for Belichick.
In the late 1990s, I edited Paul “Dr. Z” Zimmerman’s online columns for Sports Illustrated. He was a Hall voter and one of the most respected at that. One week, I remember he went into incredible detail about the back-room machinations of the Hall. I recall he got into a lot of trouble with his Hall secret society about violating the omerta. Dr. Z was as willful as any writer I have ever worked with, and in my recollection, even he seemed a bit shaken by the response from the institution. (The column itself is lost to history. I wish there were a copy somewhere. I did find this representative sample of Dr. Z’s brand of radical transparency about the Hall of Fame from 2007.) Peter King, also at SI, was also as admirably transparent as possible in his legendary MMQB columns — without violating rules that might get him tossed out as a voter. This was enthusiastically welcomed by fans (and I’m betting many of his peers).
The Belichick situation is more fraught than most. People are not clamoring to hear how voters felt about L.C. Greenwood or even Pats owner Bob Kraft. But this vote on Belichick — as arguably the greatest NFL coach of all time and, to an overwhelming number of fans, a classic “first-ballot” Hall of Famer, if also a first-ballot antagonist in the sport’s history — is shining a light on the Hall’s process and essential lack of transparency.
As more Belichick vote totals are publicized, it would not surprise me if the claims by voters that they cast ballots for Belichick clear the 80 percent threshold, which would be its own debacle for the Hall, because then someone is lying to avoid public scrutiny. I encourage every voter to take advantage of the loose guidelines and tell us how you voted. If you voted against Belichick, that’s your prerogative — but it’s also your implied obligation, as one of only 50 voters involved in this legacy-defining exercise, to explain your choices.
The goal isn’t to shame voters. The goal isn’t to harangue voters. But the template of baseball writers being transparent shows that, when approached in good faith — like showing your work — fans respond overwhelmingly in good faith. That’s an ethos of sports: We can disagree, but I respect your position if you offer reasonable points.
All the more reason to adopt the simple — yet apparently radical — step for the Pro Football Hall of Fame to reveal each voter’s ballot each year. We shouldn’t be asking about the Belichick 11. They and the Hall should be telling us.