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On the Saturday before the Super Bowl, the Hall-of-Fame committee picked Jack Butler, Dermontii Dawson, Chris Doleman, Cortez Kennedy, Curtis Martin and Willie Roaf for the 2012 class.
Two of the most prominent individuals left out were Bill Parcells and Cris Carter.
Parcells won two Super Bowls with the Giants, took New England to the Super Bowl and took the Jets to the AFC Championship game. He also did a decent job in Dallas.
How can people make the argument that Cortez Kennedy and Willie Roaf are more worthy than Parcells? That seems unfair.
This was the first year Parcells was eligible for “The Hall,” and it was surprising, with his resume, he didn’t get in.
According to a long-time NFL writer, with a lot of acquaintances on the committee, feels he knows what kept Parcells out.
“My belief is that Parcells and Cris Carter are reaping what they have sown over the years,” said the writer, who has been covering the NFL for three decades. “They often did not treat reporters well or with respect and now just enough reporters are getting their payback.”
But should media relations really play into the voting process?
“Voters are not supposed to base their votes on off-the-field issues and prejudices, but reporters are human just like the players they’re voting for,” said the veteran writer. “It’s not right for anyone to vote that way, but that is the system we’ve got.”
However, nobody in that room is going to admit it is poor media relations that kept Parcells out of the Hall-of-Fame this year, so what rationale might they have used in the meeting?
“Voter could convince him/herself that Parcells is not Hall-of-Fame material, either because his performance could not lift three of the four teams he coached to a Super Bowl victory, or because he didn’t take care of some of the ‘intangibles’ that could have helped him coach his teams better, one of them being his relationships with the media,” said the writer.
How do you get the voters to stop letting media relations from getting in the way of the voting process?
“How do you legislate that out of the process? You can’t. If you bring players/scouts/coaches onto the selection committee, they can and will [have other biases]. All the Hall can do is lay out the standards it would like to hold its selectors to, then turn the voters loose and they will vote as they vote.”
The long-time football writer thinks Parcells and Carter will get in, but the writers who didn’t like how they were treated by the two men, are going to make them sweat.
“I’m sure Parcells and Carter will get into the Hall, but because of their thorny relationships with reporters, they will wait longer than they might have had to get in.”
My partner on Sirius NFL Radio, Howard David, has the best idea – term limits for Hall-of-Fame voters. There are some people who have been on the committee too long, and their biases never change.
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