Canton Has Yet To Welcome Some of Football's Best

Debate on who should be in or out of the Baseball Hall of Fame goes on all year, but discussion on pro football's selections are confined to ... well, actually, there really isn't any debate on the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Maybe that's because the announcement is on the day before the Super Bowl (as it will be Saturday) when all the press cares about is where Giselle Bundchen is going to sit.

More than 500 people vote for the Baseball Hall of Fame, while the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, has just a 44-person board of selectors (consisting of one press representative from each franchise city, except New York, which gets two; a 33rd member who represents the Pro Football Writers of America, and 11 of what the PFHOF refers to as "at-large delegates"). The organization cheerfully announces on its Web site that "any fan may nominate any qualified person ... by writing to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The only restriction is that a player or coach must not have played or coached at least five seasons before he can be considered." If that's true, the post office must have misplaced every letter I've sent to the PFHOF for the last 10 years.

Compared with Major League Baseball, the people who do the selecting for pro football's Valhalla seem like a private club. There are some great writers on the board, most notably Sports Illustrated's Peter King and Paul Zimmerman, two of the best in the country.

But the issue isn't really the quality of the people doing the picking. The issue is why aren't there many more of them? For instance, why is there no veterans committee for players who might have been passed up in previous votes? (The PFHOF does have a veterans committee, but its members are taken from the 44-person panel.) More to the point, why aren't former coaches and players given a say as to who the greatest players are? Who exactly sets the rules for the Pro Football Hall of Fame in deciding whom the voters should be?

Almost none of this is ever discussed publicly, almost certainly because the Pro Football Hall of Fame is, for all intents and purposes, the NFL Hall of Fame, and the NFL only occasionally makes notice of the achievements of players in leagues it has either crushed or absorbed. That's the only reason why Larry Csonka would be in the HOF while Herschel Walker isn't. Csonka played for 11 seasons, rushed for 8,081 yards, and ran for 64 TDs, while Walker played for 13 years and got 8,225 yards with 61 TDs. But Csonka caught just 106 passes for 7.7 yards a catch and just four TDs, while Walker caught 512 passes for a 9.5 average and 21 TDs. That's just part of the story. Walker collected 18,168 yards running, receiving, and returning kicks with four NFL teams, but that doesn't include the 7,000-plus he compiled in the USFL — which the NFL wants to pretend never existed. (They never forgave Walker for choosing the USFL out of college rather than going to the NFL.) Herschel Walker is pro football's all-time all purpose yardage leader — but he's not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

If I was selecting an all-time team of players not in the PFHOF, I'd start with the guard position, which is where a great many pro coaches would start building their team. One of the names that first comes to mind is the Green Bay Packers' right guard from their glory era of the 1960s, Jerry Kramer. Kramer was a nine-time All-Pro with five championship rings. Not only is the passer he blocked for, Bart Starr, in the PFHOF, but Green Bay's runners, Paul Hornung and Jim Taylor, are as well.

It's often said that Kramer is not in the Hall because so many of the Packers from that period, including his fellow Packer offensive lineman, center Jim Ringo, and offensive tackle Forrest Gregg, have been voted in. But why should that keep Kramer out if by consensus he was the best at his position?

While we're considering offensive linemen, Joe Jacoby, the most famous of the Washington Redskins "Hawgs," should be a HOFer. Jacoby was a five-time All-Pro who played in four Super Bowls and helped get championship rings for three different Redskins quarterbacks.

John Brodie, the unluckiest quarterback in pro football, is not in the Hall of Fame, while Bob Griese, the luckiest passer in history, is. The answer is obvious: Griese was fortunate enough to play on two Super Bowl-winning teams, the Miami Dolphins in 1972 and 1973. (His contribution to that famous unbeaten '72 team was exactly four TD passes and four interceptions.) Griese played 14 seasons, mostly for excellent Miami teams, leading the league in pass completion percentage only once and TD passes only once.

Brodie played 17 seasons for some wretched San Francisco 49ers teams and led the NFL in completions three times, completion percentage three times, yards passing three times, and TDs twice. Is there anyone who thinks that if Brodie and Griese switch teams that the Dolphins wouldn't have just as many or more Super Bowl rings? And that we wouldn't even remember Bob Griese's name today?

How about Kenny Anderson, who played his entire 16-year career with Cincinnati and sometimes managed to lift the Bengals above mediocrity? (Such as 1982, when he took them to the Super Bowl.) Four times Anderson had the NFL's highest passer rating — that's four times more than three HOF QBs: Troy Aikman, Terry Bradshaw, and John Elway, who have, among them, a total of nine Super Bowl rings. Does the NFL put any stock in its own statistics and ratings? If so, why isn't the man who was, by their system, the best passer in the league four times not in its Hall of Fame?

I could cite a dozen other worthy should-be Hall of Famers — running back Roger Craig of the Niners' Montana era; Deron Cherry, the Kansas City Chiefs vastly underrated safety, and Dave Krieg, perhaps the best passer never to make it to the Super Bowl. And so could anyone else who has followed pro football over the last few decades. If pro football is really our national sport, isn't it about time that the NFL opened up the discussion on the game's best players to something more than a private club?

Mr. Barra is the author of "The Last Coach: A Life of Paul 'Bear' Bryant."