With QBs that have retired in the last 5 years, there are some interesting HOF debates that I see coming up. Right now the sure-fire HOF guys are Brady, Brees, and Rodgers when he retires. The next tier, however, is a lot more interesting. You have Matt Ryan, Big Ben, and Rivers who are all very close. What’s interesting is that according to Pro Football Reference’s HOF Monitor, they all have fairly similar scores even though they have different resumes. Ryan has the MVP/All-Pro 1 season which is pretty much required unless you have 2 Super Bowls. Ben doesn’t have a crazy MVP season, but he does have those 2 Super Bowls and 17 good years. Then Rivers has some crazy counting stats. I think that Ryan and Roethlisberger have a slight edge over Rivers but it is very hard to separate the 3. So my question is do we think any of them make it? If they do it opens up the debate for a lot of players in the future. Also, how do we think the HOF committee weighs Rings/MVPS/All-Pro teams? The media is always so focused on the rings but looking at the resumes of HOF QBs there are a lot more without rings than there are without All-Pro seasons.
Edit: Here is the PFR Monitor. The average HOF QB has a score of 108. Ryan has a score of 106, Ben has a score of 100, and Rivers is at 98.
I’ve never quite understood people who use Super Bowl/championship wins as criteria for the HOF in both football and other sports.
What you do is essentially condemn any player who didn’t win a Super Bowl because of a variety of factors that very well might have been out of their control. If a good player is stuck on a really bad team, why hold them off the ballot because “they didn’t win anything”? Football especially is a team sport where there is heavy emphasis on the team aspect.
Take Philip Rivers, I firmly believe he deserves the HOF. Nothing about the numbers he put up says he shouldn’t be. Is it really Rivers’s fault he had Marty Schottenheimer as coach? A guy notorious for being unable to win the big game? Or Mike McCoy? Or Anthony Lynn? Despite what the Patriots did during this time, people should remember that getting to the Super Bowl is hard, let alone winning it.
And that argument cuts both ways I think. Joe Thomas is in the hall of fame? Okay but what did he win? He didn’t play a single down his entire career in the playoffs. But he has a ton of all pros so it’s fine. Okay, so that would mean unless you are literally the best player in the entire country at your position year after year, if you don’t win anything that disqualifies you from the HOF? That’s some pretty backwards logic if you ask me.