This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nfl by /u/bilbobiggers on 2024-04-08 01:54:48.

I wanted to see what the Hall of Fame could look like in a few years and project future inductees, so I decided to chart every position. Please see below for details on how I went about this.

We now get to the tight ends.

This is hands down the weirdest chart I have come across in this project. There are basically three groups of tight ends in the last 25 years: Tony Gonzalez; a handful of great players; and everyone else. And there is a chasm between each group.

Every position shows a few generational guys sticking out from the crowd, but the situation here looks far more drastic. It also looks very hard for TEs to crack 25 HOFm points: only 21 players made the cut.

Because of the recent Antonio Gates snub I wanted to compare him with some other guys and I was surprised to learn that Shannon Sharpe was not a first-ballot HOFer - he didn’t get in until his third year of eligibility. In fact, aside from Gonzalez, no tight ends have ever been inducted on the first try. If this is a well-known fact I apologize for my denseness, but I was not aware. Seems like tight ends and the Hall of Fame are a weird mix

SOME DETAILED EXPLANATIONS

I used Pro Football Reference’s Hall of Fame Monitor (HOFm), a metric designed to estimate a player’s HoF merits based on statistical output and individual accolades. I took every player who has a score of 25 or higher and sorted them by the year when they last played.

(Why 25? PFR states that “a score of 100 is around the average modern-era HOF inductee for each position”, so I figured 25% of it would be a good place to start).

Only players of the so-called “modern era” are featured because I hoped to focus on how today’s HoF voters think like. The “modern era” is made up of the players who finished their careers in the last 25 years. Players before this time fall under the jurisdiction of the Seniors Committee.

Colors indicate status:

  • HoF: already in the Hall of Fame
  • Elg: eligible for induction
  • Ret: retired but not yet eligible
  • Act: active player

Hovering over each player’s dot will give you some info (HOFm, All-Pro 1st teams, Pro Bowls). It gets cluttered with all the labels, especially towards the bottom, so I added a filter so you can look for individual players who are featured. You can also click on each color to remove it from the chart entirely (click again to re-include it).

Of course a lot more goes into Hall of Fame arguments. This is just my attempt to spread out the cards a little bit.

Previous chart: The Offensive Line