If it were up to me, there would be a lot of players in both the MLB and NFL HOF that wouldn't be and there would be some who are not in that I would vote in. But my point is, you've got players in the NFL HOF, the MLB HOF and I'm sure the NBA HOF that shouldn't be in there, IMO. So when players like Stafford come up and people automatically say "No", you then have players who are in there that can be pointed to and say "But my god, he got voted in?".
The problem I have - and most of the anlaytics have with the argument you state here (not blaming you for this argument) is that you're using the LOWEST common denominator - which basically means, "Any player better than the worst player in the Hall of Fame HAS to be a Hall of Famer." That might work if the selection committees never made mistakes, but the fact is that biases and nepotism has landed many a guy into the Hall of Fame, particularly in MLB. The egregious selctions made by the Veterans Committee from 1971-81 - where a bunch of old teammates of Frankie Frisch got elected to the Hall solely because they played on his team - got us to the point where we want to induct outfielders with .265 batting averages.
Let's be honest: Don Drysdale and Phil Rizzuto have no damned business in the Hall of Fame - and if Drysdale wasn't a teammate of Sandy Koufax who kept himself in the limelight as a handsome broadcaster years after the retired, he never would have made it. Rizzuto was basically Steinbrenner and the Yankees bullying the voters for nearly ten years until he made it.
And if those guys had played for the Washington Senators, nobody would have ever heard of them. The same can be said for a bunch of guys who played with Frisch - guys like Ross Youngs, Rube Marquard, Jesse Haines, and Fred Lindstrom.
I know it's unpopular to say here, but Joe Namath - who WAS one helluvan athlete - is not a HOF football player, but he made it largely due to one game that assumed outsized proportions. And quite frankly, neither is Troy Aikman. I don't think the case for Ken Stabler is particularly strong - but that's because I'm a "small Hall" guy who thinks this basically ought to be limited to the top 10% of players. So when you look at the guys from the 1970s who were quarterbacks - how in the world do Stabler, Namath, and Bob Griese ever make the cut?
If you take the top 10% - there were 26 teams until 1976 and then 28, so it's the top 3 QBs in the league.
Who were the top 3 QBs in the 70s?
Staubach, Bradshaw, Tarkenton
So none of the other guys qualifies here.
Look at these stats:
Player A - 55% passer, 31K yards, 214 TD, 224 INT (league MVP once)
Player B - 50.1% passer, 27K yards, 173 TD, 220 INT (league MVP once)
Player C - 59.8% passer, ~28K yards, 194 TD, 222 INT (league MVP once)
Player D - 56.2% passer, 25K yards, 192 TD, 172 INT (3 top 4 finishes for MVP)
Player B BY FAR has the worst stats of these four. Player A - arguably - has the best when you take into account his career started in 1957 when you didn't throw much at all. And yet Player A is the ONLY ONE of these guys NOT in the Hall of Fame.
Player B is Joe Namath.
Player C is Ken Stabler
Player D is Bob Griese
Of course, then you have to remember that Stabler and Griese threw a lot of short outs to guys like Clarence Davis, Dave Casper, and Paul Warfield while Namath
threw long bombs to Bobby Brady.
Player A is John Brodie. He's also the only one who never won a Super Bowl. (And for those who cite 1972 for Griese - he missed most of that season and Earl Morrall was the QB). And he'll never be in the HOF without buying a ticket, either. But every measuring stick you apply, he's better than Namath. And other than career record, he's better than Stabler, too.
And this is where it all comes to the head. Stafford will go into the Hall under the criteria used to elect Namath, Stabler, and Griese - and that's a defensible argument up to a point, I just don't think it's the best argument FOR a player, either.
(Before anyone comes to beat me up - I love Joe Namath, okay? I'm happy for him, and I'm not leading some crusade to evict him from the Hall. I'm just saying there is NOTHING in his stats that commend him for the Hall of Fame at all. Now - if someone wishes to argue, "But you can't tell the story of pro football in the US without Namath signing with the AFL and the guarantee for the Super Bowl," that's an entirely different category).
