The build up to the Super Bowl features one of the greatest things in sports: The Knock.
In years past, Pro Football Hall of Fame president C. David Baker would deliver the news to the upcoming class of Hall of Famers. NFL Films began chronicling his experiences knocking on doors to inform finalists that they made it. When Baker retired, fellow Hall of Famers picked up where he left off. This year, for example, Derrick Brooks welcomed Bucs legend Ronde Barber to the Hall and ex-Cowboys and Dolphins coach Jimmy Johnson showed up at Zach Thomas’s door.
The Minnesota Vikings have several players who haven’t yet received the knock despite having strong arguments. Jared Allen was a finalist this year, Kevin Williams did not make the cut to become a semifinalist and Jim Marshall was one of 25 senior semifinalists but was not included when the list was pared down to a dozen nominees.
While every fan base will inevitably believe that their favorite player from the past is deserving of football’s highest honor, an invention by the football database Pro-Football Reference shines light on the strength of Williams, Allen and Marshall’s arguments. It also contextualizes whether other past or current players have a good case to get The Knock someday.
The PFR Hall of Fame Monitor is defined as “a metric designed to estimate a player’s chances of making the Pro Football Hall of Fame using AV, Pro Bowls, All-Pros, championships, and various stat milestones.”
Some bells and whistles might be going off in the heads of the analytically inclined because Pro Bowls and championships are generally poor measures of which players should be rewarded. However, the history of HOF voting indicates that those things carry weight. PFR’s catch-all AV (Approximate Value) is a measure of a player’s contribution to their offense or defense’s success, which is more telling than Pro Bowl votes.
Combining all factors, the HOF Monitor indicates that Kevin Williams may be suffering from the biggest snub of any eligible player. The only players who rank higher on the Monitor’s all-time list are Bob Lilly, Aaron Donald, Randy White, Alan Page, Joe Greene, John Randle, Warren Sapp and Merlin Olsen.
The strength of Williams’s case rests in his five All-Pro selections, which is tied with Alan Page for fifth most by any defensive tackle. The problem for Williams may be in his sack totals. Despite scoring nearly on par with Randle in terms of Approximate Value, he has less than half the sack total. The most comparable in terms of HOF Monitor score is Seattle’s Cortez Kennedy, who had fewer sacks and fewer All-Pros than Williams.
We have access to numbers now that provide further insight into Williams’s impact compared to his teammates. In particular, how often he was on the field and his all-around game. Take the 2008 season for example. Williams played 910 snaps, second most of any defensive tackle in the NFL and graded by Pro Football Focus as the third best DT in the league behind two players who didn’t clear 700 snaps. He produced an NFL best 59 QB pressures and ranked as the sixth best run stuffer.
PFF began grading in 2006. In the first six years of their grades Williams ranked ninth, fifth, third, 12th, seventh and ninth at his position. What’s interesting about the defensive tackle position is that players with consistency over long periods of time are very, very hard to find. Williams has the 17th most games played at DT and many of the players ahead of him were run-stuffing nose tackles like Ted Washington.
It’s also notable that Williams needs to get in soon or he’s going to get lost in a flood of players who followed in Warren Sapp and John Randle’s footsteps of rushing the passer from the interior. The HOF Moniter lists Aaron Donald, Ndamuking Suh, Fletcher Cox and Geno Atkins as having better cases than Bryant Young, who went in to the Hall last year. Not far behind is Pittsburgh’s Cam Heyward. By the way, Young only made All-Pro once, making it even more strange that Williams hasn’t gotten the nod.
Jared Allen and Jim Marshall’s Hall of Fame Monitor scores leave more room for error than Williams.
Allen’s closest comparable is former Chief and Bronco Neil Smith, who is not in the Hall of Fame. His Approximate Value score is on par with ex-49er Justin Smith, who is not in the Hall of Fame. His sack totals are only slightly above Leslie O’Neal and John Abraham.