Bill Belichick is a Hall of Famer.
You know it. I know it. Anyone with a working brain knows it.
I know another group of people that knows it, even if they didn’t choose to admit or acknowledge it during a recent meeting: Pro Football Hall of Fame voters.
According to an ESPN report, Belichick didn’t receive the requisite votes necessary to become a first-ballot Hall of Famer this summer. He won’t be part of the 2026 class in Canton in August.
But the dumbest part of this whole thing isn’t the number of voters who decided to make Belichick wait his turn before induction.
It’s this.
Ego and false hustle.
That’s what I kept coming back to when reading the report.
Two things feel pretty clear.
-Some voters were emboldened to make Belichick wait as some sort of long-range, never-forget type of punishment for Spygate and Deflategate. The former, sure, knock yourself out. Belichick cheated. He was caught. It also probably had very little to do with his 30-plus years of NFL success. The latter? Please. That was a Tom Brady-led issue, and far from something Belichick would have control over compared to his quarterback.
-Robert Kraft, also up for induction this year, didn’t want to share the stage with Belichick. Thus the power play from his guy, Bill Polian, to convince enough of the room to make Belichick wait and let Kraft have his day. It’s petty. It’s silly. It’s embarrassing.
Making Belichick wait is false hustle. It’s performative—unless those same “no” voters never vote him in the future, which I seriously doubt will happen.
The Kraft angle isn’t shocking for anyone that’s been paying attention. If you haven’t, check out the Patriots dynasty documentary on Apple TV—the alternative, pro-Kraft, anti-Belichick tale that the Patriots owner likely thinks is closer to reality than fiction.
Belichick is being punished, mostly out of jealousy. He’ll get in a year from now and the Pro Football Hall of Fame will try to pretend this whole thing didn’t happen. We’re all dumber as sports fans because it did.
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