Future Hall of Famers - Defense

Last week I went through the players still in the league and attempted to figure out which are Hall of Fame bound. Today I’m doing the same with the other side of the ball. As with offense, I judged these players based only on what they’ve achieved to this point in their careers. I’m not trying to predict the future here, even if the future is really easy to predict in some of these cases. The question I’m asking isn’t, “Will these players make the Hall of Fame eventually?” The question I’m asking is, “Would these players make the Hall of Fame if they retired today?”

You’ll notice that there are fewer players on this list than there were on the first. This is largely due to the nature of the game, where offensive players attract far more attention than defensive. If you look at the breakdown of the players in the Hall of Fame, the offense to defense ratio is almost identical to what I’ve selected.

As with the first post, these are just my opinions. If you want to take issue with them, go ahead. I’m done with classes until January, and I have nothing better to do with my time than argue about football.

Defensive Line

I’m focusing mostly on interior defensive linemen in this category because I want to group all the pass rushers together in the next, rather than having to consider players like John Abraham and Terrelle Suggs separately. Many of these players have bounced between 3-4 defensive end and 4-3 defensive tackle, and some have played essentially every position along the line. These players don’t often put up huge sack totals, and there’s no great stat to measure how they play. Like offensive linemen, the best way to evaluate these players’ candidacies is to look at their appearances on All Pro teams.

Locks: Kevin Williams

Haloti Ngata

For years Ngata was known as the best player the average fan hadn’t heard of. Overshadowed by teammates like Ray Lewis and Ed Reed, he flashed often enough that every commentator had their own version of the “most underrated player in the NFL” speech. After a couple years of this, Ngata’s performance fell off faster than his reputation, and he went from one of the league’s most underrated players to one of its most overrated. All Pro voters are usually smart enough not to get caught up in these narratives, and they selected him to the second team three times and the first team twice. His candidacy is still very tricky, and I think he’ll end up on the outside looking in after he retires sometime in the next couple years.

Justin Smith

Smith started his career as a defensive end in the 4-3, but he never really took off until he arrived in San Francisco and took up his current role in the 3-4. His time in Cincinnati was widely considered a disappointment, as he failed to ever reach ten sacks after being selected fourth overall in 2001. He’s never had elite ability as a pass rusher, but he is a master of what he is asked to do in San Francisco. He swallows blockers and stuffs the run, leaving Aldon Smith free to rush around the edge and collect all the glory. We saw how valuable he was in 2012 when a triceps injury cost him the final two games of the year, two games in which Aldon Smith did not record a single sack. If I had a vote I would give it to him, but I think the actual voters will hold his low sack totals against him.

JJ Watt

I’ve listed 43 players between my two Hall of Fame posts. Of those 43, all but one entered the league prior to 2008. That one exception is Watt, who came into the league in 2011. The fewest seasons played by a Hall of Famer is six by Gale Sayers. Is it somehow possible that Watt has been dominant enough in his first four to be enshrined in Canton? The fact that this isn’t a ridiculous question says enough, even though I think the answer is likely no. Fortunately, we don’t nee to answer this question now. Watt has a long career still ahead of him, a career that will almost certainly end with him marching into Canton on the first ballot. But it would be interesting to see how the voters would handle it if he retired after one of the most dominant four year stretches from any player at any position in NFL history.

Pass Rushers

 

Elite pass rushers are incredibly valuable in the modern NFL, but they still seem strangely undervalued in the Hall of Fame. Eleven of the top twenty in career sacks among eligible Hall of Famers have not yet made it, and with a lot of players with high sack totals coming through the system it is possible we could end up with a backlog similar to the one we see at wide receiver. I think the voters will be more open about putting the current superstars into the Hall of Fame, but a high sack total is not an automatic by any means.

Locks: Julius Peppers, Jared Allen, DeMarcus Ware, Dwight Freeney

John Abraham

If asked who the active leader in career sacks is, most people would probably come up with six or seven names before Abraham. Nobody seems to realize that he is in the top ten all time in career sacks. These numbers have come over the course of his career, rather than being piled up in individual seasons like Ware and Allen. Only once did he manage more than thirteen sacks in a season. The career numbers are there, but his lack of dominance will probably keep him out of the Hall of Fame. In a lot of ways he is similar to Kevin Greene, absent from the Hall of Fame despite being third all time in career sacks. Pass rushers are prized more for their peaks than their sustainability.

Terrelle Suggs

Suggs has a reputation that far exceeds his actual abilities. Many put him in the same category as the four locks above, even though he is more than ten sacks behind Freeney, twenty behind Peppers and Ware, and a full thirty behind Allen. Suggs has reached double digit sacks only five times in eleven seasons and has a single season high of fourteen, the year he won Defensive Player of the Year thanks to three good games that all happened to be during prime time. People remember him as part of the Ravens 2013 Super Bowl run, even though he was hobbled by an Achilles injury that entire year. In short, he will probably make it into the Hall of Fame even though he shouldn’t even make it past the first round of voting.

Robert Mathis

Another stat most people don’t realize: despite entering the league one season after longtime teammate Dwight Freeney, Mathis actually has more career sacks. That probably won’t still be the case at the end of the season, but the fact remains that the two have had very similar productivity over the course of their careers. Mathis will be punished because he has always been seen as the lesser of the two, and I don’t think last year’s league leading sack numbers will be enough to make people forget that he was always the guy across from Freeney, rather than the other way around.

James Harrison

Harrison is the opposite of Abraham. It took him a long time to finally earn a major role in the league, but once he did he was a dominant force for five years before age caught up with him. With a Defensive Player of the Year award and one of the most iconic plays in NFL history against Arizona in the Super Bowl, these five years might actually be enough to get him into the conversation. But with only 70 career sacks, I don’t think he has the sort of high volume pass rushers need to make it into Canton. His peak was higher than Mathis’s or Abraham’s, but he didn’t last long enough.

Linebackers

We seem to be in a transitional period for NFL defensive players. The 2003 draft produced superstars across the league, but many of these players have already retired. 2007 helped bolster the ranks, but many of the top current defensive players entered the league as part of the 2011 draft. Other than JJ Watt, none of these players has done enough to get into this conversation after only three and a half seasons. So we’re left lacking for Hall of Famers at many of these defensive positions. The future Hall of Famers are in the league, but they haven’t been around long enough to earn the official distinction yet.

Locks: Patrick Willis

Lance Briggs

Briggs always played second fiddle to Brian Urlacher, even though he was likely the better player of the two for much of their time together. When he does retire, he will always be known as the sidekick rather than the superstar. I think his Hall of Fame case is every bit as strong as his former teammate’s. He was the rare 4-3 inside linebacker to receive popular recognition for his abilities (an honor Briggs 2.0—aka Lavonte David—is still waiting on) and he does have three All Pro appearances to his name. But with fewer than twenty sacks, interceptions, and forced fumbles, his résumé will only look worse the further we get from his years of dominance.

Secondary

Another position in a transitional period. Ed Reed, Asante Samuel, and Champ Bailey are gone. Patrick Peterson, Richard Sherman, and Earl Thomas are all too young. We’re left with a couple of superstars who have hung around too long and a bunch of veterans who are generously termed as long shots. Defensive back is an extremely volatile position, and it is difficult to project where a lot of current players will go from here. For these reasons, I have absolutely no idea how many Future Hall of Famers from the secondary are actually in the NFL right now.

Locks: Charles Woodson, Troy Polamalu

Eric Weddle

For about a ten year stretch the safety position in the NFL was dominated by Ed Reed and Troy Polamalu. For about the last half of that period, Weddle was always the third name people mentioned. He’s been a very good player for a long time, even if he was never a great player. But with four All Pro selections, he has an outside shot at getting into a Hall of Fame conversation. He isn’t there yet, but if he can hang on for a few years, bolster some of his career stats, and become involved in a high profile playoff run, he still probably won’t get in.

Charles Tillman

It’s stupid, but the number one way cornerbacks are measured is interceptions. If a cornerback can’t pick the ball off, he isn’t considered among the elite players at his position. Look at Tillman’s college teammate Ike Taylor, a dominant cornerback cursed with the hands of Troy Williamson. Despite tracking the opposing team’s top receiver week after week, Taylor has never been selected to a Pro Bowl because he has only 14 career interceptions. Tillman isn’t as poor off as Taylor. He has 36 career interceptions, and enough forced fumbles to make up for any other shortcomings in this area. But for most of his career he played in a system that asked him to tone down his aggressiveness, and because of this he went a long time before he was recognized as one of the best cornerbacks in the game. He deserves to at least come up in conversations for the Hall of Fame, but I think it is highly unlikely he will ever be considered.

Darrelle Revis

I once heard a Hall of Fame voter say that if a player was ever the best in the league at his position then he should be a Hall of Famer. By this criterion Revis would be in. For about a three year stretch prior to his torn ACL he was indisputably the best cornerback in the league, and one of those seasons he probably should have won Defensive Player of the Year. But is three years long enough to get a player into the Hall of Fame? Probably not, as we will likely see when Nnamdi Asomugha gets snubbed in a couple years. Revis’s candidacy could go either way in the coming years, depending on how he continues to recover from his struggles the past few seasons. As long as he remains a competent cornerback for the next five years he should get in, but he can’t afford to fall off as quickly as Asomugha did.