00:00Look, the Belichick news is fascinating. And I guess if, you know, you could take a 10,000 foot view of the thing and you can go down any number of paths, including the ones you introduced, I think the first thing that you have to say on this topic is, I mean, truly what an embarrassment for Canton and the Pro Football Hall of Fame and its voters.
00:16If Bill Belichick, who has six Super Bowl rings as a head coach, two more as a defensive coordinator, has appeared in, you know, what, 10, 11 Super Bowls, whatever the number is, and has, as you said, north of 300 wins and all these division titles and basically ran the league for two decades.
00:34If that's not the dictionary definition of what a first ballot Hall of Famer looks like, I don't know what is. I mean, how could any other head coach in the history of the league go in first ballot?
00:47And so it's a complete and utter travesty and embarrassment. And a lot of the voters out there have come out and said as much other than some, very few so far of the, what has now been coined the Belichick 11 that have said why they did not vote for him.
01:03And I just think the reasoning is foolhardy. You know, obviously nobody is going to come out, even if this is true, let's just go in order, right? Nobody's going to come out and say, I didn't vote for Bill Belichick because he made my job difficult for two and a half decades.
01:19And he was mean and he was a curmudgeon. He was a jerk. And I didn't like the guy and the way that he dealt with the media. Even if anyone held a bias like that, nobody could come out and say that.
01:31So then you go to the next level, which is, as you, as you said, pardon me, Deflategate, Spygate and various cheating scandals over the years. And what I would say to that is part of me gets it.
01:46But another part of me says there's no double jeopardy, man. I mean, Belichick and the Patriots were fined and punished for Deflategate, for Spygate.
01:58You know, these things were ruled on the time. You are supposed to get in or not get in based on your credentials on the field.
02:05And Belichick's credentials on the field are inarguable. I think ultimately, really, the biggest problem here is that the voting process for the Pro Football Hall of Fame is wildly dysfunctional.
02:27So it's not a process that makes sense. You know, you shouldn't, for anyone who doesn't know how this works, there are multiple committees.
02:36And, you know, across, there's obviously the players that are there for the first time.
02:41Then you get to the Veterans Committee, who are then going against head coaches like a Belichick and architects, owners like Robert Kraft of the Patriots.
02:50And these guys are pitted against one another, which is how you can have someone leave a Bill Belichick off your ballot and vote for Kraft or leave a Bill Belichick off your ballot and vote for, you know, Ken Anderson.
03:01Is Ken Anderson more worthy of the Hall of Fame than Bill Belichick is? Of course not. It's ridiculous.
03:07But that's the way the voting, you know, standard has turned into here to where these voters, you know, the however many of them there are, the 40, right?
03:19You know, or 50, you need 40 votes out of the 50, 80 percent in order to get in.
03:23But you can only vote for three people. So it's not like Cooperstown baseball where you can vote for, you know, 10 on a ballot.
03:29You need 75 percent of the vote and all of these things.
03:31You only get three. You get three and you got to spread them out across however you want to tier them and who you believe is most worthy.
03:39And then it gets sort of muddied in the waters of, well, is Belichick the most worthy?
03:44I mean, sure, but I'm going to leave him off because enough people are going to vote for him.
03:47He's definitely going to get in anyway. I don't have to worry about that.
03:50I'm going to spread my votes out to guys that have been on the ballot for too long and they're going to age off soon.
03:55And I want to give them a little bit extra life. That shouldn't be a thing.
03:59It shouldn't even be possible. We need to vote, you know, the royal we, because I'm not a voter.
04:04We need to vote on the merits of whether a guy belongs in the Hall of Fame.
04:07That simple. And there's nobody, nobody out of that, you know, 50 group that could possibly say that Bill Belichick is not a first ballot Hall of Famer.
04:17So I think you're going to see changes to the rules and the way that ultimately the voting is done going forward by the Pro Football Hall of Fame because this is terrible.
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