2027 Hall of Fame Contributor Candidates

Watch any random week of football, and you’ll hear about eight to 10 people described as a “future Hall of Famer”, as announcers search for alternatives to avoid just repeating “that guy is very good”. If you took all of those proclamations at face value, the Pro Football Hall of Fame would have about 5,000 guys in it.

The Hall voting always brings with it some degree of criticism and controversy. Some of it is well-deserved, like a broken system that led to Bill Belichick not making the Hall on his first attempt. But sometimes, the criticism comes from the extended process of whittling down the list. Questions like “how does Eli Manning keep being a finalist?” or “why hasn’t the wide receiver logjam cleared?” can’t really be answered without understanding all the steps that it takes to get to each rung of the process.

The Hall is actually a little behind schedule this year, at least publicly. In part because of their much-reported overhaul both to their selection process and the pool of voters themselves, the list of names has been slower this year. Usually, by this point, we have a full list of the 120-odd initial candidates for the Hall, for which the qualifications are ‘somebody remembers you’. That normally gets cut down in a series of votes until they eventually arrive at the 15 finalists that get discussed in the meeting. But we’ve already missed the public points last year when the Hall would produce these lists!

That, more than any of the other changes, is concerning – we don’t need less transparency in the voting process. Say what you want about the seniors and coaches and contributors being grouped in with the modern players, or with the pool of voters being smaller and no longer explicitly representing each NFL city, but at least we know what’s going on there and can judge it accordingly. Not knowing just who the Hall is considering is a change I don’t much care for. Do we need to know the 160th-place finisher for any given Hall class? Of course not. But I’m never in fan of less information being given out.

So it was good today to see that the Hall has at lease released the five contributors being considered for the final ballot. This was apparently cut down from a list of 42 that we never got to see, but hey, it’s better than nothing.

The five semifinalists are:

• Ralph Hay: Owned the Canton Bulldogs from 1918-1922; hosted the NFL’s formational meeting in his automobile dealership in downtown Canton.
• Robert Kraft: Owner of the New England Patriots since 1994 and chairman and CEO of the Kraft Group. His teams have won six Super Bowls and played in five others – 11 appearances overall in the past 31 seasons. Also key member of several influential NFL owners’ committees.
• Virginia McCaskey: Principal owner of the Chicago Bears from 1983 until her passing in 2025 at age 102. Daughter of team founder George Halas. During her tenure the Bears won Super Bowl XX during a stretch of five consecutive division titles.
• Doug Williams: Nine-year NFL career was punctuated with a Super Bowl title and game MVP honors following a 340-yard, four-touchdown performance against the Broncos to cap the 1987 season. Has spent the past 13 seasons in the front office of the Commanders’ franchise. Other stints as a scout or front office executive in the NFL came with the Jacksonville Jaguars and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
• John Wooten: An offensive lineman in the NFL for 10 seasons, he transitioned to scouting and player personnel roles with the Cowboys, Eagles and Ravens for nearly three decades. In 2003, became chair of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, a group working to advance opportunities for minorities in coaching and front office positions across pro football.

The Contributor Subcommittee will get together in a couple weeks to decide which one of these five will get to make the final 15, alongside one coach and 13 players. I still don’t like them all being grouped together; how do you compare Ralph Hay to Steve Smith? But, well, here we are. Presumably, we will hear about the reduction votes for the players and coaches soon enough, as well.

So let’s play Subcommittee. Which of the five would you advance to the final 15?

I am not a fan of someone getting in just for being an owner of a team. That doesn’t mean owners can’t make the Hall; I just need them to contribute something significant to the league or game as a whole, rather than “owned a team and won a lot of football games.” A contribution for the contributor’s category.

I’m not sure, then, that Virginia McCaskey passes my sniff test. While she was in charge for the Super Bowl XX win, she was very hands-off as an owner in the 21st century, and it’s hard to point to any one significant thing she did outside of the Bears. If you don’t take my word for it, maybe take McCaskey’s – the NFL once tried to give her an award for making “significant and innovative contributions to professional football”, but she declined, saying that she didn’t feel qualified. McCaskey has a lot of respect and love from people who worked with her, but the Hall? I don’t really see it. The other two owners on this list are more qualified.

Robert Kraft was the contributor’s finalist last year and failed to get in. Kraft has a massive legacy in New England, even if you ignore the championships – it was his moves that kept the Patriots in the northeast and stopped them from moving to Jacksonville or St. Louis. He bought what would become Foxboro Stadium and used his leverage there to prevent a series of owners (Victor Kiam, James Orthwein, Stan Kroenke) from shipping the team out of town. That deserves at least a little respect, even if that’s more a Patriots thing than an NFL thing. Outside of that, his candidacy is a little more inside baseball, as it were. He’s been a major player in negotiating labor deals and media deals, being one of the key figures avoiding the 2011 lockout. I don’t view Kraft as some absolute load-bearing figure in NFL history or anything, and I do not care about the championships the team won while he happened to be writing checks, but there’s more there than an average owner.

Of course, Kraft also comes with his own share of controversies, and while the Hall isn’t supposed to consider off-field incidents when picking their nominees, they do live in the world the rest of us live in, too. His 2019 solicitation thing is embarrassing, but I honestly think his recent part in the Macklemore/Ed Sheeran Palestine/Israel thing is a headache no one wants to deal with right now. They made Kraft a finalist last year for the first time, and I’m sure he’ll be finalist again at some point. This might not be his year.

Ralph Hay’s year should have been in the 2020 centennial class, because what better time to put in the guy who started the league then on the 100th anniversary? His resume sounds very impressive when you first hear it, and then gets a little less so when you dig in. Hay sometimes gets called the “founder of the NFL”, because he organized the initial meeting and held it in his automobile showroom in Canton. That’s why the Hall is there, after all. The idea wasn’t initially his – it came from Leo Lyons, an interesting Hall candidate is own right, via Jim Thorpe. But having an idea is one thing; doing it is another, and convincing enough independent teams to band together to actually try to make one unified league, combining the best teams from the old Ohio League, the top teams from Western New York, and assorted contenders in between? I mean, we’re not talking about any of this if someone doesn’t group everyone together. Hay’s candidacy is hurt by the fact that he declined the opportunity to be the league president and sold the Bulldogs before the 1923 season; he wasn’t involved in the game for a particularly long time. But the other Ohio team managers trusted him to bring everyone together, to contact George Halas and Leo Lyons and everyone and make it more than just a regional thing. That’s worth something, even if most of his contribution to the league as we know it was a couple months in 1920.

Doug Williams is an odd case, and might be the rare contributor who’s candidacy is actually improved by the new rules. Since ‘Contributor’ is no longer its own separate slot on the ballot, voters can now consider his playing career as part of his candidacy. As a quarterback, he certainly is not Hall of Fame caliber, but being the first black quarterback to start and win a Super Bowl is a feather in his cap, as is the Super Bowl XXII MVP. He gets both pioneer and championship credit on top of 20 years of front office work. It’s just…every time you hear about Williams’ candidacy, it always comes down to “20 years of front office work!” with very little tangible things actually mentioned. Willliams has done a lot of general football advocacy, especially for minorities, and that shouldn’t be discounted. But compare him to, say, Gil Brandt. Brandt’s in the Hall as a scout, and you can draw a line from his scouting innovations to things every team in the league does to this day – his use of computers and data to evaluate players, his international scouting, helping to create the scouting combine and school pro days, and so on and so forth. Williams hasn’t had anywhere near that level of impact as an executive and scout, and that’s kind of the bar. So you’re taking a couple non-Hall level careers, mashing them together, and coming out with a package that may be bigger than the sum of its parts. I could see it? But it’s not the clearest case to make.

John Wooten also gets a bit of a bump from his playing career getting to be included. Like Williams, Wooten was not a Hall of Fame player, though he did pick up a couple of Pro Bowls as a guard blocking for Jim Brown and Leroy Kelly. Like Williams, Wooten had a long career in various front offices. But he has one feather in his cap that Williams doesn’t – you can point to something specific that he helped create. The Rooney Rule, requiring NFL clubs to interview ethnic minority candidates for major roles, was created in part due to lobbying by Wooten in his role as chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance. That’s what I mean when I say I’m looking for something tangible. Wooten certainly wasn’t the only one to come up with the idea for the Rooney Rule or to speak out about the difficulties minority candidates face getting consideration, but he’s credited with a significant role in putting this specific policy in place, on top of just a general legacy of advocacy. I think that gives him a leg up for me on Williams.

So, who do I pick?

Ultimately, I don’t think that any of the five has a resume that would get me to pick them over a player. That’s the trouble with getting rid of the contributor category; will voters really want to use one of their spots on a scout or owner over a star wide receiver? I’d love to see more contributors in the Hall because one of its roles should be educational; showcasing those who made the game what it is who don’t have highlight reels should be part of it. But to actually keep out a player for a contributor, they had better be something incredibly essential, and none of the five this year pass that test for me.

That being said, we have to advance one, so I’ll pick Ralph Hay. One way to think about which contributor to pick would be who the league would be most different without. Well, without Hay, does the NFL exist? I’m sure, at some point, teams would have banded together and formed a league; this was not some new and innovative concept in 1920. But Hay had the connections to actually get things done. He’d be my selection.