While we didn't receive any official credit I know we had something to do with it. A few days ago, Mike Sando, who is filling in for Matt Mosely over at Hashmarks wrote a post asking for who we thought should be in the Hall that wasn't. As part of the article he was writing he spoke to Randy Gradishar, the biggest HOF omission in sports. Of course, taking any opportunity to further the Broncos cause in Canton, I submitted the following comment --
The NFL should quiz the yahoos that vote for the Hall to make sure they understand there WAS a National Football League before 1985 and yes the players "way back then" were pretty damn good.
Earlier that day, Santo had specifically asked about Rod Smith, and his Hall worthiness. Again, I took the chance to defend the Orange and Blue, and bring attention to Denver's huge lack of Hall of Fame members --
Oh, can we not hold it against every other receiver in the NFL that Art Monk is not in the Hall??? Denver has won 6 AFC Championships, 2 Super Bowls, and has exactly ONE player in the Hall, so if any team has been screwed by Canton it's the Broncos.
While we weren't the only ones defending the Broncos, we were the first to point out that glaring statistic. 6 AFC Championships, 2 World Titles, ONE HALL OF FAMER!!
Fast forward to today, when Sando blogs about his planned HOF column took a strange turn.
It seems while gathering information about his column he realized what we have known for a long, long time -- The Broncos are geting screwed....royally. How bad is it?? Take a look at some of the numbers --
I then ran a basic statistical function to see how the number of Hall members correlated to the other columns. This would give us an idea which criteria could be relevant in predicting Hall membership. Right away it was clear that total victories was highly correlated to Hall membership (correlation above 90 percent). Total victories tends to be a function of games played, which correlated to Hall membership at 80-plus percent.
There was also a roughly 85 percent correlation between championships and Hall membership. No surprise there. The correlation between playoff appearances and Hall membership was 70 percent.
The surprising thing to me, really, was that the Broncos averaged .003 Hall members per victory while seemingly similar franchises -- Minnesota and Kansas City have similar records -- had rates at least seven times as high. Some of the more storied franchises (Chicago, Green Bay, Cleveland and the Giants) averaged .03 and .04 Hall members for every victory.
I had to read that twice. Teams with simliar historical win totals have, on average, 7 Hall of Famers. The Broncos, just one. We talked at length about this on MHR Radio last night and now it appears we are finally getting some National Attention.
The final result of Sando's work was THIS COLUMN, which went from being a general article discussing guys yet to be enshrined, to one focused solely on the Broncos lack of membership. My favorite part? This quote by Harvard statistician Carl N. Morris, "How can Denver, which has been a powerhouse team for a long time, have only one?" Good question, Carl. If a Harvard guy can't figure it out, how can we?
Will anything come from this? We'll see, but you have my word that I will not let this go. I will continue fighting until the Broncos are properly and deservedly represented in Canton, OH.