(Note:  This originally appeared as a comment under the Bill Williamson/Dominique Foxworth heading.  I created a FanPost of it at Guru's suggestion.)

People here in Cleveland are just convinced that Bernie Kosar was a great player. Really, he was merely a good player in an era with lots of great QBs (Elway, Montana, Marino, Jim Kelly, Warren Moon, Steve Young) and some more good ones who were better than Bernie (Esiason, Simms, Randall Cunningham.)

Bernie does color commentary for Browns pre-season games now, and he always sounds like he chain-smoked two cartons of non-filter cigarettes and drank a big bottle of Jim Beam directly before coming on the air. It’s really difficult to listen to, and even though his analysis is typically solid, he would never be put on TV anywhere but here.

As a fan base, I don’t think we have anybody like Bernie. By that, I mean a pretty good player who we all mistakenly believe was a great player. I objectively consider Rod Smith to be a Hall of Very Good player rather than a Hall of Famer, but I wouldn’t even put Bernie in the Hall of Very Good. (As a side note, Jerome Bettis will definitely make the Hall of Fame without ever being a truly great player, because of his deft touch with the media. He is like Rod, really good without ever being truly great.)

Can anybody think of a player we all overrate as a fan base? Here is my list of Hall of Fame and Hall of Very Good, for discussion purposes.

HOF
John Elway
Terrell Davis
Shannon Sharpe
Gary Zimmerman
Randy Gradishar
Tombstone Jackson
Tom Nalen
John Lynch
Champ Bailey
Jason Elam

HOVG
Rod Smith
Steve Atwater
Karl Mecklenburg
Bill Romanowski
Al Wilson
Simon Fletcher
Neil Smith

Am I missing anybody? This is an interesting topic to me, since Zimmerman is about to be only our second HOFer. What do you think?