Bill Belichick personally attends blue-ribbon panel meeting to pick 15 Hall of Famers

[Pat Patriot]

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The blue-ribbon panel that met on Wednesday to select the 15-member Hall of Fame Centennial Class included someone who, in any other year since 2009, wouldn’t have been available.

Via the Canton Repository, Patriots coach Bill Belichick personally attended the meeting to finalize 15 extra bronze busts for the 2020 Hall of Fame class, a deviation from the rules (in more ways than one) crafted specifically for the 100th anniversary of the NFL. Belichick was available because his team isn’t playing this weekend, for the first time since the 2009 postseason.

Three hundred nominees previously had been sliced to 38 finalists. Of those, 15 are in. The final list will be announced next week.

“On Wednesday, selectors followed the Hall’s standard selection process, with each candidate getting a four-minute presentation on his behalf,” Alison Matas of the Repository writes, glossing over the fact that the standard selection process most definitely was not utilized. First, the usual selection committee was cut out of the process entirely. Second, the panel narrowed the 38 finalists to 15 without each and every one of the 15 being subject to the up or down vote that characterizes the standard selection process.

The reason, some believe, for the deviation is simple: The Hall of Fame was hell bent on adding a firm 15 enshrinees to the five that the usual committee will select on the Saturday before the Super Bowl, giving the 2020 class exactly 20 new entries. And the Hall of Fame feared that, if the 15 finalists for the Centennial Class included one or more candidates to whom the selection committee objected, the entire 15-person class would be blocked from enshrinement.

Of course, there’s still a way the selection committee can keep the 20 in ’20 thing from happening. The 15 modern-era finalists to be considered early next month through the standard selection process eventually will be trimmed to five, with the final up-or-down vote then applied to each of them. If one of those five don’t get enough votes from the selection committee, then the normal 2020 class will be four, not five.