Texans receiver Andre Johnson is a finalist for Pro Football Hall of Fame for third year in a row.
If Andre Johnson isn’t elected into the Pro Football Hall of Fame Thursday evening, here is why.
He is a Texan. A Houston Texan, that is.
A veteran NFL reporter told me that Johnson’s Hall of Fame résumé is lacking big-time playoff moments and Super Bowl memories.
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Worse yet, as a member of the Texans, Johnson didn’t play in a host of primetime games and not many of the widely viewed late-afternoon Sunday games.
None of the above is listed as criteria for membership in the hall.
RELATED: Will third time be a charm?
According to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, “The only restriction is that a player and coach must have been retired at least five years before he can be considered.”
With no requirements aside from having played professional football, membership comes down the subjective voting of 50 elite selectors. Their task is challenging.
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Every year, there are more worthy candidates than available slots.
There is little doubt Johnson had a Hall-of-Fame career — I have yet to meet a voter who doesn’t believe so — when he will be acknowledged for that is the question.
Johnson is a finalist for the third straight year. Contemporaries Torry Holt and Reggie Wayne have made it to the final stage of voting for the fifth year in a row.
They also have strong arguments for induction. Johnson’s is simply better.
But, as the aforementioned writer pointed out, Johnson made his case with the Texans, the NFL’s youngest franchise and one of the least popular teams in the league during his playing days. Houston is a team that never advanced to the AFC Championship Game, let alone a Super Bowl, when Johnson was in uniform (or since, for that matter).
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Johnson played in four playoff games in a 14-year career. Wayne (21 playoff games in 14 seasons) and Holt (10 playoff games in 11 seasons) had far more postseason success.
RELATED: How to watch Hall of Fame announcement.
But they began their careers catching passes from Hall of Fame quarterbacks Peyton Manning and Curt Warner, respectively.
Wayne and Holt were each key members of a team that won a Super Bowl and lost a Super Bowl. Had they played for the Texans, they would have been key members of teams that never made it to a Super Bowl.
They would be no lesser players for it.
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The outstanding database pro-football-reference.com — the absolute go-to site for NFL player and team statistics — has a Hall of Fame Monitor that is an attempt to measure players’ Hall of Fame worthiness, with a comparison to others already in the hall.
It is an extremely flawed metric, mathematically sound, but not at all the best measure of the value of an individual in a team sport.
A formula is only as good as the variables one chooses to include in it. The Pro Football Reference HOF Monitor puts one and one together to get 11.
Not only does the formula reward players with a bonus for championships won, it deducts points from those who were never on a Super Bowl winning team.
Note that I used the phrase “on a Super Bowl winning team” and not “won a Super Bowl.”
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Football, the ultimate team game, isn’t a sport where wide receivers win Super Bowls. Oh, the 49ers probably wouldn’t have won the three Super Bowls they won with Jerry Rice on the team had my namesake Jerome Lee not been on the roster. But they did win one a few years before he was drafted.
Put the greatest receiver of all-time on the Texans in place of Johnson, and he would be a Hall of Fame-caliber receiver with spectacular numbers and zero Super Bowl victories to his credit.
The Pro Football Reference HOF formula ranks Wayne and Holt above Johnson, though the former Texans’ star is a two-time All-Pro and seven-time Pro Bowler, while Wayne and Holt made just one All-Pro team. Wayne matched Johnson’s Pro Bowl appearance, Holt finished one behind.
They weren’t better, they just played in Super Bowls and were on Monday Night Football all the time.
Holt’s HOF monitor rating is significantly higher than Johnson’s (108.22-94.91) because of a 25-point bonus for being named to the All-Decade team of the 2000s. He was a second-team pick in a foursome of Hall of Famers Randy Moss, Terrell Owens and Marvin Harrison.
A well-earned honor that it as much about timing as talent.
Holt played his entire career in the 2000s (1999-2011), with all of his best seasons in that decade. He played in two Super Bowls while Johnson was in college and the Texans didn’t even exist.
Johnson posted multiple 1,000-yard receiving seasons in the 2000s and 2010s, but didn’t make an all-decade teams because his career was split between the two.
No Hall of Famer has more 100-reception seasons than Johnson, and Rice is the only player with more 1,500-yard receiving seasons.
Johnson went about his business in relative silence, never drawing attention to himself, never bragging about his abilities. Were he a politician, Johnson wouldn’t hold campaign rallies or engage in a debate. His record, he believes, speaks for itself.
It says: Andre Johnson is an all-time great. He is unquestionably one of the top 15 wide receivers to ever play in the NFL, top-10 if you watched him dominate with a slew of average quarterbacks throwing to him.
He will be voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame one day.
Today is as good a day as any.
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