The NFL world was shocked to learn that former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick won’t be a first-ballot Hall of Famer after the results of the vote were fully revealed yesterday, and Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes was among the first to react.
“Insane…don’t even understand how this could be possible,” Mahomes wrote in his X post, which was picked up as part of a broader ESPN story.
The quarterback’s sentiments were quickly echoed by celebrity athletes across multiple sports, many of whom are Hall of Famers in their own right, and a chorus of prominent media voices quickly spoke out and demanded that the snub be corrected.
The vote hit Mahomes particularly hard, however. He spent the first few years of his career trying to figure out how to beat Belichick’s defensive schemes, and he came up short on his first few occasions. Beating Belichick and Brady was an essential part of Mahomes’ learning process, so he knows from experience just how good Belichick was back in his halcyon days.
The specifics of the voting process that allowed this to happen are both labyrinthine and obscure. Belichick needed to get at least 80 percent of the votes from a 50-person selection committee, according to ESPN, and it was quickly revealed that at least 11 voters didn’t even include the six-time Super Bowl winner on their ballots.
The level of embarrassment for the NFL in this matter is off the charts, especially with the league about to celebrate and glorify itself during the media tidal wave that is Super Bowl week.
Belichick has become a controversial and somewhat embarrassing figure in his own right in recent years, and having him in Santa Clara prior to the Super Bowl with the New England Patriots back in the championship game looked like it would be the ultimate bowl of awkward.
Conspiracy theories about how this happened are popping up all over the internet right now. The most prominent one has Bill Polian, the Hall of Fame former GM of the Indianapolis Colts and bitter Belichick rival, somehow getting a small gang of voters to make the former New England coach wait a year due to the various cheating scandals that occasionally scarred Belichick’s reputation and ticked off his competitors.
Those theories make for good reads and entertaining media fodder, but the big question is what the NFL will try to do to mitigate the wave of bad publicity the league is getting. The answer is probably “nothing,” but it should be fun to see the folks from the Shield twist themselves into pretzels trying to spin this.