What? Buddy $%*# Parker?
As a 32-year veteran of the Pro Football Hall of Fame selection committee, I’ve gotten used to being surprised at the decisions we make. We vote in secret, and I don’t take the temperature of fellow voters before meetings, so I really don’t know how the vote will turn out most times.
The Hall has 50 voting members. There are two subcommittees (Seniors and Contributors) with 12 voting members each that advance candidates to possible election in January. Last Tuesday, the Contributors Subcommittee, which I’m a part of, met via Zoom to whittle 12 candidates (coaches, GMs, owners, scouts, officials) for 2024 election down to one.
The Contributors list was strong: Patriots owner/league pillar Robert Kraft and John Wooten, who blocked for Jim Brown and recently has been at the forefront of football’s diversity efforts, were on the ballot, as was a slew of coaches who’d won 160 or more games—Mike Shanahan, Tom Coughlin, Mike Holmgren and two who hadn’t won titles as head coaches, Marty Schottenheimer and Dan Reeves. Also in the mix: Buddy Parker, who’d coached the Lions to NFL championships in 1952 and ’53 and is the only coach to have Paul Brown’s number head-to-head, ever. But Parker had been eligible for election for 58 years and never gotten much traction. When in 2020 the Hall of Fame decided to enshrine 15 forgotten candidates (at least that was the idea) as part of the league’s 100-year celebration and Parker didn’t make it then, I thought it was over for him.
Voters are not allowed to divulge what happened in the meeting, so I can’t tell you specifics. I can say each case is heard, and voters are tasked with voting for their top six; when the list is cut to six, we’re asked to cut it to three, and when it gets to three, we’re asked to cut to one. When this meeting ended after nearly five hours, the last man standing was Parker.
So … two questions.
Who was Buddy Parker?
And which Hall voter (apparently persuasively) presented his case to the group to advance him past a strong field?
Parker, an acerbic Texan who died in 1982, coached the Lions to three NFL championship-game matchups against mighty Cleveland in his tenure from 1951 to 1956, winning two. The Browns played in the championship game of their league for 10 straight years beginning in 1946, winning seven. Head-to-head with the great Paul Brown of the Browns, Parker’s Lions were 4-1. He was one of the early adoptees of the nickel defense and the two-minute offense. He left the Lions weeks before the 1957 season in a reported contract dispute; the Lions won their third title of the decade that year while Parker got hired to coach the Steelers. He was 107-76-9 in 15 years (12- and 14-game seasons) as a head coach.
Paul Kuharsky, a longtime NFL writer based in Nashville, presented Parker, taking the reins from another Hall voter, Clark Judge, a longtime Parker advocate who’d presented his case previously. What’s odd—or good, depending on your point of view—about the Hall process for Contributors or Seniors is that any voter can be chosen to present any candidate; voters can request a candidate but aren’t guaranteed getting to present him. Kuharsky chose Parker.
**“I was born in Cleveland, grew up in Jersey, went to college in New York, lived in Nashville since 1997—and presented a guy who coached in Detroit and Pittsburgh,” Kuharsky said.
** “I was upset he didn’t get in from the Centennial Committee vote, and I couldn’t figure out why. That stuck with me. As a committee, I think sometimes we lean too much on the modern candidates.”
There will be those outraged by passing over an owner with great credentials (Kraft), one innovative coach with two titles and a great current coaching tree (Shanahan), another coach with two Super Bowl wins over the powerful Patriots and who built an excellent expansion team (Coughlin), and a coach who won one title and mentored Brett Favre and took another team to a Super Bowl (Holmgren). Understandable.
But I love Parker making it. I’ve supported him wholeheartedly. We need to honor pro football history more at the Hall of Fame than we do. The game’s 104 seasons old. Too often we default to what we’ve seen, what we know—instead of opening our mind to the Buddy Parkers. I’d have been fine with Kraft, or with one of the three leading coaches (Shanahan had the slight edge over Coughlin for me). But this feels right. Parker being up for the Hall come January is justice delayed, but not denied.
“I think those other guys are going to get in, and before their 109th birthday,” said Kuharsky. Parker was born more than 109 years ago. “Buddy getting in is not a slap in the face to anyone. The game was different then, and we can’t hold it against him that there were fewer regular-season games and there weren’t levels of playoff games then.”
For the rest of a rather long column:
