Bill Belichick Becomes The Target Of Someone Else’s Pettiness, For A Change

If Bill Belichick was willing to play to type today, he would rise in Uppermost Dudgeon—it's a suburb of Foxborough—and say he doesn't want to be voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame at all, won't accept induction when it does come, and would attend the ceremony only for the privilege of telling everyone who worked to keep him out this time to eat a heaping bowl of death. Expert analysts call this "pulling a Schilling," but more on that in due time.

Of course he won't, though. He'll endure what The Athletic and everyone else in the incredulous-on-command media game described as "a snub" and pretend (poorly) to be gracious when he is elected, which will probably be next year. Too bad, too. Not because Belichick shouldn't be in the Hall Fame, mind you; even the most benign of explanations doesn't cover the full 20-plus percent of voters who skipped him on any principle. But his temporary (for the moment) exclusion makes him the latest example of what we now know halls of fame to be at their essence: places in which sports grandees honor their friends and hosepipe their enemies. And Belichick, through cultivation and diligence and by being the contemptuous villain he chose to portray, has made far more enemies than friends over his nearly half-century in football.

The news that Belichick didn't get the required 40 votes (out of 50 electors) to gain inclusion came as quite the shock to many establishment football people, who should know that concepts like ethics and honor have nothing to do with football, or much of anything else these days. Baseball fans know this as the Bonds Effect, with one important caveat. Barry Bonds has only been suspected of being a steroid enthusiast and proven only to be aggressively impolite to nearly anyone he met in the job, while Belichick actually got caught cheating. This is hardly unique in the results-before-honor world of which we speak here, but despite the theory attributed to former Indianapolis Colts executive Bill Polian in Don Van Natta Jr. and Seth Wickersham's reporting at ESPN (which Polian has since disclaimed) that Belichick should not be a first-ballot HOFer because of the brigandries of Spygate and DeflateGate, it is Belichick's devotion and even zeal in being the most unpleasant bastard in a profession full of them that ultimately won the day. Even the only semi-compelling and football-related reason not to vote for his inclusion—that Belichick was more or less an extra-sour Norv Turner without Tom Brady—would not have swayed many voters if his public personality hadn't been so much "a bag of coal dust scattered in your eyes."