Heartwarming: Miserable Man Frustrated In Ultimately Insignificant Way

Every day, up and down the culture, unjust things are happening. Terrible things happen to good people, while some of the most vile people this country has ever produced blithely escape any accountability for their actions and go on cutting the line. It is all wrong, and if the wrongness of it is not necessarily new, it can feel crushing all the same.

Now turn that frown upside down: Bill Belichick was not elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his first year on the ballot. As Don Van Natta Jr. and Seth Wickersham reported at ESPN, Belichick failed to receive the necessary 40 of 50 votes from the Selection Committee during their recent conclave. "Several sources who spoke with the coach over the weekend described Belichick as 'puzzled' and 'disappointed,'" the reporters wrote, adding that Belichick groused, "Six Super Bowls isn't enough?" to an associate, and believes that "politics kept him out." Delightful!

What we have here is a perfect fit between villain and consequences. Belichick has won more Super Bowls than any head coach in NFL history, and would have a fine case for admission just for his game-changing work as a defensive coordinator under Bill Parcells, where he won an additional two Super Bowls with the New York Giants. There is no real case for keeping him out of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But the argument that Van Natta and Wickersham attribute to Bill Polian—and which Polian disclaims while saying he can't remember to a certainty whether he voted for Belichick or not—which amounts to making Belichick wait a year as a sort of ad hoc penalty for the two cheating-related offenses he oversaw in New England, is funny if not remotely valid. It is the nature of Hall of Fame voting that stupid stuff happens for stupid reasons, and this can comfortably be filed under that heading. In that sense, while the Spygate and Deflategate offenses are real enough, it would also be perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the thing for a member of the committee to withhold a vote from Belichick just because of how he acted.