Antonio Brown and the Hall of Fame (Mailbag Part II)

Revisiting a classic Football Outsiders debate over one of the most polarizing players in pro football history.

Part II of this week’s mailbag will only cover one question. That’s because of the scope of the answer, and also because a lingering illness has made it difficult for me to do the research that many of your questions deserve.

If I did not get to your question this week, I apologize and will make every effort to get to all of them in the next Mailbag. Also, it appears that the email did not go out announcing this week’s chat thread. That is user error on my part, and I won’t let it happen again. I don’t want anyone to feel left out!

Is there a path to the Hall of Fame for Antonio Brown?

I think you’ve said that Mike Evans will get in, and I’m not sure he’s been considered a top three receiver at any point of his career. Brown was the best in football for 3-4 seasons, at a time there were plenty of other great receivers (Julio Jones, Calvin Johnson, Demaryius Thomas, AJ Green, Beckham, Hopkins, Fitzgerald, Dez Bryant, Agholor).

His peak was WAY higher than Evans’, and his career numbers are still comparable.

So why do I feel like Brown has no shot? Especially when someone like Evans (or Julio, for that matter) is considered likely to get in? — Sheepnado

I wrote at length about Antonio Brown’s complicated Hall of Fame candidacy for Football Outsiders in 2022. I am about to reprint that feature, almost in its entirety, as it can no longer be found on the Internet.

Sheepnado’s question illustrates one of the points I emphasized in that feature: Brown’s misdeeds are already fading from memory. It was just some extra-spicy diva behavior, right? Plus some off-field incidents which cannot be held against him, according to Pro Football Hall of Fame voting statutes?

Actually, he went AWOL from three separate teams, one of them during a game. There’s a lot of contract detrimental to both the sport and his team’s attempts to win games to sift through. Hall of Fame selectors will indeed sift through it when Brown’s case comes up, even if a Greek chorus of fans (who have forgotten 90% of the details) decry them as patriarchal fuddy-duddies.

Oh, and I saw what you did with “Agholor,” Sheepnado. Nelson Agholor is a first-ballot NFL Meme Hall of Famer. We should respect that accomplishment.

Now on with the special-edition rerelease:

Hall of Fame Debates: Antonio Brown

(From Football Outsiders, August, 2022)

It’s Antonio Brown Pro Football Hall of Fame debate time! And you know what that means: we must start with an impassioned plea to stay as close to the topic as possible in the comment thread, take a deep breath before posting, respect the feelings and opinions of others and remember that nobody’s views on the former Pittsburgh Steelers All Pro brands them forever as society’s greatest monster.

With that out of the way, let’s take things talking point by talking point.

Statistically, Antonio Brown is worthy of the Pro Football Hall of Fame

That should be obvious, but it’s worth laying down parameters when discussing someone as polarizing as Brown.

Brown is NOT a clear-cut first ballot selection based on his statistics, though some will inevitably claim he is. His statistical case and Pro Bowl/All Pro count line up roughly with Andre Johnson, who is currently in the finalist queue, and with contemporaries like Julio Jones and DeAndre Hopkins who will reach the ballot process at the same time as Brown.

Brown’s case is also broadly similar to that of Calvin Johnson, a first-ballot HoFer in 2021. As I often note, voters I spoke to at the time made it clear that they needed to hear Megatron’s case before waving him through on the first ballot, not because they thought he was undeserving but because they have so many candidates to prioritize and were reluctant to let someone cut the line who wasn’t Peyton Manning-level qualified.

So a baggage-free Brown would probably be a Hall of Fame “queue” guy. A baggage-free Brown also would not get his own segment in Walkthrough, and is rather difficult to imagine after so many years of … stuff.

Brown’s football-related transgressions absolutely deserve consideration and debate by the Pro Football Hall of Fame selection committee.

As is often restated here at Walkthrough, voters are forbidden from taking off-field misconduct into consideration when assessing PFHoF cases. But voters ARE both allowed and expected to consider whether a candidate upheld the Hall’s stated values of “courage, dedication, vision, fair play, integrity and excellence” within the realm of their football-related activities.

Dedication and integrity are thorny issues for a player who was suspended by the Pittsburgh Steelers in the heat of a playoff chase, walked away from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the middle of a game just before the playoffs, and resorted to some extremely juvenile and insubordinate behavior to force his release from the Oakland Raiders.

There are those who argue that none of Brown’s beefs with various teams/coaches/organizations should matter. I would argue that if throwing a tantrum and going AWOL on Tom Brady and Bruce Arians just before the playoffs start doesn’t matter, then nothing matters, football is all just a silly soap opera and who cares who gets a statue in some tourist attraction off I-77?