From a football perspective, Bill Belichick not making the Pro Football Hall of Fame on the first ballot defies logic.
So why, as ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. and Seth Wickersham reported Tuesday, did 11 Hall of Fame voters keep the former New England Patriots head coach off their ballots and deny him the 40 out of 50 votes necessary to make the cut?
OutKick’s Armando Salguero is a good person to ask. The longtime NFL reporter presented Belichick as a candidate during a meeting earlier this month with the 50 Hall of Fame voters who were tasked with selecting up to three candidates from a pool of five “seniors” that included Belichick, Patriots owner Robert Kraft, running back Roger Craig, linebacker L.C. Greenwood and quarterback Ken Anderson.
According to Salguero, Belichick’s snub had to do with one issue and one issue only.
“I presented him (to the committee),” Salguero said Wednesday on Arbella Early Edition. “I did not mention Spygate in the presentation. Then debate happened. There were a lot of Spygate mentions in the debate, and then I get the final say, in which I presented a Spygate rebuttal.
“I’ll tell you right now: The reason that Bill Belichick is not in the Hall of Fame as a first ballot Hall of Famer is Spygate. Period. Next.
“It’s not anything else. It’s not, ‘Well, he was mean to me one time and now I’m going to get back at him.’ It’s not, ‘Well, Tom Brady really helped him and (he didn’t win) that much without Tom Brady.’
“That wasn’t it. It was Spygate.”
Spygate, of course, refers to the 2007 cheating scandal in which the Patriots were fined $500,000 and stripped of their 2008 first-round draft pick after being caught videotaping opposing coaches’ signals from unauthorized locations.
According to Van Natta and Wickersham, former Indianapolis Colts general manager Bill Polian allegedly told some voters he believed Belichick’s induction should “wait a year” as a punishment of sorts for Spygate. Polian later insisted he voted for Belichick, but Salguero was strong in his conviction that Spygate was the driving force for most of the voters who kept Belichick off their ballots — and that the end result didn’t sit well with the committee as a whole.
“It’s embarrassing that this has happened,” Salguero added. “I’ve talked to a number of voters who are embarrassed that this happened. They agree that Bill Belichick should be in the Pro Football Hall of Fame come the 2026 induction in August, and he’s not going to be because some people who remain anonymous decided they didn’t want to vote for him.”
