Your Vote For Hall of Fame 2011 Is Complete

From Dallas, Texas

Saturday morning the Board of Selectors for the Pro Football Hall of Fame will hold its annual meeting to elect the class of 2011.

Over the last two weeks, we’ve gone through the voting process for the Hall of Fame and allowed you guys a chance to vote on the same names that the board will consider.

Under the procedure, the readers of bobgretz.com think just two of the 15 finalists deserve induction. Those men are:

• RB Marshall Faulk.
• OT Willie Roaf.

Here’s a walk through the process. It started with 15 names, the modern-era finalists. On the first vote, slicing from 15 to 10, eliminated were:

RB Jerome Bettis, WR Tim Brown, C Dermontti Dawson, DE Chris Doleman and RB Curtis Martin.

Eliminated in the next round, on a vote from 10 to 5 were: DE Richard Dent, DE Charles Haley, DT Cortez Kennedy, WR Andre Reed and TE Shannon Sharpe.

That left a final five still alive for consideration of the voters: WR Cris Carter, RB Marshall Faulk, OT Willie Roaf, DB Deion Sanders and NFL Films pioneer Ed Sabol.

In this last round of voting it was simply a yes or no for each individual finalist. Those that received 80 percent yes votes among those cast are Hall of Famers. The voting must produce at least two inductees. If it does not, then the next highest percentage of yes votes will also become a Hall of Famer.

All this is exactly how the voting will take place on Saturday morning. What’s different is that we’ll provide the final vote totals and percentages on the fan vote, something the Hall of Fame does not do for the real election.

Overall, we had 60 qualifying ballots. Several had to be removed from the election because they did not have votes for all five of the candidates. Here’s how the voting broke down:

—-ELECTED—–

OT Willie Roaf        54    90%

RB Marshall Faulk    50    83%

—-DID NOT QUALIFY FOR ELECTION—-

NFL Films Ed Sabol    44    73.3%

WR Cris Carter        39    65%

DB Deion Sanders    33    55%

As a member of the Hall’s Board of Selectors, I was surprised by the support shown for Ed Sabol. Ultimately he did not make the cut, falling four yes votes short of 80 percent.

There are scenarios in the actual voting where he could make the Hall with 73 percent of the vote. If one of the senior candidates was rejected, they would have to add another modern era finalist to achieve the minimum four-man class.

Hopefully this gave everyone a taste of what happens and we’ll have much more Hall of Fame coverage over the next few days.