Posted by Mike Sando
One of the fun things about writing a story or column is not knowing where it's going to take you. I had no idea two or three days ago that I'd be lining up interviews with Randy Gradishar and a Harvard statistician as part of a story about the Broncos' inability to get players into the Hall of Fame. The story became a column during the writing process, given that the results of my research almost created a point of view.
At first I was going to look at a few Hall finalists and others who might have a shot at enshrinement in future years. During the course of research I looked at franchises that seemed to be underrepresented in the Hall. At that point I realized John Elway was the only Denver player enshrined.
This seemed odd given the Broncos' six Super Bowls and two league titles, so I created a spreadsheet showing the number of Hall members by franchise. I then added columns for total games played, total victories, total defeats, total ties, overall winning percentage, playoff appearances, AFL/NFL titles and, finally, number of people enshrined in the Hall.
Right away I noticed that other teams similar to the Broncos in these regards tended to have at least seven Hall of Famers.
I then ran a basic statistical function to see how the number of Hall members correlated to the other columns. This would give us an idea which criteria could be relevant in predicting Hall membership. Right away it was clear that total victories was highly correlated to Hall membership (correlation above 90 percent). Total victories tends to be a function of games played, which correlated to Hall membership at 80-plus percent.
There was also a roughly 85 percent correlation between championships and Hall membership. No surprise there. The correlation between playoff appearances and Hall membership was 70 percent.
The surprising thing to me, really, was that the Broncos averaged .003 Hall members per victory while seemingly similar franchises -- Minnesota and Kansas City have similar records -- had rates at least seven times as high. Some of the more storied franchises (Chicago, Green Bay, Cleveland and the Giants) averaged .03 and .04 Hall members for every victory.
There could be many reasons for this. For example, my basic computations did not take into account the distribution of the Broncos' victories, although off the top of our heads we know Denver has been pretty consistently competitive for the last 30-plus seasons. It's possible that the Broncos relied more heavily on teamwork than other teams, producing victories without producing a corresponding number of Hall-worthy players. We can't say for sure, but the research does give Denver fans a little ammo.
That was never the intent. Sometimes you look into things having no idea what the results will be. That was the case here. Taking a step back, Gradishar and Gary Zimmerman seem to be strong candidates for the Hall. Both have been finalists. Terrell Davis, Shannon Sharpe, Rod Smith, Champ Bailey and others could factor into things down the road.
