Is Frank Gore the First Voting Hall of Fame player? – Blog of the San Francisco 49ers

Run back Frank Gore Signed one day contract with San Francisco 49ersended his NFL career when it started as a third-round pick (65th overall) in 2005.

Gore last played on December 27, 2020, when he hit 48 yards on 14 executions New York Jets’23-16 wins first Cleveland Browns. Those 48 javelins gave Gore exactly 16,000 javelins during a 16-year career playing with five different teams.

That puts Gore in 3rd place all-time in rush speed. Fast-moving pieces of his potential Hall of Fame resume include his selection as one of four return runners to the All-Decade team of the 2010s and five Pro Bowls.

Whenever a player on the Gore production calls it a career, the phrase “Canton next stop” is thrown. And as one of the Pro Football Hall of Fame voters, I believe Gore will be honored.

The real question is: Is Gore the First Voter’s Hall of Fame? The short answer is that it depends on who else among the 15 finalists. If widespread recipient Larry Fitzgerald doesn’t try to return, he and Gore will qualify for the first time in the Class of 2026’s Hall of Fame. Gore’s clockwork starts with his last season playing, not announced his retirement.

So let’s start with the big-ticket items. The top 16 all-time top drivers in NFL history qualifying for the Hall of Fame are all already in the Hall of Fame. Later, numbers 19 (John Riggins), 21 (OJ Simpson) and 34 (Joe Perry) were also kept.

The only back runners out of the top 16 who weren’t covered were Gore and Adrian Peterson, who is still a freelance agent. For his part, Peterson was one of four uniformly selected offense players on the 2010 Decade (brave cat, Joe Thomas and Marshal Yanda are others).

If Peterson doesn’t play any more games, he’ll be eligible for the Hall of Fame starting in 2027.

If Gore doesn’t show up as an eligible player the first time around and he and Peterson appear on the Hall of Fame ballot at the same time, there’s always a prospect – and a common one at that – they will split the vote. This has happened many times over the years in a variety of positions, especially at the wide end – tackles from Tim Brown, Andre Reed, Terrell Owens being among the most recent examples.

All three were saved in the end, but Reed was a finalist eight times, Brown a finalist six times, and Owens a finalist three times.

The last time two runner-ups were inducted into the same Walk of Fame class was 2017 when LaDainian Tomlinson, in his first year of qualifying, and Terrell Davis (three finalists) were selected. It hasn’t happened since 1994 before that class.

Overall, the all-time rush leader list is likely to be a much better yardstick for a Hall of Fame consideration than the all-time pass-through list, which seems to change month-to-month. Season. These days, the league isn’t the type to go back to, and no one is threatening to break the 12,000-yard barrier any time soon.

Tomlinson is the only returning runner, aside from Gore and Peterson, of the league’s 12 fastest runners of all time, who have even played in a game after 2005. And only four of them. The 16 fastest runners of all time have played a game since the 2009 season began.

Discussions about the Hall of Fame are always emotional because the math is so simple. Every team in the league has a minimum of four unprotected players, who each of those teams considers to be a useless, mindless player who is a player that is not his.

That’s 32 teams multiplied by four – 128 players – with, counting them, a maximum of five modern-day slots for Hall rank per year. If no new players are even added to the ballot each year it would take 25.6 years to process even that pool.

Much of the anger in the social media world about Hall, aside from those who waited, or even failed to shortlist the finalists, was the whole of the first voting.

Look, the gold jacket for John Elway is the same as the gold for Floyd Little, who waited nearly four decades after he played his last game to be stored. They do not use different bronzes for their chosen Hall of Fame bust during their first year of eligibility.

Some of the players sifted through the decades that weren’t picked in the first year of eligibility include Willie Davis, Joe Namath, Willie Lanier, Alan Page, John Mackey and Ozzie Newsome.

Gore’s case for the Hall is consistently top production. He’s somewhat of a medical experience, having racked up two ACL nets in college before becoming one of the league’s most enduring players in nearly two decades. When the debates get heated at some point in the course of many years from now, some will say that Gore finished among the top five of the tournament in just one. his season and never had the luck of playing with a Super Bowl winner.

But all of that is in the next 5 years from now. After 241 regular-season games played, nine 1,000-yard seasons, 11 900-yard seasons, today is a game for Gore to celebrate. It was a rare career for a player who rarely had to say goodbye where it all began.