Seems to me there are two questions here: why isn’t Ray Guy in the HoF, and why aren’t any other punters in the HoF either?
Question 1 probably deserves its own thread. As to the second question: because kicking specialists aren’t considered football players by other players. They don’t block, pass, catch or tackle (much).
Plus, there are hardly any dominant ones. AFAIK, no punter has led the league in punting average or net average in consecutive seasons during the last 20 years. It’s almost impossible to be consistently awesome at punting because of the punitive nature of punt rules.
If you come up short of the goal line, it only counts however many yards you missed by against you. If you overshoot, it costs you 20 yards automatically. The whole pointy ball thing makes it worse, since a punt that bounces at the 5 is “perfect” if it bounces straight up or sideways, but mediocre at best if it bounces forward.
It is an extremely political process, but I disagree with your description of how the process works behind closed doors. Several of the guys who are in the room have written about the process at length (eg, Peter King, Mike Wilbon, and Paul Zimmerman.) Also, the rules don’t require six players every year. It’s between 4 and 7.
I “moved the goalposts”? I don’t see how. I mentioned BOTH net average AND inside-the-20 kicks in my initial post. I merely point out that, no matter HOW you choose to rate punters, Ray Guy is NOT at the top.
He’s not the all-time leader in average punt yards. Not by a long shot.
He’s not the leader in net average. Not by a long shot.
And he’s not the leader in punts inside the 20.
So, pick your favorite punting stat. I don’t care which. No matter which stat you choose, there will be several punter more deserving of the Hall of Fame than Ray Guy.
I don’t take any joy in saying this, because I was a Raiders fan for most of my youth (Daryle Lamonica was my idol). But, while Ray Guy was an excellent kicker, he was no better than LOTS of punters that nobody views as Hall of Famers. In fact, speaking as someone who saw the Raiders and Chiefs play a lot, I’m not even sure Guy was much better than his old rival Jerrell Wilson.
But… and this WILL be my last post on this subject… I will concede the following:
Most fans and observers disagree with me, and Ray Guy WAS widely perceived as the best punter in football, in his day.
IF pro football’s Hall of Fame followed the same procedures as baseball’s, I’m pretty sure Ray Guy would have been elected to the Hall of Fame a long time ago.
FWIW (not much…), Guy was a safety in college, and I remember on several occasions him drilling a returner with a real tackle, not a hapless wave and fall down to the turf like most kickers. His hang time had something to do with 0 returns for TDs, but not all of it…
None of those points are relevant by themselves, because Guy played prior to widespread ball tampering by kickers and punters (though also prior to the K-ball era); played most of his career under the “only gunners can run down punts” rule- which sharply reduced net averages; and as noted above, punting inside the 20 includes a heavy element of random chance.
You compare him to his contemporaries. By the facts, Guy was not all that much better than the best of his era. Half the years he was in the league, his peers picked someone else for the pro bowl.
I submit that the position is so specialized, a player must be truly dominant or revolutionary to make it in> I don’t love that Stenerud pick, but in the memories of a lot of people he was the first great soccer kicker.
I think Gary Anderson should (but won’t) and Morten shouldn’t (but will)
Gary I think will always be associated with that missed field goal in Minnesota in the NFC championship game. His first miss of the year.
Morten has longevity on his side, but he never won a championship (I don’t think, anyway)… and at the end of his career, he had distance restrictions on his kicks (around 40 yards, if I remember correctly)
Adam Vinateri will probably make it because of his numerous clutch kicks.
Back to punters, Ray Guy was the first punter I can remember knowing outside of Bobby Walden (an old Pittsburgh kicker), so he had to be pretty damn good. I remember Chuck Noll saved a couple of balls from a game in Oakland to see if the balls were filled with helium. But from the stats listed above, I have to agree that he might not be the first choice. Maybe Ray Guy was so well known was because he played on a very good team (Raiders) who appeared on a ton of national TV broadcasts when the NFL wasn’t as popular as it is today. I think the Raiders had the record for MNF appearances in the 70’s for example, and they would always be the game of the week opposite the Steelers since they were on the west coast. So he got a lot of exposure.
I think it’s worth mentioning that statistics are not all that useful when evaluating punters. There are just too many variables and great punts often aren’t remarkable in any way on the stat sheet. This coupled with the fact that punts, even for punters with very long careers, are too relatively rare to make the sample sizes truly indicative.
Punts outside of the 20 can be great punts. Long punts can be great punts. Short punts can be great punts. Punts at the 19 yard line can be very disappointing punts.
It’d be interesting to see if someone could come up with some composite statistic that covers more of the nuance. Some type of punting efficiency stat. Perhaps grading each individual punt with some formula of relative success of each kick based on field position shift, proximity to the goal lines, return yards, hang time etc. That might help highlight a very good punt that happens in the shadow of their own goal posts that might only be 40 yards on the stat sheet. Of a very good punt that gets downed on the 2 yard line for a total distance of only 30 yards compared to a 40 yarder downed on the 18.
So a thousand or more data points aren’t enough? I’ll remind you of this if anyone ever asks who last years’ best QB was.
I’ll freely acknowledge that the stats are very limited, but when you’re looking at a whole career, I think you can make some judgements. There are plenty of guys that Ray Guy was clearly better than. I sumbit that if Guy (or anyone else) was “truly dominant or revolutionary” – in a Getzky, Ruth, Chamberlain way – we’d have evidence of that.
And if he was not that dominant, I submit that a punter’s role is too limited to enshrine him. It’s like putting Lenny Harris in the Hall of Fame because he’s arguably the best pinch-hitter of all time.
I’d rather have a great offensive or defensive coordinator than a great punter. And I doubt that Dick LeBeau is getting in.
Over 14 years? Not really. And as the number goes up the key statistics are liable to seek out the middle, especially net average. As a punter goes along his number of long punts and his number of pooch punts and coffin corner punts will cancel each other out, meaning that every punter will find the middle of the pack. A guy with a long net average isn’t really the guy with the biggest leg, he’s the guy who was asked to punt from his own 45 yard line the least. The exact opposite is true for the Inside the 20 stats.
If Dick LeBeau had been JUST a great defensive coordinator, you’d probably be right to doubt it.
But he was ALSO one of the best defensive backs of all time (every defensive back with MORE interceptions than LeBeau is already in the Hall of Fame). And Peter King, now the most influentialmember of the Hall of Fame committee, is on record now as supporting LeBeau.
So, I think LeBeau’s chances are (ultimately) pretty good- depending who the other guys up for consideration are. and who THEIR champions on the committee are.
DVOA, of course – each punt (each play, actually) is measured against league average performance in similar circumstances, not in a vacuum. Punt and kickoff values are also adjusted for weather and altitude. (Did you notice that that 90-yard punt linked up-thread occurred in Denver? That’s wasn’t a coincidence.)
Of course, DVOA only goes back to 1995 at this point, so it isn’t going to shed any light on Ray Guy for quite some time. They’ve got to manually enter play-by-play data from hard copies at Canton, which are not crisp enough to scan into a computer. They’re trying to add one old season per year, so at that rate they’d have numbers for Ray Guy’s whole career by around 2031.
