Jon Wilner explains the CFB Hall of Fame’s bad inclusion guidelines

Everyone can agree that Junior Seau, one of USC’s greatest football players ever, should be in the College Football Hall of Fame.

It should be a slam dunk. It should not be a debate on the raw merits.

Yet, Seau isn’t in the Hall. He’s not on the 2023 ballot. He won’t be on the ballot anytime soon.

What needs to change? The rules for inclusion.

Jon Wilner of the Wilner Hotline explains:

But the most important criteria is performance. To be eligible, a player “first and foremost” must have “received First-Team All-America recognition by a selector that is recognized by the NCAA and utilized to comprise its consensus All-America teams.”

At the end of the 1989 season, Seau was named to a slew of All-America teams, but only The Sporting News gave him first-team honors.

And in 1989, the NCAA didn’t recognize The Sporting News as an official selector. It does now, but it didn’t back then.

As a result, Seau, who died in 2012, will never be eligible for the College Football Hall of Fame as long as the current selection process remains in place.

Our intent here isn’t to bash the Hall of Fame or its partner, the National Football Foundation, whose membership makes up the Hall’s electorate.

With so many schools and so many deserving players, the nomination process must have guardrails.

But perhaps the Hall should create a pathway for special exemptions — for players who weren’t named first-team All-American by one of the recognized selectors. After all, the NCAA’s list has changed over the years.