Congrats to the 2017 Hall of Fame Class that will be inducted tonight. We spend a lot of time debating and talking about someone’s Hall of Fame worthiness, but today is a day to celebrate and honor some of the game’s best players. We have an 7-person class (Commissioner Paul Tagliabue) being enshrined tonight:

• Kenny Easley (Tommy Rhodes, high school coach)
• Jason Taylor (Jimmy Johnson, HC with Dolphins)
• Morten Andersen (Sebastian Andersen, son)
• Terrell Davis (Neil Schwartz, agent & friend)
• LaDainian Tomlinson (FB Lorenzo Neal, teammate with Chargers)
• Jerry Jones (Gene Jones, wife)
• Kurt Warner (Brenda Warner, wife)

It is a pretty remarkable class of players (and congrats to Jones, too, though I am not going to get into his accolades here).  Consider:

• Andersen played in 382 games in his NFL career, the most in NFL history.  He played for 25 years, second only to George Blanda (26 years). How long did his career span?  As a rookie, Andersen played with Archie Manning.  In his last season, Archie’s youngest son — who was one year old when Andersen entered the league — won the Super Bowl.

• Davis rushed for 142.5 yards and 1.5 touchdowns per game in the playoffs for his career, easily the best marks of any running back in NFL history.  If Davis isn’t the best playoff running back in history, it’s because of Emmitt Smith or Franco Harris beating him on longevity, but the three of them and John Riggins are on the Mount Rushmore of Playoff Rushers.

• Tomlinson is third in career touchdowns (behind Jerry Rice and Emmittt Smith) and fifth in career yards (behind Rice, Smith, Walter Payton, and Marshall Faulk). For six straight years, he ranked in the top 3 in fantasy points among running backs; in eight straight years he ranked in the top 7.  By this measure, he’s the greatest fantasy running back of all-time, both in terms of career and single-season performance.

• Taylor didn’t have the typical profile of a first-ballot HOFer, but he was  dominant for a very long time.  Johnson is inducting him, but I always think of Taylor (and Zach Thomas, Sam Madison, and Patrick Surtain) on those Dave Wannstedt Dolphins teams.  Wannstedt was hardly a great coach, but from 2000 to 2003, Miami had the 5th best winning percentage in the NFL. Miami had Jay Fiedler at QB for 52 games, and Ray Lucas (6), Brian Griese (5), and Damon Huard (1) for the other 12 starts.  The Dolphins passing attack ranked 19th in ANY/A and passer rating over that period, but the defense made Miami a constant playoff contender.  Taylor ranks 7th in sacks since 1982, and no player forced more fumbles in the decade of the ’00s.

• Easley is one of just five safeties to win the AP Defensive Player of the Year award (Dick Anderson in ’73, Ed Reed in ’00, Bob Sanders in ’07, and Troy Polamalu in ’10) and one of just eight safeties since the merger to be named a first-team All-Pro by the Associated Press (joining LeRoy Butler, Nolan Cromwell, Cliff Harris, Ronnie Lott, Reed, Darren Woodson, and another Seahawk in Earl Thomas).  It’s fitting that Easley gets in the same year as Davis: both players had remarkably dominant peaks, but their prime years were cut short due to injury.

• Warner’s story is so well known that it’s easy to be numb to how remarkable it really was. He ranks 15th in career passer rating after adjusting for era despite being undrafted! Take a look at the 125 quarterbacks to throw at least 2,500 passes. On the X-Axis, I have plotted their career rank in era adjusted passer rating; on the Y-Axis, their draft status. Warner is the first dot on the 350 line (that’s where I put undrafted players).
  
  

  Right next to Warner is Tony Romo; Jeff Garcia is the one at 36, and Dave Krieg is at 51. Warren Moon is at 63, although career passer rating is not a great way to measure Mooon since he played forever dragging his rating down, and he’s not an undrafted player by merit, anyway.

  And that’s it. Warner and Romo were about as popular and mainstream as it got during their playing days, making it sometimes easy to forget that they were overlooked for a very long time. Warner’s journey from bagging groceries in 1994 to the Arena League from ’95 to ’97 to backing up Tony Banks in 1998 to Super Bowl Champion in 1999 and Hall of Famer in 2017 is truly remarkable.