Hall of Fame debates are usually fun — peak vs. longevity, era arguments, all that.

Bill Belichick was never supposed to be one of them.

And yet, ESPN’s Seth Wickersham and Don Van Natta Jr. reported Tuesday (Jan. 27, 2026) that Belichick failed to get in during his first year of eligibility, falling short of the 40-of-50 votes (80%) required from the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s selection committee. Per sources, he had the same reaction that all of us did:

“What does a guy have to do?”

That’s the exact question the football world started asking right back — loudly — because this isn’t a “borderline guy got squeezed in a loaded class” situation. This is the coach with six Lombardi Trophies as the head man not being treated like an automatic.

So how does something this unthinkable happen? The answer is a mix of a new voting system that basically dares voters to get cute, plus the same ugly truth that follows every secret ballot: when nobody has to own their vote, some people will use it to make a point.

The Resume Should've Ended the Conversation Before It Started

Belichick’s football case isn’t some nuanced debate that needs you to frame it the right way. It’s about as straightforward as Hall of Fame arguments get.

Six Super Bowls as a head coach — more than anyone. Two more rings as the Giants’ defensive coordinator. Nine conference championship trophies. Sixteen Conference Championship Game appearance. Seventeen division titles. Thirty-one playoff wins, the most ever by a head coach. Three hundred and thirty-three total wins including the postseason, second only to Don Shula.

That’s not a resume that needs defending. That’s a resume that usually ends the conversation before it starts.

If you watched those teams closely, the real separator was how consistently they won the margins. Clock management. Field position. Situational football. Third-and-short calls that felt obvious only after they worked. Fourth-down decisions that made the other sideline feel like it was always one step behind. “Take away what you do best” became a cliché because New England executed it so cleanly for so long that people stopped appreciating how difficult it actually is.

This is all before even considering his resume as a general manager — which, while not flawless, is nearly as impressive as his coaching one when you zoom out.

No, Belichick isn’t universally revered as the greatest drafting GM of all time, and plenty of fans can rattle off misses if you give them a minute. But the idea that he was some liability in that role doesn’t hold up either. Through the dynasty years, New England consistently found core pieces that defined eras of those teams: Tom Brady in the sixth round, obviously, but also players like Richard Seymour, Vince Wilfork, Ty Law, Logan Mankins, Devin McCourty, Rob Gronkowski, Julian Edelman, Dont’a Hightower, and Matthew Slater.

Some were stars, some were tone-setters, some were culture guys — all were critical. It was never about batting a thousand; it was about repeatedly building rosters that fit his vision and adapted as the league changed.

When you stack that body of work next to his coaching legacy, it doesn’t feel possible for voters to leave him out. 

The New Process Built a Trap Door

If you’re a voter who takes the seniors pool seriously — and there’s a very real argument that many of them don't — you can talk yourself into some tough choices pretty quickly. Ken Anderson won an MVP and has been waiting for decades. Roger Craig changed how we think about running backs with that 1,000/1,000 season. L.C. Greenwood was a core piece of the Steel Curtain, one of the defining defenses in NFL history.

Then there’s Robert Kraft, who’s been campaigning for years and whose case is more about stewardship than stats: he bought the Patriots, kept them in New England, built the stadium, and oversaw the most successful run any modern franchise has ever had.

Now shrink all of that down to three votes.

That’s the danger of a process that encourages gamesmanship. And when those decisions are made behind closed doors, nobody has to explain whether their vote was about strategy… or something else entirely.

The “Gates” Played a Role

According to ESPN, Spygate and Deflategate came up during the committee’s meeting, which ran pretty much all day. Belichick was fined $500,000 and the Patriots lost a first-round pick for Spygate back in 2007, and Deflategate brought its own wave of penalties years later, including Tom Brady’s four-game suspension.

One veteran voter told ESPN the cheating stuff “really bothered some of the guys.” Another voter, speaking anonymously, claimed Hall voter Bill Polian suggested Belichick should “wait a year” as a punishment for Spygate — something Polian has since denied, saying he was “95% sure” he voted for Belichick.

However you want to frame it, the scandals weren’t ignored.

And this is where a lot of fans draw a pretty clear line. If someone’s stance is, “I can’t vote for him at all because the scandals disqualify him,” that’s at least a consistent position. You can agree or disagree with it, but it’s a real line in the sand.

What doesn’t sit right is the idea of making him wait a year as some sort of unofficial punishment. That’s not a principle — that’s a sentence. It turns the Hall into a courtroom, where voters hand out penalties while still admitting the guy obviously belongs.

The Kraft-Belichick Politics

Since their split in January 2024, the two have been painted as rivals, and their breakup turned into a public tug-of-war over credit — who built the dynasty, who pushed the wrong buttons at the end, and who really deserves the praise for two decades of dominance.

Put both names on the same ballot, limit voters to three slots, and you almost guarantee that some people are going to start picking sides instead of straightforward football decisions.

Maybe some voters didn’t want to induct an owner and a coach from the same franchise in the same class. Maybe some felt Kraft had been waiting long enough and deserved his moment on his own. Maybe others just didn’t want the Patriots taking over the weekend yet again.

Or maybe, for a few voters, this was their first chance to get back at a guy they never liked.

The Reaction Was Unanimous

It's very rare to see the sports community all agree on something. There's a reason sports debate is so popular; arguing is a part of sports as a whole. But no one was arguing about this one. 

Patrick Mahomes summed it up with a post on X:

Tom Brady was far more direct. He called the decision “completely ridiculous,” saying:

"I don't understand it... If he's not a first-ballot Hall of Famer, there's really no coach that should ever be a first-ballot Hall of Famer, which is completely ridiculous because people deserve it. He's incredible. There's no coach I'd rather play for. If I'm picking one coach to go out there to win a Super Bowl, give me one season, I'm taking Bill Belichick."

Coming from the quarterback who spent two decades executing Belichick’s vision, it didn’t feel like loyalty. It felt like clarity.

J.J. Watt echoed that same disbelief, saying there isn’t “a single world whatsoever” where Belichick shouldn’t be first ballot. And this wasn’t just an NFL echo chamber. LeBron James weighed in from outside the sport:

Then came Jimmy Johnson, who didn’t just react — he detonated.

Johnson went after the process publicly on social media, demanding the names of the voters who left Belichick off and calling the anonymity “cowardly.” He wasn’t done there. He went on The Pat McAfee Show and doubled down, unloading on the secrecy of the vote, the idea of hidden agendas, and the absurdity of needing debate at all.

And that’s when the dam really broke.

Hall voters themselves started speaking up, which almost never happens. USA Today’s Jarrett Bell said he voted for Belichick and was “stunned” and “embarrassed,” pointing out the uncomfortable truth that at least 11 voters had to left him off. Gary Myers echoed that sentiment, saying he voted for Belichick and was embarrassed that the greatest coach in NFL history didn’t go in immediately.

When voters are publicly distancing themselves from the result, that’s not a normal disagreement. That’s a process problem.

What This Does to the Hall’s Credibility

Belichick is getting in. Everyone knows that. Even the people who voted against him know that. This isn’t about whether he belongs — it’s about what the Hall is supposed to stand for.

That’s why the “first-ballot” part matters. It’s not some vanity label. It’s the Hall saying, we don’t need to argue about this. When someone is that obvious, the process is supposed to be clean and decisive. When it isn’t, it forces an uncomfortable conversation.

What are we actually rewarding here? And how much power should anonymous voters have to quietly turn the Hall of Fame into a place where personal standards, grudges, or side arguments can outweigh reality?

Jimmy Johnson didn’t dance around that question. On The Pat McAfee Show, he went straight at the bigger picture, and he didn’t soften a word:

"I think this tarnishes everything in the Hall of Fame. All of the inductees, everybody in the Hall of Fame. Just because of 10–12 ignorant, jealous, a**holes who didn't vote for [Belichick]."

Johnson went on to say that because of this, he won’t even attend this year’s ceremony — something he had planned to do. That’s not a small statement from a Hall of Fame coach.

It's also worth noting that Belichick was widely known as one of the Hall of Fame's biggest supporters and was a true historian of the game, just making the whole situation that much more baffling.

How You Fix This Before It Becomes an Annual Circus

This doesn’t need a scorched-earth reset. It just needs the process to stop creating problems it then pretends not to see.

Start with the basics. There shouldn’t be artificial limits or forced resume competitions. Once someone is eligible, they’re in the pool — period. Every player, coach, and contributor should simply get an up-or-down vote. If they hit the 80 percent threshold, they’re in. If they don’t, they’re not. No jockeying for slots. No squeezing people out because the math says only so many can fit.

If a voter doesn’t believe someone deserves to be first ballot, that’s fine — don’t vote for them that year. But turning the process into a comparison game, where one resume gets picked apart because of who else happens to be on the ballot, misses the entire point of what the Hall is supposed to represent.

Then add transparency. If publishing individual ballots is too much, publish vote totals. Give fans something concrete so the conversation isn’t built on leaks, whispers, and back-channel explanations.

And lastly, if scandals are going to matter, define how they matter. “Depends on how the room feels” isn’t a standard — it’s a mood. And moods shouldn’t determine whether the most successful coach of all time gets into the Hall of Fame as soon as he's able to. 

The Bottom Line

Belichick doesn’t need the label. His legacy is already welded into the sport. Coaches still steal from his playbook. Defensive coordinators still talk about his game plans like they’re studying film from a different species. He’s going in, whether the committee likes it or not.

But the Hall needed to get this one right.

Because when the system can’t handle the easiest call in the room without tripping over politics, secrecy, and side quests, it doesn’t make Belichick look smaller.

It makes the Hall look smaller.

And it leaves one simple question hanging over the entire process until someone fixes it:

If Bill Belichick isn’t a first-ballot Hall of Famer… who is?