The Pro Football Hall of Fame appears to have solved its Bill Belichick problem

It’s just about impossible to have a discussion about Bill Belichick that doesn’t include lots of bloodcurdling back-and-forth about grudges, girlfriends and the latest news about the University of North Carolina football program.But let’s give it a try. Let’s talk about the Pro Football Hall of Fame, which somehow managed to have an induction ceremony this summer that did not include Belichick. Yes, Belichick was on the ballot last winter, and one would have thought his election would be a simple matter of filling out the necessary paperwork and arranging for the hotel rooms. You shouldn’t have to sit by the phone, waiting for the Canton call, when you’re the proud owner of the second-most overall head-coaching victories in NFL history and the only head coach to win six Super Bowls.And yet Belichick was denied the honor of being a first-year inductee. By one vote. Part of the reason is that Belichick’s otherwise brilliant coaching resume has a rap sheet attached to it, with the New England Patriots’ 2007 “Spygate” shenanigans right there at the top. And there’s this: Belichick has a reputation for, shall we say, not being nice to people. That includes sportswriters. It’s not unreasonable to wonder if there was some score-settling at play on the day the votes were cast.But the biggest problem, it turns out, is that it was a flawed voting system. And as The Athletic’s Mike Sando points out with his breaking story Friday morning, the Pro Football Hall of Fame has rolled out a long list of changes that, according to Sando, have been in the works for two-and-a-half years.Reading Sando’s piece brings to mind a line from “The Godfather: Part III,” wherein the crooked Archbishop Gilday says, “We have rules. We have very old rules.” Same with the Pro Football Hall of Fame, which had been clinging to a playbook with pages dating back decades.And yet, it was a new rule enacted in 2024 that hurt Belichick’s chances the most. “Those changes included forcing three senior candidates, one coach and one contributor to compete for between one and three spots a year,” Sando writes. What this did was plant a seed among voters to consider senior candidates who’d been waiting years and years for induction, candidates who might otherwise permanently wind up outside the gates to Canton if they didn’t get the call for 2026. And so it was that the great San Francisco 49ers running back Roger Craig, who closed out his career in 1993 with the Minnesota Vikings, got elected. Belichick, who coached his last NFL game with the 2023 Patriots, was not elected.My favorite takeaway from these latest changes includes an observation from the news release, attributed to Pro Football Hall of Fame President & CEO Jim Porter, that the “previous selection process bylaws left open the possibility of ‘unintended biases’ in three main areas: the disparate skills of the individuals making the initial presentations of nominees for election at the annual meeting; the assignment of a Selector to each of the NFL’s 32 member clubs; and issues related to players reaching their final years of eligibility in the Modern-Era Players category.”It’s the “disparate skills of the individuals making the initial presentations of nominees” that jumps out at me, as it conjures visions of a wobbly media person who flunked debate class in high school now being entrusted to stand up like Winston Churchill and make the case for this or that would-be Hall of Famer.It’s just that in Belichick’s case, no speech-making should have been necessary. And it makes no difference how much Belichick’s omission was the process and how much of it was the animus. The fact is that it was a bad look for the Hall, even if, sure, it made for a happy day for Belichick haters, an international organization with more members than AARP. The group includes Jets fans, Colts fans, Chargers fans, Browns fans … and on on. It includes those sportswriters who may have felt slighted over the years by Belichick’s barely disguised disdain.Is Belichick's snub a good thing? And then there are the talk show hosts, who fall into the love-to-hate category. When Belichick was left waiting this past January, it was “Christmas: The sequel” on the radio.Mike Felger, afternoon drive host on Boston’s “98.5 The Sports Hub,” put it this way: “Bill Belichick was denied entrance into the Hall of Fame because of what? Personal bias … petty jealousies … vendettas … cronyism … axes to grind. I think that’s largely true. Bill would never operate like that, would he?”As talk-radio takes go, that one was solid gold. The station liked it so much that it’s been using it in a show promo since the day Felger spoke the words. It works so well because of the obvious part that was unspoken: Of course Bill Belichick should have been a first-ballot Hall of Fame inductee. Felger’s point, shared by many, is that it was hard to feel sorry for Belichick.But for those who still believe in the quaint notion that justice is blind, Belichick should already have spilled lobster butter on his gold Pro Football Hall of Fame jacket by now.Nobody ever seriously believed Belichick was going to morph into a headphones-wearing, sideline-waking Susan Lucci, the soap opera megastar who waited 19 years before finally winning a Daytime Emmy. He was going to get in. It’s just that he should have been inducted with the Class of 2026.It would have been right, if not righteous.Now try to imagine the pleased look on Belichick’s face if he’s sitting on the Canton stage next summer while Patriots owner Robert Kraft, his former boss and now adversary, is still on the outside. Talk about a soap opera …