It seems like just yesterday I was having a debate with my friends over who the greatest football players of all time were. We judged every player who had set foot on a field, talked about the accomplishments of the NFL Hall of Fame and the same conversation kept coming up: how many people are in the NFL Hall of Fame?
My own opinions were hotly contested; especially when I said that I believed there were more than two-hundred Hall of Famers. I was surprised myself by the number; I figured that the Hall of Fame was reserved for the very elite few – a fact I was right about. It turns out that at the time of writing, there are exactly 327 people enshrined in the NFL Hall of Fame.
I was a bit taken aback when I found out the number and I couldn’t help but think about how many people had earned the title of NFL Hall of Famer over the years. It’s no small accomplishment to be inducted to the Hall and these people certainly deserved that recognition, so I took a deeper look at how many Hall of Famers there were from each era.
The first thing I noticed was that the number of Hall of Famers from the pre-Super Bowl era was much lower than some of the other eras. Of the 327, only 22 were nominated before the first Super Bowl was played. That is a relatively small number compared to others further down the list like the post-merger era with 108 inductees.
The second era I looked at was the modern era, from 2000-2010. The modern era had 66 Hall of Famers which made it the third most represented era behind post-merger and pre-Super Bowl. The modern era also saw some of the most high-profile Hall of Fame inductees, including the all-time passing yardage and touchdown leader in quarterback Peyton Manning.
The third era I looked at was the expansion era, from 2002-current. This era has seen 73 Hall of Famers inducted, making it the second most represented era in the Hall of Fame. It was also in this era that we saw the emergence of some of the best players to ever play the game such as Tom Brady and Drew Brees.
The fourth era I looked at was the post-merger era, from 1966-1999. This era had the most Hall of Famers of any era with 108. This era saw the emergence of some of the legendary players such as Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, and Barry Sanders.
Finally, I looked at the players who were elected to the Hall of Fame in the last five years. There have been 14 inductees into the Hall of Fame from 2015-2020, including some of the more recent luminaries such as Tony Gonzalez and Terrell Owens.
That is a lot of Hall of Famers! I’m sure that if I started diving deeper into the individual Hall of Famers I would find plenty of fascinating stories to tell, but that’s for another day. All in all, the NFL Hall of Fame is a remarkable collection of some of the greatest players of all time and it’s an honor for them to be immortalized.