JuggernautJ wrote:I believe both Lynch and Easley will be elected.
Not as much for whether they are deserving (IMO one definitely and one not-so-much) but because their respective teams have little representation in The Hall.
When I visited in 2000 Leroy Selmon's jersey looked awful lonely by itself in a corner.
Lee Roy, not Leroy.
And it's hard to justify a lot of Buc representation in the Hall when they've had exactly 13 winning seasons out of 41 and have been, for much of their existence, the worst franchise in professional sports.
But soon (I predict) Tampa Bay will have five names in Canton (Lynch, Selmon, Sapp, Brooks and Dungy) and that will be enough to draw folks up from Florida. Which is, after all, what its really all about.
I grew up in Florida. Half of Ohio spends half the year there already.
I doubt very seriously the HOF selectors take museum attendance into account. The induction ceremony itself, sure, the Hall probably wishes for players with a Favre-like following to get inducted, but they'll get people to come for that one weekend, not on some random March afternoon.
The Hall gets about 200,000 visitors a year, supposedly, and generates about $20M in annual revenue. (The Baseball Hall in Cooperstown received what was described as a low-for-them 260,000 visitors in 2013, its lowest since the 1980s, because the annual induction ceremony didn't include any modern players.) The Hockey Hall supposedly gets about 300,000 a year (supposedly down from a half million a year in the 90s), but's also in the biggest city in a hockey-crazy country and not a small town in the middle of nowhere.
Museums are, as an industry, a very tough business. Museums about the most popular sports in the country have a bit of an advantage. The mythology of the NFL certainly helps. But attendance is an issue for those who run such museums, not those who vote for who gets enshrined in them.
