For the eighth time, former Pittsburgh Steelers WR Hines Ward was named a semifinalist for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Ward played with the team from 1998-2011 and has a solid resume for football’s ultimate honor. He made the Pro Bowl four times from 2001-2004, was a second team All-Pro three times from 2002-2004, and was named the Super Bowl MVP of Super Bowl XL after the Steelers’ win over the Seattle Seahawks. Ward has two Super Bowl rings, as he was also a part of the Steelers’ win over the Arizona Cardinals in Super Bowl XLIII. He is a member of the Steelers’ prestigious Hall of Honor. In total, he had 1,000 receptions for 12,083 yards and 85 touchdowns.
Former Steelers RB, and current Hall of Famer, Jerome Bettis appeared on the Dan Patrick Show on YouTube Thursday and the two of them got talking about current players and their likelihood to enter the Hall of Fame. Bettis used the opportunity to discuss his former teammate for the honor.
“You see the receivers, the goal line has been moved,” Bettis said. “And I say that because I’ve got a guy whose, his goal line has been moved in Hines Ward. He played in an era where we ran the football, right? But he was one of the best in that era. He did it all. And then at the end of his era the goal post moved because now you got all these guys catching 115, 120 balls a year. Well, he was in an era where when you caught 85 balls a year, that puts you at the top of the league.”
It’s not like Ward never put up those kind of numbers. In 2002, with Tommy Maddox as his quarterback, Ward was second in the league that year behind only Marvin Harrison with 112 receptions. That put him ahead of the likes of Randy Moss, Terrell Owens, and even Jerry Rice at the tail end of his career.
“So now his numbers are skewed,” Bettis continued. “He kinda was in both of those eras…It’s gonna be a different era in terms of numbers. So you’re gonna look at it a different way, and you’re gonna look at those numbers a different way.”
His impact was felt beyond the stat sheet. As Bettis alluded to, Ward was a part of the great rushing offenses of the Steelers’ early 2000s teams. He helped pave the way for guys like Bettis and Willie Parker. Quarterbacks weren’t throwing the ball 35-plus times per game back then. The NFL had to change a rule to disallow crackback blocks because of the punishing hits that Ward was laying on opposing defensive backs on a regular basis.
Pro Football Reference has given him a 75.17 Hall of Fame monitor score, which aggregates all stats and career achievements into one weighted number. There are 32 wide receivers ahead of him on the list, but 21 of them have already been inducted. There are also a handful under him on the list who have already made the cut even though the “average HOF wide receiver” has a score of 104 from PFR. With the next era of wide receivers shooting up the list with gaudy stats from this new passing era of football, it will only get harder for Ward in the future. It will take current Hall of Famers, like Bettis, to help campaign and get him in.
