Chargers wrote:
I understand the reasoning, but am also disturbed by it.
* Changing the rules after the fact isn't right.
Actually we knew that there would be less nominations this year (what with there being a smaller community) and were planning on doing SOMETHING about that, just hadn't decided what until recently. Every year we wait until after the nominations are all in to decide certain things, like the number of votes needed to actually be inducted. Note that in my original post in this thread there is no mention about the number of nominations required to go to the next stage; that was very much intentional. We have traditionally allowed the top 15 to go forward, but by no means are bound by that.
Due to there being less nominees this year, that would have A) cut some people out of the top 15 unfairly, because there would be people not in the top 15 who tied in number of nominations with people who did make the cut and B) made it so some people with very few nominations moved forward, which is something we specifically don't want (getting into the Hall of Fame should be inherently difficult). The fact is, there was absolutely no way to fairly do a 15 person cut, as #16 was tied with #15, so which of those two gets in? We could have allowed more than 15 in, but that goes directly against the idea of the Hall of Fame being difficult to be inducted into. So we decided to go less than 15, and 8 was a good number based on how the nominations fell.
So we had very good reason to reduce the number from 15 to 8, and since there weren't any rules set beforehand about how many nominations it would take to get in we aren't changing the rules after the fact. We're making a decision after getting all the facts.
Quote:
* On SHNN, it was mentioned about a year ago that a prior year nominee who barely made the cut so wowed the judges with his response that he was voted in. That's a cool story.
I agree that's a cool story, but as I wasn't in the HoF for voting last year I can't really speak on it. That could still happen, though, it's just that "barely made the cut" changed from having the 15th most nominations to having the 8th most.