Playmaker, pioneer, pariah: Should Michael Vick be in the Hall of Fame?
Michael Vick’s career is one of the most fascinating, discomforting episodes in NFL history.
Playmaker. Pioneer. Pariah. Famous then infamous. He is one of the most electric players to step foot on a field, and also one of the most controversial. An otherworldly talent who helped redefine what the quarterback position could be and helped pave the way for the likes of reigning MVP Lamar Jackson, Vick is as notorious for having served 21 months in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to his involvement in a dogfighting ring.
It’s been five years since Vick retired from the league – or rather was retired by the league – which means he is now eligible for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Responding to a Twitter question last week asking whether Vick should be a first-ballot selection, Jackson responded “This can’t be a question.”
Jackson was putting voice to a generational divide. By the old rules, Vick is way off the Hall of Fame pace. But to a section of players and fans, Vick is thereason why they started watching or playing football. It’s why someone like Jackson was so convinced he could play the most important position on the field. And it’s why coaches believed in him. Why they saw he shouldn’t move from quarterback to running back or wide receiver because he was the best athlete on the field. Instead they saw he should be playing quarterback precisely because he’s the best athlete on the field.
Without Vick, we may never have seen a full embrace of the pace-andspace style at the NFL level, which makes him and his career a fascinating test case for the Hall and its voters.
Whether or not he should be enshrined in Canton is as much a discussion about what you think the Hall represents rather than solely an examination of the player himself. Are we rewarding the best players? The best careers? The biggest winners? Are we treating it as a museum, using the classic adage can you tell the story of the game without him? to determine who gets in and who is kept out?
Every voter uses his or her own judgment, which makes the whole thing murky.
Vick only hits one of the above categories. Since his playing days, he has emerged as the ultimate stats-v-eyetest guy. Ask a defender from his era which quarterback they feared playing the most and Vick will be right at the top of the list.
One story stands out above all: Remember the 2002 Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the team of Warren Sapp and John Lynch fame? The Bucs, along with the Ravens, were the most fearsome defense in the NFL in the early 2000s. It was a group littered with future Hall of Famers and All-Pros galore. In game-planning for Vick for a top-of-the-NFC-South clash, the Bucs defense honed in on the Falcons third-down package. They pulled up the tape. Boom. Boom. Boom. Vick was a blur. He was carving up defenses with his arm and legs. It didn’t just look easy, it looked like the quarterback was having fun. “Yo!” Simeon Rice, a fourtime All-Pro called from the back of the room, “Is this a damn highlight reel?” It was not.
Warren Sapp summed it up succinctly: “The best football I had ever before seen in my life.”
Whereas the greatness of most quarterbacks is a little in the shadows – the game planning, the audibles, the setting and resetting of protections, the little wins that lead to a big completion – Vick’s was visceral. He was quicker and he could throw the ball farther than anyone. And he knew it, too, playing with all the swagger and style that made him a cross-cultural icon to a generation of fans who were done with the stodgy, conservative quarterbacks they were used to.
Vick played in Atlanta at a time when the city was the center of the hip-hop universe. This was a place of Outkast and Ludacris and Lisa Lopes. “We did something great for the city at a time when times was changing,” Vick said in 2017. Atlanta fell in love with Vick the personality as much as the player.
He became the face of EA Sports’ Madden NFL franchise. It was a seismic moment, indicating a readiness from the masses for a black quarterback as the face of the NFL. “Something black America had been awaiting for decades,” David Dennis Jr wrote for the Undefeated.
Vick and his Madden legend are inseparable. He was such a glitch in Madden 2004 that EA was forced to change the entire mechanics of the game to compensate in 2005. Yet Vick’s real-life career numbers and accolades underwhelm compare to his virtual duplicate. Yes, he finished his career with 6,109 rushing yards, a monster total for any player, let alone a quarterback. But as good as he was with his legs, as revelatory as his playing style may have been, Vick was never listed as an All-Pro, never won an MVP award and never played in a Super Bowl. His career record as a starter is only a tick above .500, and he completed just 56% of his pass attempts in a 13-year career. Those are crude numbers that lack nuance, but they’re also the kind of thing voters usually look for in their HOF quarterbacks.
Joe Montana, Jim Kelly, John Elway, Dan Marino, Steve Young, Troy Aikman,
Warren Moon, Brett Favre and Kurt Warner are the only quarterbacks voted into the Hall of Fame this century. Peyton Manning will be elected to the Hall of Fame in 2021, the same year as Vick. Tom Brady and Drew Brees will
and goofy.
Brazil were a little lucky to win at the Cotton Bowl. At the same time they carried a cutting edge that was just too much for the Netherlands. Perhaps the Dutch would also have gone on to win this World Cup from here. It was arguably their best chance.
The team of 1998 was even more talented, with Jaap Stam, Edgar Davids and Clarence Seedorf, as well as Patrick Kluivert up front with Bergkamp. But the rest of the field was stronger by then too. Euro 96 had taken a chunk out of the Dutch. Somehow those later teams lacked the meanness, the winning qualities of Rijkaard, Gullit and Koeman. The narrative arc seemed set, the notion of beautiful, brittle failure already written.
Brazil would win two out of three tournaments, winning in 1994 and in 2002 and reaching the 1998 final in between, vindication of their own golden crop. A more prosaic Netherlands team would reach the final 16 years later. Louis van Gaal, the dead hand of mid-90s Ajax-ism, would take them to the semis 20 years on.
Was all this obvious in Dallas? Was it flagged in retrospect on Fifa’s archive film, a falling-short just waiting to be written? Was the Dutch project – fine technical football, strong characters, self-expression – hostage to its own flaws in an era of high-pressure collectivism?
Sport, as ever, turns on details. Versions
of how we want to see it are picked out from a row of disconnected points. A move the other way, a freekick not given, a save not made, and the conclusions would no doubt be different. All the Fifa archive really tells us is that those endlessly revolving variables fall a certain way and we find a story to fit. One thing is certain though. It is still a very good one.