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Originally Posted by DJ's left nut
Payton. Sure.
Smith. Yeah, can't argue with the numbers, even if his line did most of the work.
Allen - boy, it's getting thin there; I'm not sure I'd consider Allen a clearly more worthy entry to the Hall than Tomlinson.
Dorsett - thinner.
Harris - oh c'mon. Nope, that's where I can't even try to muster an argument. I'd take Tomlinson over Franco Harris 100 times out of 100.
Tomlinson's one of the top 10 rushers in NFL history (#5 by yardage) and was arguably the most dynamic RB out of the backfield in league history.
To use your argument - If Marshall Faulk is a HOFer, so is Tomlinson. And Tomlinson is a hell of a lot closer to Faulk in terms of performance than he is to a guy like Eddie George. I'm not real sure why you keep going to the Eddie George well; he's nowhere near the candidate that guys like Bettis and Tomlinson were, regardless of what metric you want to use. Bettis won a championship and was a more prolific runner (significantly so). Tomlinson never won a championship, but was better in every phase of the game, including the grunt work like blitz pickups.
Yes, Tomlinson absolutely deserves to be enshrined alongside some of the greats you've mentioned.
And ultimately, I'm absolutely confident he will be.
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The difference between Franco Harris, Tony Dorsett, Marcus Allen and Tomlinson is that the former were transcendent players on Super Bowl winning teams.
The Hall of Fame should be about great players that either elevate or transcend and while Tomlinson was very, very good, IMO, he was neither able to elevate the play of his teammates nor transcend the game like a Barry Sanders or even Adrian Peterson (who has a long way to go to be HOF worthy, IMO).
Regardless of whether or not he gets in, I wouldn't vote for him.
That said, keeping a high profile on the NFL Network will certainly help him, as it did Cris Carter at ESPN.