Pro Football Hall of Fame

• 1. Introduction

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  The Pro Football Hall of Fame opened its doors in Canton, Ohio on the 7th of September, 1963 inside a building of just two rooms and 19,000 square feet. Back then, professional football was still fighting for cultural ground against baseball and college sports. The question hanging over that modest opening was simple: would anyone care enough to show up? What followed over the next six decades was a slow, brick-by-brick transformation of a midsize Ohio city into the spiritual center of the most watched sport in America.

  Canton is not a glamorous metropolis. It is an industrial city in northeast Ohio with a complicated relationship to a game it helped create. The NFL was not founded in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles. It was founded in Canton on the 17th of September, 1920, under a different name: the American Professional Football Association. That founding moment gave Canton its claim. But that claim had to be argued, funded, and fought for before a single trophy case was bolted to a wall.

  Today there are 387 members of the Hall. Between four and nine new inductees join each year. The Chicago Bears lead all franchises with 32 official enshrinees. And the name Canton has become something close to shorthand for the highest honor professional football can bestow. How a fundraising campaign of nearly $400,000 turned into a 118,000-square-foot complex with a stadium, a hotel, and a village of its own is the story this documentary will tell.

• 2. Canton's Argument

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  Canton made its case to the NFL on three distinct points. The first was the founding: the league's birth certificate traces to a meeting in Canton on the 17th of September, 1920. The second was the Canton Bulldogs, a team that no longer exists but once stood at the pinnacle of the sport as the NFL's first repeat champion, winning back-to-back titles in 1922 and 1923. The third point was money. The Canton community raised nearly $400,000 through a local fundraising effort, a concrete demonstration that the city would not just host the Hall but help pay for it.

  Groundbreaking took place on the 11th of August, 1962. Less than thirteen months later, the doors opened. That timeline reflected a community that had been pressing the case for years and was not about to let momentum slip once approval came through. Dick McCann, who took the position of executive director on the 4th of April, 1962, was present from the planning stages and oversaw the earliest years of the institution's life.

  From the start, the Hall of Fame made a deliberate choice about how to recognize its members. Unlike the Baseball Hall of Fame, where plaques typically show inductees wearing a specific team's cap, the Pro Football Hall of Fame bust sculptures carry no team insignia. All of an enshrinee's affiliations are listed equally. The Gold Jacket given to every inductee belongs to no single franchise. It belongs to professional football itself.

• 3. Decades of Expansion

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  The original 19,000-square-foot building could not hold what professional football was becoming. In April of a year shortly after opening, ground was broken for the first expansion, which added a third room, opened a pro shop, and pushed the interior to 34,000 square feet at a cost of $620,000. Completed on the 10th of May, this project coincided with a milestone: yearly attendance passed 200,000 for the first time. The rise of the American Football League and the AFL-NFL World Championship games had driven new fans to the sport, and they were finding their way to Canton.

  Work on a second expansion began in November 1977 at a cost of $1,200,000 and finished in November 1978. That project doubled the size of the theater and enlarged both the gift shop and the research library. The Hall now stood at 50,500 square feet, more than two and a half times its original footprint.

  The building held that shape until July 1993, when a $9,200,000 expansion was announced. Completed on the 1st of October, 1995, it brought the total to 82,307 square feet and introduced a fifth room. The centerpiece was the GameDay Stadium, a theater showing an NFL Films production on a 20-by-42-foot Cinemascope screen. By 2013, the Hall had completed its largest single renovation, bringing the structure to 118,000 square feet. That figure is roughly six times the size of what Canton opened in 1963.

• 4. Who Gets In

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  A 50-person Selection Committee, composed largely of media members, holds the power to decide who enters the Hall. Each NFL city sends one representative from its local media; cities with more than one franchise send one representative per team. There are also 15 at-large delegates, among them one representative from the Pro Football Writers Association, who serves a two-year term. Everyone else serves until death, incapacitation, retirement, or resignation.

  To be eligible, a player must have been retired for at least five years. Coaches need only one year removed from the game. Team owners and executives can be considered at any time. Nominations can come from the public; anyone may write by letter or email to the Hall. The Selection Committee is then polled by mail in March, September, and October, narrowing the field to 25 semi-finalists. In November, 15 finalists are chosen by mail ballot, with a Seniors Committee and a Contributors Committee each adding one or two additional finalists on alternating years, bringing the final ballot to 18 names.

  The decisive meeting takes place on "Selection Saturday," the day before each Super Bowl. A finalist must receive at least 80 percent support from the full committee to be elected. The committee instructs its members to consider only professional football contributions and to disregard everything else. Whether that instruction is followed consistently is a question the Hall's critics have raised for decades.

• 5. Controversy and Absence

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  Some of the most revealing debates about the Hall of Fame concern who is not inside it, or who got there late. A 2009 article in The New York Times criticized the Hall for not even placing punter Ray Guy on its ballot. Guy was eventually inducted as part of the 2014 class, a wait his supporters considered inexcusably long.

  The Hall's treatment of game officials stands out sharply against comparable institutions. Only two figures have ever been enshrined, both for administrative rather than on-field officiating roles: Hugh "Shorty" Ray, inducted in 1966 as the NFL's supervisor of officiating, and Art McNally in 2022. McNally holds the distinction of being the only Hall inductee with actual experience as an in-game official. By contrast, the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, and the Hockey Hall of Fame have all inducted on-field officials.

  Sports broadcaster Howard Cosell, closely associated with Monday Night Football, has never been inducted and has not even received the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award. A Sports Illustrated article from August 2010 suggested Cosell may have been effectively blacklisted by the NFL itself. Wide receiver Terrell Owens waited through two rounds of eligibility before being elected in 2018, then declined to attend the enshrinement ceremony in protest. In 2026, coach Bill Belichick was passed over in his first year of eligibility despite winning six Super Bowls as a head coach; analysts pointed to the Spygate and Deflategate controversies as likely factors in the committee's calculation.

• 6. The Centennial Slate

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  The 2020 class broke from every precedent the Hall had set. To mark the 100th anniversary of the NFL, a special Blue-Ribbon Panel selected an additional 15 members outside the normal process, naming them the Centennial Slate. Ten of those 15 were seniors, players whose careers ended more than 25 years before their selection.

  Hall of Fame president David Baker delivered several of the selections in person. On the 11th of January, Baker walked onto the set of The NFL Today and told coach Bill Cowher, who was working as a pregame analyst, that he had been chosen. One day later, Baker appeared on the set of Fox NFL Sunday to deliver the same news to coach Jimmy Johnson. The remaining 13 members were announced on the 15th of January.

  That group included wide receiver Harold Carmichael, offensive tackles Jim Covert and Winston Hill, free safeties Bobby Dillon and Cliff Harris, defensive tackle Alex Karras, strong safety Donnie Shell, tackle Duke Slater, end Mac Speedie, and defensive end Ed Sprinkle. Three contributors joined them: NFL Films president and co-founder Steve Sabol, general manager George Young, and former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed the actual enshrinement ceremony to 2021, though all 15 are formally designated the Centennial Class of 2020.

  Sabol later became one of only four people, alongside Art McNally, Marion Motley, and Bill Willis, to receive both the Ralph Hay Pioneer Award and full Hall of Fame enshrinement.

• 7. A Village Around the Hall

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  Groundbreaking for the Hall of Fame Village began in 2016, expanding the Hall's footprint from a museum into something more ambitious: a mixed-use development adjacent to the existing campus. The vision combined entertainment, retail, residential, and hospitality facilities, anchored by a hotel and an interactive sports complex.

  At the center of the Village sits Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium, which serves as home to the annual Hall of Fame Game, the NFL's preseason opener. In 2017, that game was held on a Thursday night for the first time. The same stadium hosted the enshrinement ceremony from 1963 to 1965 and again starting in 2002, after a period when the ceremony took place on the steps of the Hall itself. Since 2007, the ceremony has been held on Saturday night; in 2022, it moved to a noon start.

  Future phases of the Village plan include additional sports venues, a sports medicine facility, an expanded convention center, and residential housing. The development is also positioned as a hub for sports technology and innovation. The Hall, which started as a two-room building funded by local pledges of nearly $400,000, now anchors a destination that its planners describe as a significant economic driver for Canton and the surrounding region. Buffalo Bills guard Billy Shaw, the only Hall of Famer who played his entire career in the AFL without a single snap in the NFL, stands as a reminder that the Hall's reach, however wide, still traces its roots to a very specific tradition.