Kam Chancellor deserves the NFL Hall of Fame on the first ballot

Comparing Kam Chancellor to current HOF safeties

Let’s play a little game, 12s. I’m going to show you the stats per 16-game season for two Hall of Fame safeties and Kam Chancellor. See if you can figure out which line belongs to our guy.

Player  Tackles      Solo    Asst      TFL    Int      FF      FR

A             59.4       49.1     10.3       3.1    5.9      1.0    1.2

B             89.1       61.8     27.3       2.5    1.8      1.3      .4

C            113.8       85.7     28.1        –      2.3         .6      .8

D              97.0       65.9      31.1       –      5.3       1.3   1.4

Player A is Ravens star Ed Reed, while Player B is our man, Kam Chancellor.  C is Broncos safety Steve Atwater, and D is the 49ers Ronnie Lott. All stats can be found on my favorite site for stats, pro-football-reference.com. As I’m sure you know, all but Chancellor are in the Hall of Fame. Reed and Lott were inducted in their first year of eligibility, while Atwater waited five extra years. No, I have no idea why that happened, either.

A few notes on those stats before we move on. I had to estimate the solo and assist breakdowns for Lott and Atwater, as complete data isn’t available for either player. The league’s own site only has the last two seasons available for Ronnie Lott, so I used the ratio of those two years to extrapolate from his combined tackles. We have six years of data from Atwater’s 11-year career, so I used the same process there. Tackles for a loss are just that, lost.

So you can place Chancellor behind Atwater in tackles but well ahead of Reed. He falls well behind Reed in interceptions, but then, so does almost everybody. Reed and Lott are sixth and seventh all-time in league history. And that brings us to the crux of the issue. You can’t really compare Chancellor to those guys. They really weren’t playing the same position.