Every now and then, as I pore over old newspapers, call and clean data, and try to shape it all into something resembling a coherent story for the 149 Weeks series, I stumble upon something interesting and grab onto it. I have to show you this shiny new thing I’d just unearthed, so I stick it into one of the chapters and imagine your eyes widened and eyebrows raised as you encounter it. Fortunately, I (usually) remove those shiny things before publishing. But some are too interesting - or too weird - to shelve forever. So I decided I’d share them under the guise of taking a “Bye Week” from the 149 Weeks series. File this one under ‘things that may interest only me,’ but I hope you enjoy it anyway.
That Clinton Portis has been nominated for the Pro Football Hall of Fame just four times in his 11 years of eligibility might be the stupidest thing I’ve encountered in sports.
I’m not going to tell you Portis belongs in the same breath as the all-time greats like Emmitt Smith, Walter Payton, Barry Sanders, Eric Dickerson and Jim Brown. (Although, as you’ll see, that’s exactly where I found him as I dug through his career statistics.)
I’m not even going to claim he deserves to get in ahead of Frank Gore or Adrian Peterson, each likely to be enshrined over the next few years. Hell, I won’t even argue he should get in during his modern-era candidacy, which he’s now more than halfway exhausted. (Although I don’t think such an honor would be undeserved.)
Here’s what I will tell you: in failing to advance Portis to the semi-finalist stage to force more careful scrutiny from the selection committee, it all but damns his chances of earning admission in the last years of his modern-era eligibility, and perhaps even as a senior candidate.
Portis is a Hall of Fame snub not because he isn’t in, but because he’s not even considered.
Consider Fred Taylor. Portis and Taylor both became eligible for the Hall of Fame in 2016. Portis was nominated in his first year of eligibility and just three times since.
Taylor was first nominated in 2018 but has been a nominee every year since, nine years in a row. He’s been a semi-finalist every year since 2020, seven years in a row, and he’s been a finalist twice.
The gulf between Taylor and Portis in Hall of Fame consideration is, frankly, astounding, if not wholly surprising. In naming Taylor a perineal semi-finalist and putting him forth as a finalist twice, the Hall of Fame does the easy thing. They look for the running back with the most career rushing yards.
Nothing against Taylor. He was a fine running back and his career deserves Hall of Fame consideration. Taylor’s 11,695 career yards are most among running backs who aren’t yet in the Hall of Fame and who’ve been eligible for more than a year. (Gore has 16,000 career yards but was first-time eligible last year.) Taylor put up those yards over 13 seasons and 153 games.
Portis had a better, albeit shorter, career. He rushed for 9,923 yards in his career over nine seasons and 113 games. Taylor averaged 76.4 yards per game; Portis averaged 87.8. Portis also beats Taylor in total career touchdowns (75 vs. 66), despite playing 40 fewer games. Portis also beats Taylor in Pro Bowl appearances and individual awards, and they tie with one All-Pro team apiece and zero Super Bowls between them.
There’s more. Ricky Watters, Eddie George, and Tiki Barber are perennially nominated too, and each have been a semi-finalist within the last decade. Let’s call them Door-Knockers because, well, they’re knocking on the Hall of Fame’s door. The same pattern emerges when we compare them to Portis: higher career totals, lower per-game averages, comparable career accomplishments, though some of the Door-Knockers went to more Pro Bowls.
We’re just scratching the surface in the Hall of Fame’s absurd neglect of Portis’ candidacy. Because, perhaps strangest of all, as I dug further and further, I kept finding Portis breathing the same air as those all-time greats I mentioned at the beginning of this article.
When Top-10 All-Time Falls Short of the Hall of Fame
I stumbled upon Portis’ lofty production as I worked on the first chapter of the 149 Weeks series.
That chapter chronicles Portis’ career at Miami and in the NFL, particularly his rookie season when he burst into the league as one of its best backs.
He rushed for 1,508 yards and 15 touchdowns as a rookie in 2002 despite starting just 12 games. Quite a big rookie season, I thought. I wondered for how long he kept that up. I looked at his next season: 1,591 rushing yards and 14 touchdowns. Another big season. In fact, I dubbed them Big Seasons: at least 1,500 yards rushing and at least 10 rushing touchdowns. His fourth year in 2005 was another Big Season: 1,516 yards, 11 touchdowns. He missed a fourth Big Season in 2008 by 13 yards and a touchdown.
How many so-called Big Seasons would I find among those all-time greats, I wondered? Guys like Emmitt Smith, Walter Payton, Barry Sanders, Eric Dickerson and Jim Brown. A group I’ll call the RB Pantheon. If Portis had three, certainly modern all-timers like Smith, Payton, Sanders, and Dickerson had to have put up five or six apiece.
Most Big Seasons all time? Derrick Henry with five, an active player and likely first-ballot Hall of Famer. Next? It’s Sanders and Dickerson with four apiece. Then it’s Portis with three, tying him with Smith, Payton, and Brown from the RB Pantheon, along with modern Hall of Fame backs like LaDainian Tomlinson, Terrell Davis, and Edgerrin James. Portis, in fact, is the only eligible player in the bunch who’s not in the Hall of Fame.
I never expected to compare Portis to all-timers like Smith, Payton, Sanders, Dickerson, and Jim Brown. I knew Portis was good. I knew he’d even ventured into the realm of great at the University of Miami and his first NFL seasons. But among the all-timers?
I dug further. He’s seventh all-time in rushing yards per game. Seventh. If we omit players with fewer than 100 career games, he’s fifth. Fifth. Top five behind only Brown, Sanders, Dickerson, and Payton.
I kept going. He’s eighth all-time in first downs per game (although first downs were not closely tracked pre-merger) and 11th all-time in touchdowns per game (eighth if you remove players with fewer than 100 career games).
What gives? Did Portis ride a league-wide wave of explosive rushing offense that cheapened his production? I checked where he ranked in rushing yards through each season of his career. He was top five in three of his first four seasons and in five seasons overall. I compared Portis’ year-by-year ranking vs. contemporary Hall of Fame running backs for each season of their career.
There it was. Notice that Portis’ orange line sits slightly above the gray lines in the early seasons of their careers? It’s not drastic, but it’s noticeable. Portis regularly finished top five in rushing yards. And when he wasn’t top five, he was top ten. He was among the greatest backs of his generation. The RB Pantheon, though, was consistently in the top three, some in the top one or two. They weren’t among the greatest but undeniably the greatest of their generations.
But surely it’s not enough to exclude Portis from the Hall of Fame. He’s not consistently top three but he’s top five through most of his prime, top 10 all time in per-game production, and, as we’ll see in a bit, he put together one of the most productive spans in NFL history.
So then what is it? Why’s he so overlooked? Why’s he never a semi-finalist? Why’s he rarely nominated?
I searched for answers in the self-proclaimed “heart of the internet.” The place everybody goes to confirm their opinions. I went to Reddit. Others, it turned out, were also skeptical of Portis’ Hall of Fame candidacy.
One redditor quipped he belonged in the “hall of very good,”1 which I thought summed up how most probably felt about Portis’ career. A Pro Bowler. A name they knew. A very good player. But not a Hall of Famer. (By the way, the Hall of Very Good exists, but Portis isn’t in it.)
As others chimed in to argue their case - most were against - I thought their arguments sounded a tad silly. Another reddit thread wondered if Portis would be in the Hall of Fame had he stayed in Denver in Mike Shanahan’s offense. “No,” wrote one of the redditors, “Shannahan could put you or I back there and get production.”2
But Terrell Davis played his entire career under Shanahan in Denver, and he eventually got in. Yes, pointed out yet another redditor, but Davis won a couple of Super Bowls and rushed for 2,000 yards in 1998.
“You could make the case if [Portis] won a super bowl [sic] or had an MVP award,” wrote yet another. “As it is, he’s just a two time pro bowler [sic] with under 10k career rushing yards. He was a great running back in that era, but not HOF worthy.”3
Is that it? Is Portis unworthy because his teams failed to win a Super Bowl? Because he was named to just two Pro Bowls? Because he fell short of 10,000 career yards?
I have to figure this out.
Case Against: <10,000-Yards
At his retirement press conference in 2012, someone asked Portis if he was a Hall of Famer.
“You know, it would be a great feat,” he answered. “I think if the measurement for the Hall of Fame, if they can add my biggest attribute, which was heart, I would definitely be there. But for just the numbers, I’m not sure.”4
The numbers Portis likely meant were his career totals. He was retiring after just nine seasons, and he’d played only 13 games over his final two years. It was a relatively brief career compared to the running backs enshrined in the Hall of Fame. Smith played 15 seasons, Payton 13, and Dickerson 11. Even Sanders, who famously retired in his prime, played 10 seasons.
Portis’ shortened career depressed his career totals, keeping him to 9,923 career rushing yards, only 77 yards shy of that 10,000-yard mark referenced by the redditor.
Ten-thousand yards is a strange measuring stick. Strange because it’s referenced as a line in the sand, an easy argument used to dismiss running backs who fail to cross it without the requisite critical thought that should be afforded players like Portis. And strange because there are no players in the Pro Football Hall of Fame whose career rushing yards fall in the 10,000-10,999 range. Not a single one. In fact, it’s the only 1,000-yard range between 5,000 and 17,000 yards without a Hall of Famer.
It doesn’t matter. Call it a 10,000-yard barrier or an 11,000-yard barrier, it’s not the forcefield we think it is. Over a dozen Hall of Fame running backs failed to reach 10,000 career yards. Most of them, however, entered the league prior to the 1967 AFL-NFL merger, making comparison to Portis difficult and unfair. Only five post-merger running backs with fewer than 10,000 career yards are in the Hall of Fame. Let’s call it the Sub-10K Club:
Earl Campbell (9,407 yards)
Roger Craig (8,189 yards)
Larry Csonka (8,081 yards)
Terrell Davis (7,607 yards)
Floyd Little (6,323 yards)
Portis matches up well with each Sub-10k Club member. Should he get in, he’d be second behind Davis in yards per game (97.5 vs. 87.8), yards per attempt (4.6 vs. 4.4), and touchdowns per game (0.77 vs. 0.66). He would have played the second fewest games of the group behind Davis (113 vs. 78), yet would lead them all in career rushing yards (9,923), career attempts (2,230), and career touchdowns (75).
And he aligns quite well with the Sub-10k Club’s year-by-year rushing yard rankings: high early-career ranks, volatility in the mid and late career, and early termination around years seven to nine for most.
So then what separates the Sub-10k Club from Portis? Why did they earn admission into the Hall of Fame, some of them soon after becoming eligible?
One thing the Sub-10k Club members have in common is brevity. The Sub-10k Club averaged 9.2 seasons vs. the 12.25 season average amongst Hall of Famers with more than 10,000 career yards. Portis fits right in with his nine NFL seasons.
But they each strung together spans that made up for the brevity and ultimately earned their selection to the Hall of Fame. Call them Star Stints. Campbell was a star out of the gate. He led the league in rushing in each of his first three seasons and in rushing touchdowns in two of those seasons. Davis played just seven seasons but rushed for more than 1,500 yards and 10 touchdowns in three consecutive seasons in the 1990s, including his 2,000-yard season in 1998.
Portis’ Star Stint spanned the first four years of his career:
NFL recordholder for most rushing yards before the age of 25 with 5,930.
4th all-time with 5,930 rushing yards through the first four seasons of his career.
Tied for 4th all-time with three Big Seasons (1,500+ yards rushing and 10+ rushing touchdowns) in his career, all within his first four seasons.
The Sub-10k Club members have another thing in common that also seems to make up for their short careers. Call them Spotlight Stats. They’re occasions that placed them in the national spotlight for a media cycle or two and boosted their name recognition amongst casual fans. Things like MVP awards, Super Bowl runs, and Pro Bowl invites.
And it’s here that Portis falls noticeably short.
Case Against: Too Few Accolades
The strongest argument against Portis’ HOF candidacy tends to be his dearth of Spotlight Stats. He went to only two Pro Bowls, was a second-team All-Pro once (never first-team), and, aside from his Offensive Rookie of the Year award in 2002, never earned individual league-wide recognition.
The Sub-10k Club, meanwhile, has Spotlight Stats to boot. Csonka was a part of the undefeated 1972 Dolphins team that won Super Bowls VII and VIII. Campbell was the league’s Offensive Rookie of the Year in 1978 and its MVP in 1979, and Davis was its MVP in 1998, won two Super Bowls in the late 1990s, and was even a Super Bowl MVP. Craig was a three-time Super Bowl champion in the 1980s and was the league’s Offensive Player of the Year in 1988.
The easiest of the Spotlight Stats to measure is Pro Bowls. For one, they’re easy to count. And while they’re exclusive in the sense that they recognize the season’s best players, they’re not so exclusive as to squeeze out the era’s best players. There can be only one MVP, only one Offensive Player of the Year, only one Super Bowl champion, only one Super Bowl MVP.
But Pro Bowls? Each conference gets three or four every year. If you’re perennially a top player, and certainly if you’re Hall of Fame worthy, you’d be named to more than two Pro Bowls, right?
Well, not quite. And Pro Bowl counts certainly shouldn’t carry the weight they seem to carry in Hall of Fame selectors minds. Especially given the fallibility of the system used to choose the season’s Pro Bowlers.
But fans, coaches, and players all have a say in the season’s Pro Bowlers. With no formal criteria from the NFL, each voter is left to their own devices, perspectives, and biases to decide what makes a player Pro Bowl-worthy. Total rushing yards? Average yards per rush? Touchdowns? Career accomplishment? Name recognition? Some kind of “eye test”?
If a player is selected to the Pro Bowl, it’s generally agreed they had a good season. But the absence of a Pro Bowl invite does not suggest a mediocre season. Portis was a Pro Bowler in just one of his three Big Seasons, after all, squeezed out twice despite rushing for 1,500+ yards and 10+ touchdowns.
2002: The rookie Portis missed the Pro Bowl despite numbers nearly identical to those of Pro Bowler Travis Henry and favorable against any other non-Pro Bowl AFC running back.
2003: Portis was selected to the Pro Bowl ahead of LaDainian Tomlinson, who put up similar numbers.
2004: In his first season in the NFC, Portis put up numbers better than Pro Bowler Ahman Green and comparable to Pro Bowler Brian Westbrook, whose receiving stats likely earned him the nod.
2005: Portis’ 2005 campaign was better than that of Pro Bowler Warrick Dunn, who finished with exactly 100 rushing yards and eight touchdowns fewer than Portis.
2006: Portis was injured and played just eight games.
2007: Portis’ season was a notch better than that of Pro Bowler Marion Barber III, who rushed for nearly 300 yards fewer than Portis and scored one fewer touchdown.
2008: Portis made the Pro Bowl for the second time, beating out DeAngelo Williams who rushed for more total yards, averaged more yards per attempt, and doubled Portis’ touchdown total.
The point isn’t that voters robbed Portis of a Pro Bowl in any particular year. Lacking firm qualifying criteria, it’s impossible to definitively identify any season’s Pro Bowlers. Rather, the point is that the way we select Pro Bowlers is far from scientific, and so it shouldn’t be treated as scientifically as Hall of Fame selectors seem to treat it as they whittle down the year’s nominees.
Portis could’ve gone to zero Pro Bowls had voters favored Tomlinson and Williams in 2003 and 2008, respectively. Or he could’ve gone to six. Give him the extra four Pro Bowls – hell, give him just two of them. And give him another All Pro season in 2002 when fullback Fred Beasley took a running back spot because the AP hadn’t yet separated the positions.
Now look at this profile: A four-time Pro Bowler, two-time All-Pro, and owner of one of the best four-year spans of rushing production in NFL history. His career shortened by injuries but still within 77 yards of the 10,000-yard mark, and whose per-game averages are top ten all time.
Is that a Hall of Famer? Is the coulda-shoulda enough to change our perspective?
I could, of course, find a way to give any player more Pro Bowls. Or more All Pro seasons. Or more individual awards. Or even a Super Bowl. It’s beside the point. Everything about the Hall of Fame selection process, imperfect as it might be, aims to ask and answer a single question: Was this player firmly among the best at his position during the era, and did he maintain that level of excellence for long enough to warrant enshrinement as one of the game’s all-time greats?
Case Against: Not the Best of His Generation
I couldn’t find this particular argument in the Reddit threads, but it’s one I hear elsewhere: players should be considered in the context of the era in which they played.
So let’s compare Portis to recent Hall of Fame running backs who played during or just before Portis’ era: Curtis Martin, LaDainian Tomlinson, Jerome Bettis, Edgerrin James, and Thurman Thomas. Not quite the RB Pantheon as we usually think of it, but each of them also among the all-time greats. In fact, let’s call these guys the Also Greats.
The Also Greats averaged five Pro Bowls apiece and far surpass Portis in other accolades.
They’ve each made at least one and up to three (Tomlinson & Faulk) All-Pro teams.
Tomlinson, Faulk, and Thomas have been league MVP.
Tomlinson, Faulk, and Thomas have also been Offensive Player of the Year (Faulk three times).
Martin, Bettis, Faulk, and James were rookies of the year.
Three were named to the All-Decade Team: Tomlinson and James in the 2000s and Thomas in the 1990s.
But what if we throw out Pro Bowls and awards as proxy metrics for retroactively identifying the season’s or era’s top players? Was Portis a flash in the pan, a la Larry Johnson’s two phenomenal seasons in the mid-2000s? Or did he sustain himself among the top players of his generation for a substantial period?
The Also Greats shot out to early career success, ranking in the top ten and top five in the first years of their careers. So did Portis. Some of the Also Greats endured mid-career injuries that derailed their production for a season, but they each bounced back. So did Portis. And the Also Greats saw end-of-career declines as injuries, age or wear and tear caught up with them. So did Portis.
I think Portis is a Hall of Fame snub. Not because he’s been left out of the Hall of Fame but because he’s not even afforded consideration.
Hall of Fame selectors are handed a difficult task with no criteria for how to complete it. Of course they’re going to pore over counting stats, count Pro Bowls and All Pros, and look for individual awards that help them exclude players, break ties, and narrow the nominees.
Both the Pro Bowl and Hall of Fame selection processes seem to first lean into quantitative metrics and then try to make sense of those metrics with qualitative reasoning.
Yeah, Clinton Portis was among the NFL’s best backs during the early 2000s, but his career total falls short of 10,000 yards, he only played four full seasons, went to just two Pro Bowls, and played most of his career under head coach Mike Shanahan whose offenses can make any back look good.
Yeah, Terrell Davis rushed for fewer than 8,000 yards but he only played two full seasons due to injury and in his brief career won two Super Bowls, was a Super Bowl MVP, and a league MVP.
I could easily flip the qualitative reasoning, too.
Yeah, Clinton Portis went to only two Pro Bowls and rushed for fewer than 10,000 yards, but in his injury-shortened career he was seventh all-time in rushing yards per game, 11th in touchdowns per game, and sustained that high level for a lengthy span of about seven seasons.
Yeah, Terrell Davis won two Super Bowls and was a league MVP, but he played only a few full seasons, played on an offense that included future Hall of Famers John Elway and Shannon Sharpe, and played his full career under head coach Mike Shanahan whose offenses can make any back look good.
Portis is a hard nut to crack. We’ve compared him to four distinct groups - the Door-Knockers, the RB Pantheon, the Sub-10k Club, and the Also Greats - and found similarities with each. He’s a couple notches under the RB Pantheon and a notch above the Door-Knockers. He’s most obviously comparable to the Sub-10k Club given his short career and lower career totals, but through the first seven years of his career, Portis was most comparable to the Also Greats.
A player like that deserves closer and more consistent scrutiny.
The Case for Clinton Portis
Let’s bring this home. This is why Portis belongs in the Hall of Fame:
Top 10 yards per game
Top 10 touchdowns per game
T-4th all-time in Big Seasons (1500+ yards, 10+ TDs)
4th all-time in rushing yards in first four seasons
Most rushing yards before age 25
Top five rushing yards in four seasons; top 10 in six seasons, comparable to Hall of Famers
Top five rushing touchdowns in three seasons; top 10 in four six seasons, comparable to Hall of Famers
Just two Pro Bowls, but conceivably could’ve gone to as many as six
And this is why he probably won’t get in…
Does Portis deserve selection to the Hall of Fame is a different question than will he be selected. The answer to the former: probably not as a modern-era candidate.
Pro-Football-Reference’s (PFR) Hall of Fame Monitor (HOFm) aims to place a value on a player’s likelihood of being selected to the Hall of Fame. It calculates HOFm score by weighing the things Hall of Fame selectors prioritize: All-Decade Team selection, Pro Bowls, All-Pros, championships, Approximate Value (a proprietary measure of a player’s value in a season), and “other stat milestones,” according to the PFR website.5
The average Hall of Fame running back has a HOFm score of 106. Portis’ HOFm score is 36.70, well short of the average and, thus, unlikely to make the Hall of Fame. His career totals, relatively few individual accolades, and lack of postseason success depress his chances and, thus, his HOFm score.
The HOFm doesn’t aim to rank players’ by their talent or even productivity. It’s meant to estimate a player’s chances of being selected, not necessarily to make an argument for or against any particular player. As PFR writes in its explanation of the HOFm, “Many analysts agree that championships won reveal little to nothing about a player’s individual skill, but it’s certainly a factor that has historically been taken into consideration by Hall of Fame voters.”6
Above Portis on the list is William Andrews (37.23), a full back-turned-running-back for the Falcons in the early 1980s. Right after him is Jim Kick (36.25), Csonka’s backup on the 1970s Dolphins teams. Two players most would agree are inferior to Portis’ talent and productivity while in the NFL.
In any case, a player’s HOFm score is quite a good predictor of whether that player will be selected. Of the running backs within 25 points of the average 106 HOFm, only Adrian Peterson (125.67), Frank Gore (101.05) and LeSean McCoy (82.84) have not been selected. Peterson enters his first year of eligibility this year, and Gore and McCoy were each semi-finalists, and Gore a finalist, in their first year of eligibility in 2026.
The above is a selection of players with the highest HOFm scores, Hall of Famers with lower HOFm scores, and Portis. See the full Running Backs HOF Monitor here.
Allow me to speculate a bit on how this’ll play out for Portis.
He isn’t, even in retrospect, a shoo-in Hall of Famer. Few players with less than 10,000 career yards are. But he belongs in the Door-Knockers group, along with Taylor, which is where many members of the Sub-10k Club dwelled for years before finally gaining admission to the Hall of Fame.
If Portis is consistently nominated through the back half of his modern-era eligibility, it’ll force Hall of Fame selectors to consider his candidacy more regularly. And if they consider his candidacy more regularly, I expect it’ll lead to one or two semi-finalist nods.
I don’t know if that’s enough to earn admission as a modern-era candidate, but he’d be on the radar. And if he’s on the radar, he’ll be an excellent senior candidate, a la Little and Craig, two members of the Sub-10k Club selected as senior candidates in 2010 and 2026, respectively. Should Portis get in, it’ll likely be along that same path.
Anybody can nominate an eligible player by writing to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Today I dropped a letter in the mailbox nominating. I hope to see his name among the nominees for Class of 2027.
Reddit. “Is Clinton Portis a Hall of Famer?” Reddit.com. https://www.reddit.com/r/Commanders/comments/fv0px5/is_clinton_portis_a_hall_of_famer/.
Reddit. “Watching Denver…..Is Clinton Portis a HOF is he stays in Denver.” Reddit.com. https://www.reddit.com/r/Commanders/comments/1qmzbac/watching_denveris_clinton_portis_a_hof_is_he/.
Reddit. “Is Clinton Portis a Hall of Famer?”
Yanda, Steve. “Clinton Portis retires from Redskins and pro football with tears and memories.” The Washington Post, August 23, 2012. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/football-insider/post/clinton-portis-retires-from-redskins-and-pro-football-with-tears-and-memories/2012/08/23/8c442762-ed61-11e1-a80b-9f898562d010_blog.html.
Pro-Football-Reference. “PFR Hall of Fame Monitor.” Pro-Football-Reference.com. https://www.pro-football-reference.com/about/hof_monitor.htm.
Pro-Football-Reference. “PFR Hall of Fame Monitor.”