In excluding Mike Shanahan, the Hall of Fame makes the wrong call — again

I don’t understand what the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s various selection committees are doing.

Mike Shanahan will once again not be a nominee from the subcommittee focused on selecting coaches for the Hall of Fame. That announcement came down Tuesday morning, and while the omission of Shanahan’s name from the email blast trumpeting the finalists from the coach, senior and contributors pools wasn’t a surprise, the name of the coach nominated from the committee was:

Mike Holmgren.

Yes, the coach whose Green Bay Packers fell to Shanahan’s Denver Broncos in the biggest Super Bowl upset since Joe Namath guaranteed a win in Super Bowl III. A coach with one Super Bowl win to Shanahan’s two. Whose final act in the NFL — a tenure as Cleveland Browns president — was a disaster, with the Browns never winning more than 5 games in a single season before he was ushered out after three miserable campaigns.

Oh, by the way, in the on-field series between teams guided by the two coaches, Shanahan wins, 6-4.

The Hall’s selection committee referred to the panels selecting finalists from coach, seniors and contributors groups as “blue-ribbon.” It seems more like the yards of Christmas-wrapping ribbon that end up strewn about the floor and thrown in the garbage by the time NFL games kick off on the holiday.

Certainly, the members of those committees have a difficult job — particularly among seniors, where there are a slew of viable nominees for every one who becomes a finalist. But emerging from the conclave with Holmgren as the nominee over Shanahan and others is farcical.

Had the choice been Tom Coughlin, one could have understood that. Coughlin, like Shanahan, has two Super Bowl wins. They aren’t back-to-back like Shanahan’s, but they are arguably more impressive, coming not with a powerful team bursting with talent, but from a New York Giants side that eked into the postseason for both of its championship runs. And the two Super Bowl wins came at the expense of Bill Belichick, Tom Brady and the New England Patriots, who had an imperial phase superior to any other franchise in the Super Bowl era.

The nomination of former Broncos head coach Dan Reeves would have been justifiable, too. After all, the other two coaches who had four Super Bowl losses without a win — Bud Grant and Marv Levy — sit comfortably among the immortals, and have for decades.

The only logical explanation appears to be that Shanahan hindered his CV by clustering his Super Bowl wins too soon and that he struggled in Washington. They came in his first four seasons of his Broncos stewardship, which were seasons 5 and 6 in a head-coaching run that covered 20 seasons, beginning with a 20-game stint with the then-Los Angeles Raiders in 1988 and 1989.

To that notion, one should call poppycock, balderdash, or outright b.s.

The Hall is filled with coaches whose later productions failed to match their earlier show-stoppers. Take Tom Flores, the former Raiders coach who ended his career with five-straight losing seasons in Los Angeles and later with the Seattle Seahawks. Flores completely bombed in Seattle in a role as team president before naming himself head coach, where he guided the team to three losing seasons, including a 2-14 clunker that was the worst in the club’s history.

Then there’s Tom Landry, who won as many Super Bowls as Mike Shanahan during 29 years stalking the Dallas Cowboys sideline in his trademark fedora — but oversaw a steady decline in 10 seasons after his final trip to the sport’s ultimate game.

We can note how Shanahan’s Broncos — like Landry’s later Cowboys editions — continued to be postseason regulars.

Or that Shanahan’s years in Washington saw one of just two 10-win finishes in Daniel Snyder’s 23 full years of control of that franchise after buying the team in mid-1999. The other coach to guide a full-year Snyder operation to 10 wins was Joe Gibbs, who was already in the Hall before coming out of coaching retirement in 2004.

And that says nothing about the coaching tree that Shanahan nurtured in Washington, which saw five of his assistants become head coaches today, to say nothing of the subsequent branches sprouted by his son Kyle, Rams coach Sean McVay and Packers coach Matt LaFleur — which add another seven names to the tree, the most recent being Bears interim coach Thomas Brown, a former McVay lieutenant.

The Hall of Fame is about accomplishment and legacy, and Mike Shanahan stands tallest among the coaches who were considered — a group that does not yet include Belichick. He stands taller than recent inductee Bill Cowher, who has but one Super Bowl win. Today, Cowher’s chin and his sole Lombardi Trophy sit comfortably among the busts in the enshrinees room in Canton.

And Mike Shanahan, two-time Super Bowl winner and roots of one of the finest coaching trees ever nurtured — a tree whose fruit continue to blossom throughout the sport — remains on the outside looking in.