More Top Picks Best 65 Inch Tvs
player ready...Tim Brown announced his retirement Monday, a year after effectively ending his career.
Brown was actually quite a good receiver in his day. Still, it isn’t as though anyone thought of him as a Tampa Bay Buccaneer at any point, so the “retiring as a Raider” sham is really for nobody except himself and his most ardent fans.
But Brown is an interesting case because his future, rather than his past, is most intriguing. Namely, his future as it relates to Canton, Ohio, and the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
He caught 100 touchdown passes, the last in Oakland against the Raiders. He caught 1,094 balls for 14,934 yards, six catches and 66 yards short of two other major mathematical milestones. I mean, what sounds better than 100, 1,100 and 15,000?
But that’s the thing about Brown’s career–it’s mostly mathematics. He is, if you think about it a moment, the Rafael Palmeiro of football.
Palmeiro just passed 3,000 hits, and between that and his other statistics, is considered by some a slam-dunk Hall of Famer. But his is also a career without any shining individual moments or seasons, and his detractors use that as the argument for voting against him.
But this isn’t about Palmeiro. Brown’s career, though, is Palmeiro’s. He was a Raider for all but those last 24 catches, and the Raiders went to one Super Bowl in his time and reached the playoffs four other times–in 17 seasons.
In other words, Brown’s show largely was ignored, because most of the teams he played on were ignored. He caught all those balls and amassed all those yards on teams with average records of 8-8.
Logic tells us Brown should not be punished for this, but it also tells us that he should not be rewarded for it, either. The only point in bringing it up at all is that assessing Brown’s career means facing up to the fact that the history of the sport can be written with only a passing mention of him, despite his numbers, which leaves voters in the same quandary as those who must confront Palmeiro.