Dallas Cowboys: Drew Pearson’s Hall of Fame snub is a travesty

Despite possessing qualities on par with his contemporaries, former Dallas Cowboys standout receiver Drew Pearson still can’t make the grade.

It’s weird, really. In the storied history of the Dallas Cowboys, former wide receiver Drew Pearson was involved in the franchise’s signature play, The Hail Mary. Moreover, he played a prominent role through the team’s first run at immortality, which was their initial heyday through the 1970s. Lastly, he is a first-team member of the NFL’s All Decade Team of the 1970s. If that isn’t a Hall of Fame resume, especially for the time, then who knows what that entails?

For what it’s all worth, Pearson is the only member of the all-decade offense–first and second team–that will not be enshrined in Canton, Ohio. This is because former Eagles’ wideout Harold Carmichael got the nod for this year’s class. So if twenty-two of the twenty-three names on the all-decade squad are in, then it begs the question, “Why?”

In local circles, it’s been a hot button issue for the past week. It’s no question that Drew Pearson has all the credentials that his colleagues had. Sure, his statistics don’t come close to the video game numbers that the position evolved into, but neither did any of the players of his era. Pearson’s numbers either match or exceed fellow first-teamer Lynn Swann’s, and Swann got inducted way back in 2001.

For the sake for full disclosure, I didn’t get to experience peak Drew. I wasn’t around for The Hail Mary. Well, I was, but I wasn’t even a year old at the time. But I did see him play into the eighties when the Cowboys really started to gain a foothold into my football conscience. He was with the team through the 1983 season, but his legend lived on through my dad and the older generation of Cowboys fans that had come before me.

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So it is very befuddling as to why the Hall of Fame continues to give the cold shoulder to a player so deserving of the honor. By all accounts, he was a great player and a great teammate. He maintains a major presence in the DFW sports market. There’s simply no good reason other than a mean-spirited, you-can’t-sit-with-us mentality that the Hall is supposed to be completely above. Further, when word came down that he didn’t make the cut, there was the heartbreaking video of his reaction upon learning that he didn’t get the call. It was easy to tell how much the moment meant to him and how much this latest exclusion stung. It’s safe to say it got dusty in a lot of living rooms and work cubicles as well.

Maybe there is an anti-Cowboy bias when it comes to players of that era. I’d tried to talk myself out of that over the years, but there really is no other reasonable explanation. We can offer all the encouragement to the man and express to him all of our well wishes, but the damage is done. The thing he wanted the most was dangled out there like a carrot, only to be yanked away in front of everyone. It’s just gut-wrenching and unfair.

So while the fans have countless on-field memories and–if I’m trolling the Eagles a little–the hilarious second-round pick announcement in Philadelphia in the 2017 NFL draft, the man we were all rooting for still remains painfully short of his ultimate goal. I said it wasn’t fair, and yeah, life isn’t fair. We all get that. But it still doesn’t make it right, and that was the hardest thing to see him go through.

• Published on 01/20/2020 at 12:01 PM
• Last updated at 01/20/2020 at 08:28 AM