Pattern Recognition, Pt. 1: Pro Football Hall of Fame Recipients by Year

There are so many ways to look at NFL or Hall of Fame data. Here is a simple frequency distribution analysis to see if there are patterns in selected data, aggregated by year.

Year          Number of HOF Recipients

1963         17         xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx      

1964         7          xxxxxxx                   

1965         7          xxxxxxx                     

1966         8          xxxxxxxx                 

1967         8          xxxxxxxx                   

1968         7          xxxxxxx                   

1969         5          xxxxx

1970         4          xxxx

1971         7          xxxxxxx

1972         4          xxxx

1973         3          xxx

1974         4          xxxx

1975         4          xxxx

1976         3          xxx

1977         5          xxxxx

1978         5          xxxxx

1979         4          xxxx

1980         4          xxxx

1981         4          xxxx

1982         4          xxxx

1983         5          xxxxx

1984         4          xxxx

1985         5          xxxxx

1986         5          xxxxx

1987         7          xxxxxxx

1988         4          xxxx

1989         4          xxxx

1990         7          xxxxxxx

1991         5          xxxxx

1992         4          xxxx

1993         5          xxxxx

1994         6          xxxxxx

1995         5          xxxxx

1996         5          xxxxx

1997         4          xxxx

1998         5          xxxxx

1999         5          xxxxx

2000         5          xxxxx

2001         7          xxxxxxx

2002         5          xxxxx

2003         5          xxxxx

2004         4          xxxx

2005         4          xxxx

2006         6          xxxxxx

2007         6          xxxxxx

2008         6          xxxxxx

2009         6          xxxxxx

Observations

There are many observations that can be made. Several simple ones are:

1. There was a decline in the number of NFL players inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, from 1963 to 1964.

2. There was a minimum of three inductees in 1973 and in 1976.

3. The mode in the distribution of inductees is 4, occurring 15 times in the data set. The mode is also 5, occurring 15 times in the data set.  It is a bi-modal distribution.

4. The maximum number of inductees occurred during the first year of the induction process, with 17 players enshrined in 1973.

5. For four consecutive years, there are six inductees for each year, starting in 2006 to 2009.

6. For two consecutive years in 1966 and 1967, there were eight inductees for each year.

In order to get a better picture of the inductees in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, sociocultural factors, colleges and universities, and names of the last team the inductee played for (or the team that dominated the career of a player) will be aggregated to learn more about the patterns of the awards.

You are invited to make comments and more observations to stimulate a discussion of the data. 

A similar study of the Heisman Trophy winners showed a trend. Those observations may be discussed in a future B/R article. See link: Trend of Heisman Awards.