The point of the Pro Football Hall of Fame or the hall in any other sport is to recognize the absolute elite performers in that sport. That was Sterling Sharpe’s level.
Sharpe retired after the 1994 season and it wasn’t his choice. Sharpe suffered a stinger late in the season on what looked like a routine block on a run. It was his second stinger in two weeks. Sharpe played the next week against the Buccaneers despite the injury. He had 132 yards and three touchdowns. Then he was gone.
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Doctors found Sharpe had a looseness between the top two vertebrae in his neck and would need surgery. After seven seasons for the Green Bay Packers, Sharpe’s career was over. It was only seven seasons, but the excellence Sharpe displayed in that relatively short time was undoubtedly worthy of induction.
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And yet, for 31 years, Sharpe waited for his call to the Hall of Fame. It’s hard to make it with only seven seasons, but not many players have a dominant stretch like Sharpe did. Three decades after Sharpe was done playing, the Hall’s gatekeepers recognized that.
Sterling Sharpe was dominant
Sharpe was the seventh overall pick of the 1988 NFL Draft, selected by what was, at the time, a horrible Packers team. While Sharpe wasn’t still playing when the Packers finally won a Super Bowl, he was a big part of their rise in the 1990s.
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Sharpe had a reasonable 791 yards as a rookie, and then took off in 1989. He led the NFL with 90 catches, 12 of which went for touchdowns. He made the Pro Bowl, the first of five times he’d get that honor. He also was first-team All-Pro for the first time. He’d be an All-Pro two more times before he retired.
Sharpe was already one of the NFL’s best receivers when the Packers traded for a new quarterback in 1992. Brett Favre took over as the team’s starter early that season and quickly found that the best way to succeed was find No. 84 and throw it to him, over and over.
Sharpe won the NFL’s receiving triple crown in 1992, leading the NFL with 108 catches, 1,461 yards and 13 touchdowns. The 108 receptions set an NFL single-season record. He broke that record the following season with 112 catches. In his final season, he caught a league-best 18 touchdowns.
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Jerry Rice was the gold standard among receivers in that era, but Sharpe wasn’t that far behind. He led the NFL in receptions three times, in receiving yards once and receiving touchdowns twice. He was unquestionably one of the best receivers of his era. And isn’t that what the Hall of Fame is supposed to be about?
Sharpe finally gets the call
Sharpe played in only two playoff games, though that was hardly his fault. He had 229 yards and four touchdowns in those two postseason games, and his first playoff game was probably the highlight of his great career.
At the end of the 1993 season, with the Packers back in the playoffs for just the second time since 1972, Sharpe scored three touchdowns in a thrilling wild-card game against the Lions. His final touchdown was in the final minute, when he got behind the Lions defense and Favre hit him with an amazing pass to the end zone for a 40-yard score. It was the Packers’ second playoff win since Super Bowl II 26 years earlier.
Despite undeniable greatness on the field, Sharpe waited for the Hall of Fame to let him in. Sharpe wasn’t always warm and fuzzy with the media like his brother Shannon, and maybe that worked against him too. Shannon Sharpe made the Hall of Fame in 2011. His brother finally made it 14 years later. They’re the first brothers to both be enshrined in Canton.
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Sharpe said after he was voted in that he didn’t worry about whether he’d get into the Hall of Fame. But others wanted to see him get his rightful spot among the game’s legends.
“I don’t care how long or short his career was,” former Packers general manager Ron Wolf, also a Hall of Famer, said via Packers.com. “He was a dominant player in his era. Period. He’s as good a football player that ever wore the green and gold.”
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