A change to the Pro Football Hall of Fame's eligibility rules could expedite entry for a couple of legendary coaches.
The Hall of Fame announced new bylaws on Friday, which revised the selection process and also revealed a significant change: The waiting period for coaches to become eligible for enshrinement has been reduced from five seasons spent out of the game to one season.
Realistically, this means eight-time Super Bowl champion coach Bill Belichick would be eligible for enshrinement in 2026. The same is true for Super Bowl XLVIII champion coach Pete Carroll, who oversaw a decade of legitimate title contention while leading the Seahawks prior to his departure in 2024.
If neither take a job in 2025, Belichick would be all but guaranteed to be enshrined, and a strong argument could be made in Carroll's favor. And if either coach accepts a job after enshrinement, they'd join Joe Gibbs and Paul Brown as the only people to be enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, then come out of retirement to again become a head coach in the NFL, per NFL Research.
Belichick earned his place as arguably the greatest coach in American football history by turning the Patriots into a powerhouse, reaching nine Super Bowls as New England's coach and taking home six Lombardi Trophies. He owns the record for the most Super Bowl wins (eight, with two coming as an assistant), the most Super Bowl wins as a head coach, the most Super Bowl appearances (12), the most playoff wins as a head coach (31), and the most division titles as a head coach (17). No team was more persistently dominant than Belichick's Patriots, who went 266-121 and won 30 of their 42 playoff games in Belichick's 24 years at the helm, and it wasn't until Tom Brady left for Tampa Bay that the foundation started to crumble, leading to his mutual parting with the Patriots in 2024.
Carroll, meanwhile, recovered from a difficult stint in New England in the 1990s by returning to the collegiate ranks, where he turned the University of Southern California into a machine in the early 2000s, leading them to two AP national titles (2003 and 2004) before jumping back into the NFL ranks as coach of the Seahawks in 2010. It took him just three seasons to lead Seattle to their first-ever Super Bowl triumph in a 43-8 blowout win over the high-powered Denver Broncos in Feb. 2014, and a year later, they were one late-game sequence from repeating as champions before ultimately falling to Belichick's Patriots in Super Bowl XLIX.
Carroll never got the Seahawks back to the game's biggest stage, but walked away from Seattle with a 137-89-1 regular-season record and a 10-9 postseason record as a head coach.
Both Carroll and Belichick are in their early 70s, so it's unlikely anyone associated with either coach will bristle at the Hall's adjusted eligibility requirements. It might feel strange -- one of the Hall's firm traditions had been the five-year wait for enshrinement -- but it would be difficult to make a case against either coach.
