The Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton. Credit: USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Sam Neumann on

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Longtime Houston football writer John McClain is no longer on the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Selection Committee, he announced Tuesday,

McClain, one of the more notable names lost as the Hall overhauled its voting process earlier this month following Bill Belichick’s first-ballot snub, detailed the change in a lengthy post on X.

“It was a privilege serving on the Pro Football Hall of Fame Selection Committee and representing Houston, the Oilers and Texans, but I was told I didn’t make the cut from 50 to 28, including 3 non-voting members, under the new by-laws,” McClain wrote. “Among the changes, no city or team will have a representative and no more individual presentations for finalists will be made.”

That restructuring, which the Hall’s Jim Porter framed as an effort to address “unintended biases” in the voting process, is the same one that shrank the voter pool from 50 to 25 members, eliminated the market-based representative system McClain had been part of, and moved candidate presentations to people outside the committee.

McClain, a fixture of Houston sports media for nearly four decades who spent 47 years at the Houston Chronicle before being laid off from SportsRadio 610 in 2024 after 24 years there, had held the committee seat for 33 years, long enough to personally present the candidacies of Oilers Elvin Bethea, Robert Brazile, Curley Culp, Warren Moon, Mike Munchak, and Bruce Matthews, along with Texans great Andre Johnson and the Cowboys’ Chuck Howley.

“As a member of the Selection Committee for 33 years, I take great pride in presenting” those candidates, McClain wrote, adding a note of thanks to the Hall and the “hard-working Committee members” he’d served alongside, along with well wishes for “everyone who survived the cut and still have the enormous responsibility of selecting the new class every year.”

The Hall hasn’t disclosed its individual selection criteria for trimming the committee to 28 people, but McClain took the news in stride, even as many of his peers did not.

It’s not clear yet who else got swept out alongside McClain.

About Sam Neumann

Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.

View all posts by Sam Neumann