Well, the 2012 season is over. By and large the Twittersphere would seem to indicate that people are reasonably satisfied with the Super Bowl they just finished watching. New York and New England put on quite a show again as Tom Coughlin and Eli Manning once again edged out Tom Brady and Bill Belichick in an exciting game that came down to the last play.

That result seemed more satisfying to people than the results of Saturday’s Pro Football Hall of Fame voting. From the exclusion of Cris Carter, Andre Reed, Bill Parcells and Will Shields to the inclusion of Cortez Kennedy or Chris Doleman, most fans seemed to be upset about something – and with the immediacy of the Internet, many of them decided to let the voters know they were upset.

Some spewed epithets. Others called for entirely new voting panels. Most would benefit their arguments by at least spelling correctly the names of the candidates they support … but I digress.

At least a couple of voters invited discussions with the fans, acknowledging both the voters’ frustrations and, notably in some cases, even their own. Peter King from Sports Illustrated noted that all six players who were selected ultimately deserve to be inducted to the Hall – and on that I agree with him. There isn’t anyone going to Canton in 2012 who I would argue does not belong there.

I would say, however, that I don’t think they are necessarily the six MOST deserving players. And I don’t know that King would disagree with that either. He notes in another tweet specifically on the wide receiver logjam: “Seems a disagreement over which of the two – Carter, Reed – is most deserving.” And in another, in response to criticism from a fan who called for an entirely new panel of voters, he notes: “Not sure new panel could bridge Reed/Carter gulf.”

That’s also a fair point. Throw in Tim Brown, whom I argued at this linked post is the most qualified of the three, and you’ve got a situation where fans are perplexed and frustrated – and so are King and other voters.

That’s a problem. You’ve got three deserving candidates who, from the way it sounds, are not being held out of the Hall of Fame on merit, but on the inability of voters to come to a consensus around getting one of them in now so they can narrow the field and improve the odds of the other two in later years.

That becomes important as those guys’ careers become more and more memory and as those wide receivers playing now benefit from a more pass-happy game. Current players – and even some who have recently retired – who in some cases were not nearly the players that Brown, Reed and Carter were, put up stats that equaled or even exceeded them, simply because there were more opportunities. Guys who catch 100 passes a season were once a rarity. Now it happens almost every year.

So what do you do?

Well, at least one guy on Twitter suggested an entirely new voting panel. I think that’s going overboard. I believe the voters, by and large anyway, are dedicated, well-meaning, knowledgeable and trustworthy. Or at least I will believe that until I’m told otherwise. But what about some new panelists or an expansion of the voting panel? Major League Baseball has more than 1,000 voters. Does that make their process better? Arguable. And any new voter still is going to have to deal with the fact that there simply are a lot of qualified players right now, maybe more than ever.

In fact, that alone might be part of the problem. It’s always said that players are bigger, faster, stronger and more talented as a whole these days than they were in the past. These guys can afford to train year-round and don’t have to get jobs like their predecessors most often did through probably the early 1980s.

Maybe we have to face the fact that either A) The Hall needs to increase its class size and let more players in or B) Really tighten up the standards, realizing that the Hall is for the absolute best of the best of the best and acknowledge that, as such, some – often many – great, very qualified candidates are going to end up on the outside looking in.

I don’t know what the answer is. I’m hoping to do some digging around over the coming weeks and months to see if there are any great ideas out there. If you readers have any thoughts, please feel free to post them below.

In the meantime, let’s look at the good that was done on Saturday. Even though many of us agree that the six guys who will be inducted this summer might not be the first six guys we would have expected or hoped the voters would elect, they still did some good work.

Going into this weekend, the offensive line logjam was equally as troubling as the wide receiver one remains. Had Dermontti Dawson and Willie Roaf not been elected, they would still be on the board next year with returnee Will Shields. As it sits, Shields will be joined next year by Larry Allen and Jonathan Ogden. You could induct an entire class of Dawson, Roaf, Shields, Allen and Ogden, using up all of the available modern-day candidate slots, and nobody could say any of the candidates did not deserve to be there. But voters took care of two of the three this year.

They also started to clear up a defensive line mess. While I think Charles Haley was more deserving than Cortez Kennedy or Chris Doleman, I have no issue with the latter two being inducted. And that also loosens another logjam that would have been created if all three had been on the board as Michael Strahan and Warren Sapp join the list of eligible candidates next year.

So a fair amount of good was done this year.

Others have argued that Parcells and/or DeBartolo belong. Maybe they do. But with the other finalists this year and some of the other factors involved, I don’t have a problem with them waiting another year or two years. I’d take one or two of the three wide receivers as my next “in” over the two of them.

Regardless, at a limit of five modern-day candidates per year, we’re almost inevitably going to be having this conversation year after year after year. And while I think it is okay to be frustrated, I think calling for a voting panel or yelling epithets at the selection committee over Twitter is the wrong way to attack the problem, at least in part because it seems at least some of them are frustrated by what is going on too.