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Well, for better or for worse the 2010 Hall of Fame inductees have been named. The debates over the merit of those inductees are taking place on other articles on this site.

Now, as per normal, it’s time for us to start looking ahead to next towards 2011.

Many great candidates – Shannon Sharpe, Cris Carter, Andre Reed, Tim Brown, Dermontti Dawson, Charles Haley, and Richard Dent, among others – were held over for at least another year.

Meanwhile the 2011 crop brings several more first time nominees. The most oft-mentioned of that crew is Deion Sanders, the brash, trash-talking cornerback who played in Super Bowls for Dallas and San Francisco after being drafted by Atlanta in 1989. In his first year of eligibility he could join three other top five picks from that 1989 draft in the Hall – Troy Aikman, Derrick Thomas and Barry Sanders.

A trio of upper echelon running backs in Marshall Faulk, Curtis Martin and Jerome Bettis also will take their first turns in front of the Hall voters. Each is in the top 10 all-time leading rushers and both Faulk and Bettis have Super Bowl rings.

Among offensive linemen Willie Roaf gains eligibility.

The list would have been even more crowded if Priest Holmes and Junior Seau hadn’t changed their minds on retiring after 2005. But there’s plenty of competition for slots in the Hall again next year.

Do any of these guys make it on their first go-around? Or do the voters make this collection of players, which is good but not quite as star-studded as this year’s Emmitt Smith/Jerry Rice class, wait while clearing some of the logjam that has collected in recent years?

As always, we’re looking forward to seeing your thoughts.  But first, here’s ours:

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Is this mock draft right? No.

Were there probably some obvious omissions? Perhaps (see Josh Freeman – you can call it an obvious omission if you want. But we don’t think he’s first-round worthy – just our opinion – feel free to tell us why you disagree).

But at the end of the day we think this mock is … well, we think this mock draft is no worse than any other. It’s the only one we’ll do. We have day jobs, so we’re not going to adjust ours every four hours like Mel Kiper does with his.

We set out to write this mock draft a few days ago. Since we got started, one major trade (Peters to Philadelphia) forced a re-write. Certainly other moves are in the works.

That’s why mock drafts are generally worthless. They’re time killers for people who don’t want to do their real work. With one trade or one free agent signing, this whole body of work will be out of date.

So, here’s ours. Like it? Don’t like it? Let us know where we went wrong.

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Tony P. brought up another good point in the Pro Football Hall of Fame 2010 Senior List post–since we’re coming up on the 2009 season, we might as well start looking forward to the Team of the Decade for 2000-2009.

So Andy and I put our heads together. We looked at past All-Decade teams and did some quick and dirty research on the past decade’s post-season profiles. Several positions had a glut of superstars while others were lacking. So we decided to not focus on naming a specific number of players from any given spot but on recognizing players with sustained stretches of great play.

Feel free to let us know what you think.
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