Pro Football Hall of Fame results: 3 players with North Carolina ties get snubbed
The state of North Carolina went 0-for-3 Thursday night at the Pro Football Hall of Fame, as linebacker Luke Kuechly and wide receivers Steve Smith and Torry Holt were all snubbed.
Kuechly, Smith and Holt had each made the list of 15 modern-era finalists. But none earned a spot in the Hall’s Class of 2025. Instead, the inductees will be cornerback Eric Allen, defensive end Jared Allen, tight end Antonio Gates and wide receiver Sterling Sharpe.
Jared Allen did play a single year for the Panthers — his last season, in 2015. But only two of the 136 sacks Allen had in his career came during that Super Bowl season and he is primarily associated with the Minnesota Vikings.
The Class of 2025 was unveiled Thursday night on the “NFL Honors” show broadcast from New Orleans, where the 59th Super Bowl will be played Sunday between Kansas City and Philadelphia.
Kuechly was in his first year of eligibility for the Hall of Fame and was trying to become the third former Panther in the past four years to get elected. Sam Mills made it posthumously in 2022 and Julius Peppers earned his spot in 2024.
His former teammate Smith, one of the most productive NFL wide receivers of the 21st century, also didn’t make the Hall this year in what was his fourth year of eligibility and his first as a Top-15 finalist.
Holt, the former N.C. State star and North Carolina native, also missed the Hall in what was his 11th year of eligibility and his sixth year as a top-15 finalist.
Kuechly and Holt got closer than Smith did. And by virtue of making the top seven among the 15 modern-era finalists, Kuechly and Holt will become automatic finalists next year under the Hall guidelines.
A media panel of 49 voters decided upon the Class of 2025. The modern-era class was cut first from 15 players to 10 and then to seven. Then the panel voted for their top five players among the seven, with the winners all needing to receive at least 80% of the votes. The voting process changed a bit from previous years, meaning all nominees faced a slightly steeper climb to election this year and accounting for the smallest Pro Football Hall of Fame class since 2005.
Another notable omission to this class was Eli Manning, who won two Super Bowls as quarterback of the New York Giants but wasn’t elected in his first year of eligibility. Manning and Smith were two of the five players cut when the media panel sliced the modern-era field from 15 players to 10 in an early vote, according to Panthers.com.
Kuechly was considered to have a legitimate shot at making it on his first try, as Peppers did last year. Kuechly led the NFL in tackles as a rookie in 2012, when he was AP Defensive Rookie of the Year. In 2013, he became the Panthers’ first (and still only) AP Defensive Player of the Year, once making an NFL-record 26 tackles in a game against New Orleans. Kuechly was named to the NFL’s All-Decade Team of the 2010s, won a national award for sportsmanship and made the Pro Bowl for the last seven seasons he played.
Two things worked against his Hall of Fame candidacy, however: Kuechly never won a Super Bowl. And he retired early, at age 28. Kuechly played eight seasons, all with the Panthers, and left the game for good following the 2019 season after sustaining several concussions during his career.
As Kuechly explained to me regarding his retirement in a recent in-depth interview we did in December: “I was getting banged up. I had some stuff pop up that just kept rearing its head. ... I wasn’t capable of playing how I wanted to… In my mind, mentally, I was like: “Man, I can’t do it anymore.” And I thought that if I wasn’t 100%, I wasn’t doing my job how people expected me to do it…. So yeah, it’s a bummer. I love football. It brings me so much joy. It’s the best job in the world.”
Still only 33, Kuechly now is an analyst for the Panthers’ radio broadcast alongside former Carolina quarterback Jake Delhomme.
Kevin Greene, Reggie White, Mills and Peppers are all among the 382 members of the hall of fame. All were former Panthers, too. So is former Carolina general manager Bill Polian. But all of those men spent multiple NFL seasons elsewhere. Allen, who had his best years in Minnesota, will now join that list of players in the Hall of Fame who wore the Panthers uniform at least for a few games (for both White and Allen, it was in the final year of their career).
Smith has great numbers from his 16-year NFL career — 13 seasons with Carolina, three with Baltimore — but he’s been caught in a Hall of Fame logjam at wide receiver. He has been Hall-eligible for four seasons, and this was the first time he made the cut from 25 modern-era players (the semifinalists) to 15 (the finalists.)
Holt and Reggie Wayne, who played his entire 14-year career at Indianapolis, have made it to the Hall final 15 on six occasions. Both of them will also have to wait at least one more year, meaning the bottleneck at wide receiver isn’t clearing anytime soon, especially with Larry Fitzgerald becoming eligible in 2026.
Smith’s best year at Carolina came in 2005, where he won a rare triple crown by leading the NFL in receptions (103), receiving yards (1,563) and touchdowns (12). He made one Super Bowl appearance, with Carolina, catching a 39-yard touchdown pass from Delhomme in Carolina’s 32-29 loss to New England in the 2003 postseason. He also scored the most famous TD in Carolina history, winning a playoff game in double overtime that same offseason with a 69-yard catch-and-run against St. Louis on a play called “X Clown.”
Holt made the Pro Bowl seven times with the St. Louis Rams and posted six consecutive seasons of 1,300 or more receiving yards. Now 48, he lives in the Raleigh area with his family. Holt and his brother Terrence, who also played in the NFL, run Holt Brothers Inc., which is involved in a variety of philanthropic and business ventures.
Born in Gibsonville, N.C., Holt went to N.C. State, once scored five touchdowns in a single game and became an All-American wide receiver. The Rams drafted him No. 6 overall in 1999. In the pros, he won a Super Bowl as part of the Rams’ “Greatest Show on Turf” and was selected to the NFL’s All-Decade Team of the 2000s.
Kuechly, Smith and Holt will all be eligible for election again for the Class of 2026, along with a host of new nominees who will now have been retired from the NFL for the requisite five years — Drew Brees, Philip Rivers, Thomas Davis and Greg Olsen among them. In other words, it won’t get easier.
Kuechly and Holt will both automatically advance to modern-era finalist status along with kicker Adam Vinatieri and offensive lineman Willie Anderson in 2026. They were the four players who made the final seven among the 15 modern-era finalists but weren’t elected this year.
This story was originally published February 6, 2025 at 10:31 PM.
