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Since retiring 11 years ago, Holt has been a HOF semi-finalist 11 times and a finalist six times…When will he get asked to dance?

By Tim Byrnes

When a crime is committed, there is a trial. A great travesty has befallen professional football for eleven straight seasons, and wrongs must be corrected! So, I present my case for WR Torry Holt to don the golden jacket.

I give you: Torry Holt’s Career vs. The Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Background:
After an All-American career at North Carolina State, WR Torry Holt was drafted in the first round of the 1999 NFL Draft. On April 17th of that year, he was chosen 6th overall.

Two-hundred and eighty-eight days later, he had seven receptions for 109 yards and a touchdown to help bring a Super Bowl win to the Rams organization.

Over the next eleven years, Holt would go on to catch 920 passes for 13,382 yards and 74 touchdowns in the regular season, and he would add 47 receptions for 630 yards and four touchdowns in his ten playoff appearances.

Despite his stellar career, the crime is that he has been skipped over for Hall of Fame induction year after year.

Exhibits:
Holt’s 13,382 receiving yards is 17th in NFL history, with TE Tony Gonzalez 6th being the only non-WR with more yards.

Every wide receiver above him played at least two more seasons; in the case of the great Jerry Rice, he played nine more seasons than Holt(20).

Pro Football-Reference created a HOF metric that considers statistics, milestones, championships, and the number of Pro Bowl and All-Pro selections and determines a wide receivers likelyhood to make the Hall.

Again, Torry Holt ranked 17th in NFL history within the metric. Only Stephen Smith, Reggie Wayne, and Anquon Boldin are above him without a jacket and have only recently gained eligibility. Both played five more years than Holt.

A whopping 22 WRs graded well below Holt’s metric have already graced the Hall with their presence. 

That’s 22 before Holt!

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He was a Pro Bowl selection in seven of his eleven seasons and an All-Pro twice.

He has a ring from Super Bowl XXXIV, his rookie year.

He led the NFL in receiving yards in 2000 and 2003 and also led ’03 in receptions with 117. That season, Holt had his best stats with 1,696 receiving yards and 12 touchdowns to go with those 117 catches.

As a member of The Greatest Show on Turf, Torry Holt had many impressive statistical streaks.

From 2000-07, he had eight straight 1,100-yard receiving seasons, and only Rice has more(13), and it took the greatest WR in history nine more seasons to do so.

Within that streak, Holt had six consecutive 1,300-yard seasons, six straight 90-reception seasons, and eight consecutive years where he reached 80 catches.

Of the leading players on those ‘Greatest Show on Turf’ years, only Holt is left on the outside looking in.

The coach(Vermeil), the quarterback(Warner), the quarterback’s backside protector(Pace), the running back(Faulk), and the WR1(Bruce) have ALL made the HOF, and yet Holt waits.

Before the announcement of the 2024 HOF Inductees, Kurt Warner said of Holt that the man was among the best wide receivers of his era and that it isn’t right he had the most yards receiving in the 2000s but hasn’t gotten the call.

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Final Argument:
Torry Holt was a consensus pick on the 2000’s All-Decade Team, yet the only WR on the team not in the Hall.

Even the two tight ends from the All-Decade Team are now in the Hall, in Tony Gonzales and Antonio Gates.

During his time in the NFL, he had 835 yards more than any other receiver. The receiver behind him at two was the #4 receiving yards leader of all-time, Randy Moss, with Terrell Owens behind him at three.

This is the company he keeps!

Since retiring 11 years ago, Holt has been a HOF Inductee semi-finalist 11 times and a finalist six times.

He played in a Rams system that gave over 1,000 targets to the running back and slightly more than 1,050 receiving targets to the third and fourth wide receivers.

Yet he continued with consistent elite production.

In his last six years, five with the Rams and none of which were winning seasons, Holt went through five different coaches who had five different offensive approaches.

Those last years of his Rams tenure were the beginning of the ‘Cleveland Browns-like’ quarterback debacle that started after Mark Bulger was gone and lasted until Jared Goff went #1 overall in 2016.

Holt dealt with eight different starting quarterbacks. 

Yet he continued to put up elite numbers.

Even when injury ended his career, he still caught 52 passes for 722 yards with David Garrard in Jacksonville.

While in the NFL no one had more receiving yards than Torry Holt.

With that, I humbly submit that Rams WR Torry Holt should receive his call, his gold jacket, and his due.