Fans Can’t Believe Stetson Bennett Isn’t Eligible For College Football Hall Of Fame

Quarterback Stetson Bennett IV, the Tom Brady of college football (in that he is so much older than everyone else he’s been competing against), had himself one whale of a career at Georgia, Jones County Junior College, and then Georgia again.

After 42 games, Bennett owns a 160.9 quarterback rating and is 29-3 as a starter for Georgia. In his final season with the Bulldogs, Bennett went 15-0, passed for 4,127 yards, threw 27 touchdown passes and ran for 10 more TDs.

Bennett, who turns 26 in October, was also named the MVP of the past two National Championship Games and the Offensive MVP in the two bowl games that put Georgia into the final game.

Stetson Bennett was also one of just four players invited to the 2022 Heisman Trophy ceremony.

He is also not eligible for enshrinement into the College Football Hall of Fame.

Wait, what?

That’s right. As Connor O’Gara of Saturday Down South pointed out this week, “This is the very first rule of College Football Hall of Fame eligibility: ‘First and foremost, a player must have received First Team All-America recognition by a selector organization that is recognized by the NCAA and utilized to comprise their consensus All-America teams.'”

The 5-foor-11 Bennett has never been named a first-team All-American – selections that are voted on and decided before each bowl season.

While Bennett had his skeptics — many from Tennessee — for making it to New York, what many failed to acknowledge was that against teams that were in the AP Top 25 heading into the postseason, he had a quarterback rating of 185.27. That was 6th among all Playoff-era quarterbacks (min. 4 games). And again, that was before he led the Ohio State comeback (189.2 QB rating) and the TCU rout (226.9 QB rating).

Bennett is the reason the rule needs tweaking. You cannot tell the story of college football without him. And for everyone who thinks he was just AJ McCarron or Greg McElroy, Bennett had more games with a quarterback rating of 180.0 against AP Top 25 teams in his last 2 seasons (8 of 11 opportunities) than those 2 Alabama quarterbacks combined in their last 2 seasons (7 of 25 opportunities). The irony is that McCarron actually earned AFCA first-team All-America honors in 2013 and he’ll be eligible to appear on the HOF ballot.

Oh yeah… as O’Gara also reminds everyone, Drew Brees (who passed for almost 12,000 yards his final three seasons in college), Eli Manning (who won the Maxwell Award as the best player in college football), aren’t eligible either.

Many fans, upon realizing that Stetson Bennett is ineligible for the College Football Hall of Fame, couldn’t believe it.

“If the Hall of Fame was off talent alone, it would stand for nothing. It’s about honoring excellence and telling the story of college football, and as of Jan. 9, 2023 you can’t tell that story without Stetson Bennett,” another fan tweeted.

And don’t even get them started on whether Mike Leach should be eligible for the Hall.