Early Saturday afternoon in Canton, as the 2026 Pro Football Hall of Fame class is being officially inducted in front of thousands of onlookers at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium, Bill Belichick, who should be headlining that group, will instead be in Chapel Hill coaching his University of North Carolina football team.

The greatest head coach in pro football history not getting selected for enshrinement in his first year of eligibility? That’s as wrong as wrong can be. It is embarrassing, a bad joke, a nightmare, just a horrible look.

This is supposed to be a glorious day for the Hall — the most glorious day of the year. However, it will a charade this time. It should make the movers and shakers at the HOF, and in particular its voters for enshrinees, sick to their stomach. They have messed up everything — absolutely, positively everything, all of it.

This was always the pro sports hall of fame that did things that made sense. While the baseball guys in Cooperstown were putting in only one or two legends each year because of the snooty, holier-than-thou voters — the elite who are convinced they are bigger, better and smarter than everyone else —looking like foolish on steroids in the process, the people in Canton were like Picasso painting a masterpiece — one that kept getting better every year. Yes, it was the Jim Brown of halls of fame.

Not this year, however. Are you kidding? In Stark County, they have finger-painted a disaster like a disinterested bunch of kindergartners.

And it didn’t have to be that way. The missing ingredient was that aforementioned common sense.

If, when they finished voting and realized they had somehow left out the GOAT, the guy whose HOF-worthiness far outdistances that of all the other inductees combined, and the guy who understands and appreciates the history of the game like almost no one else, they should have reconvened and figured out how to fix it. Instead, they got lazy, irresponsible and derelict of duty and went on to the next thing they had to do that day.

I don’t care what the “rules” are, but the fact of the matter is that it didn’t work — at all, not in the least bit.

All that ugliness and dysfunctional nature will be on full display Saturday. Let’s hope and pray — let’s make darn sure — that it never happens again.

And I am guessing that Joe Horrigan, the Hall’s keeper of the keys for longer than anyone can remember, and a man who gets things done, will be leading that charge.

Steve King