Tampa Tribune and TBO.com pro football expert Ira Kaufman reported Wednesday that former Bucs Doug Williams and Hardy Nickerson failed to make the cut to be included on the final ballot for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I don’t think anyone has an issue with Nickerson - a very good linebacker, but hardly one for the ages - but I’d argue that not only should Williams be on the ballot, he should be in the Hall.

Too many voters, I suspect, break a career down by simply the numbers. Doug was fairly pedestrian there; a career 49.5 percent passer with an 88-81 overall record, and 100 touchdowns vs. 93 interceptions. Those numbers don’t exactly jump off the page. Neither do Joe Namath’s. You can look it up if you don’t believe me.

Namath was a career 50.1 percent passer with 173 touchdowns and, gulp, 220 interceptions.

Namath was a no-brainer pick for the Hall, though, because of his work in Super Bowl III. You can make the same argument for Williams, whose performance in Super Bowl XXII has yet to be equaled. While Namath leading the upstart New York Jets to a groundbreaking upset of the Baltimore Colts has been hailed as a turning point in sports, Williams becoming the first African-American quarterback to win a Super Bowl was at least as significant - arguably moreso.

One argument to be made for both these men is simple: Can you write the history of pro football without them?

The answer is obviously no.

Few players had to overcome what Williams did in his career, coming to the Bucs when they were struggling to move beyond a rag-tag expansion bunch. Back then, too many people judged a quarterback by the color of his skin and not by the strength of his makeup. He was a big reason they were able to go to the NFC title game in just his second season as a starting quarterback. If he hadn’t gotten hurt in that game against the Rams, the Bucs might well have gone to the Super Bowl in 1979.

Williams is an iconic figure, just like Namath. Young players flock to him as they would a rock star.

The Bucs were wise to hire him in their personnel department after the moron Hugh Culverhouse essentially ran Williams out of town to the USFL in 1983, and Williams has the goods to be a general manager in the NFL - if not here, then somewhere.

Numbers can tell you a great deal about a man’s career, but they fall way short of telling the whole story in Doug Williams’ case. He’ll have to wait a year now before he has a chance to go on the final ballot, and that’s wrong. It would have been an immense thing to have Williams voted into the Hall during Super Bowl week in Tampa. He needs to get to Canton eventually though. It’s the right thing to do.