Nick Wagoner, ESPN Staff Writer 8y

Nothing comes easy for Kurt Warner, and that includes Hall of Fame induction

EARTH CITY, Mo. -- There's nothing easy about making Kurt Warner's case for being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

And that's fitting, because nothing came easy for Warner on his road to the NFL. His career came in three parts and didn't begin until an age when most players were already closer to the end of their playing days than the beginning.

"There's different situations for different people," Warner said on 101 ESPN radio in St. Louis this week. "I think that's the hardest thing when you try to quantify or qualify my career is that I just didn't get the opportunities that everyone else did.

"I think that's the thing that I'm honored about so much in the last couple years in being a finalist for the Hall of Fame, is the voters have realized there's different ways to have impact. There's different ways to leave a legacy and not everybody gets the same opportunities. It's easy to qualify the career of someone who plays 20 years and has all the stats and does all of those things. But what about those of us that don't get that? What about those of us that start our careers when we're 28 years old and bounce around to a few different teams?"

Warner was, of course, speaking from experience. And the answer to his question came Saturday night when the NFL unveiled the 2016 Hall of Fame class. As a finalist for the second time in as many tries, Warner came up short.

More often than not, Hall of Famers are rewarded for a combination of production, achievement and longevity. There are exceptions: Chicago Bears running back Gale Sayers was so dominant in a small sample size that there was no doubt about his candidacy.

Warner didn't start an NFL game until he was 28 years old. His storybook ascent out of the Arena League and a grocery-store job to the top of the NFL has been told many times.

"All of a sudden it was all there," former Rams coach Dick Vermeil said. "I wish I could say I knew Kurt was going to be that good. I knew he could play and I thought we would really play well, but I didn't know he'd be as great as he was."

In his first season as a starter, Warner was the NFL and Super Bowl MVP. Two seasons later, he was the MVP again and the Rams reached another Super Bowl, this time losing when New England kicked a last-second field goal. Years later, he helped lead the Arizona Cardinals to Super Bowl XLIII.

"Kurt is the consummate pro," former Rams teammate Orlando Pace said this week. "To take two organizations like the Rams and then Arizona -- to take them both to Super Bowls is unbelievable. His story is so great, his perseverance, the great years he had in St. Louis and then to go away and then rebound and have great years in Arizona.

"I'm biased because I love Kurt. But he's a Hall of Famer in my book no matter who is voting."

Warner is one of three quarterbacks, along with Craig Morton and Peyton Manning, to take multiple franchises to the Super Bowl and the only one to take previously moribund organizations like the Rams and Cardinals to the NFL's promised land. He also holds the three most prolific passing days in Super Bowl history.

Could there have been more had Warner had the same opportunity as other star quarterbacks? It's a fair question Warner has asked himself but is OK not answering.

"I wouldn't have it any other way," Warner said. "Yeah, would it have been nice to say, 'What if I had stayed with one team for 15 or 16 years? What would it have looked like? Would that have equaled Hall of Fame or whatever? Would that have equaled six Super Bowls like Tom Brady?' But again, my life is so much bigger than just what happens on the football field."

It's what happened on the football field, as short-lived and stop-and-start as it might have been, that ultimately decides Warner's Hall of Fame fate.

"There was a lot of different circumstances for me that it's really hard to quantify my career," Warner said. "But what I look at is in the time that I was on the field and the opportunities that I had with the organizations when they gave them to me, I felt like I played at an extremely high level and I'm very, very proud of that. Nobody else has ever done it like I did it, and that to me is the greatest honor. I'll take that with me wherever it leads me."

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