Before ramping up to its regular season, the NFL takes a fond look back at its past. The new additions to the Pro Football Hall of Fame are commemorated this Saturday, with a quintet of era-defining players getting bronze busts and gold jackets.

The 2026 Hall of Fame class covers so much ground. It includes a heroic quarterback in Drew Brees, a graceful wideout in Larry Fitzgerald and a tough-as-nails linebacker in Luke Kuechly. Saturday also gives long-overdue flowers to innovative running back Roger Craig, and coronates Adam Vinatieri as the most clutch kicker in NFL history.

As is tradition, this year’s Hall of Fame members will deliver speeches and relive career highlights. It’s a must-see event for ardent fans of the sport. Here’s what to know before tuning in.

How to watch the 2026 Pro Football Hall of Fame induction ceremony

• Venue: Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium — Canton, Ohio
• Date: Saturday, Aug. 8
• Time: Noon ET
• TV: ESPN, NFL Network
• Streaming: Fubo (Stream Free Now)

ESPN also streams with an ESPN Unlimited subscription. NFL Network also streams with an NFL+ subscription. 

Hall of Fame induction ceremony coverage

The broadcast on both ESPN and NFL Network is hosted by Rich Eisen, the inveterate football anchor. He’s joined by analysts Louis Riddick and Kurt Warner. Warner has a gold jacket of his own — the two-time MVP quarterback was part of the 2017 class.

As of July 30, NFL Network has been added to the ESPN Unlimited app. It’s part of the billion-dollar partnership that was announced last August.

This is ESPN’s 31st consecutive year, and NFL Network’s 23rd, covering the Canton celebration.

This year’s Hall of Fame inductees

Brees was the first pick of the second round in the 2001 draft. He went 30-28 under center for the then-San Diego Chargers, but suffered a brutal injury to his throwing shoulder during the final week of the 2005 season. The New Orleans Saints took a chance on his recovery, and it proved to be a fruitful decision. Brees arrived in New Orleans as the Saints returned to the Superdome, one year after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Across the next decade and a half, the pinpoint passer won two Offensive Player of the Year awards, led the league in passing seven times and set a single-season record in 2011 with 5,476 yards through the air. Most significantly, he was MVP of Super Bowl XLIV, the Saints’ emotional championship and first in franchise history.

Brees takes the stage ranking No. 2 in the NFL record books in career passing yards and touchdowns. He’ll be presented by his former coach Sean Payton.

Craig was a second-round pick of the San Francisco 49ers in 1983. He turned into a fixture of the Niners’ dynasty and earned championship rings during the 1984, 1988 and 1989 seasons. He became the first player to record three touchdowns in a Super Bowl. In Super Bowl XIX, he rushed for one score and caught two others.

Craig’s 1985 campaign broke unprecedented ground when he totaled more than 1,000 rushing and 1,000 receiving yards. He also won Offensive Player of the Year in 1988 with a league-leading 2,036 scrimmage yards.

The versatile running back retired after stints with the then-Los Angeles Raiders and the Minnesota Vikings. He’s the lone 2026 inductee selected by the senior committee, which considers candidates from earlier seasons up to 2000. Craig’s presenter is Jamie Williams, his childhood friend and teammate in the NFL (49ers), college (Nebraska Cornhuskers) and high school (Davenport Central High in Iowa).

Fitzgerald went third overall in the 2004 draft. He quickly emerged as a playmaker for his Arizona Cardinals, with 1,409 receiving yards and an NFL-best 103 catches in 2005. Fitzgerald was a model of consistency through 17 seasons and played his entire pro career in Cardinal red.

His playoff run during the 2008 season was one for the ages: 546 yards and seven TDs across four games, capped by his inspired performance in a tough Super Bowl XLIII loss.

The generational WR1 ranks second all-time in receptions and receiving yards. His father, Larry Fitzgerald Sr., was a longtime sports reporter who covered Minnesota teams. Fitzgerald told The Athletic that he wanted his dad to be his presenter at the enshrinement. His son, Devin, will now do the honors following Larry Sr.’s passing.

Kuechly joined the Carolina Panthers as a 2012 first-rounder. His tenure was relatively short but absolutely spectacular — Defensive Rookie of the Year in 2012, Defensive Player of the Year in 2013 and five first-team All-Pro bids in eight seasons. In 2015, Kuechly captained Carolina through its 15-1 regular season. He opened that postseason with pick-sixes in back-to-back games as the Panthers made it to the Super Bowl.

After the 2019 season, the archetypal middle linebacker retired at age 28. Now 35, he becomes one of the youngest Hall of Famers in NFL history, second only to Gale Sayers. Kuechly will be introduced by his father, Tom.

Vinatieri rose from an undrafted free agent to the NFL’s all-time scoring leader. He kicked for the New England Patriots and Indianapolis Colts during his 24-year career, with three first-team All-Pro nods and four Super Bowl victories.

Vinatieri’s crowning moments were part of New England’s dynastic ascent — two clutch field goals through a blizzard in the famous Tuck Rule Game, then decisive makes at the end of Super Bowls XXXVI and XXXVIII.

He is the third full-time placekicker to reach the Hall of Fame, alongside Morten Andersen and Jan Stenerud. He’ll be honored by Carlie Irsay-Gordon, the Colts’ current co-owner and CEO.

New Hall of Famers in the NYT archives

Drew Brees

This was the moment Drew Brees had longed for, the reason he came back from a shoulder injury so severe that doctors initially said it could not be repaired. This was for all the critics who said he was too short, for all the teams that passed on him as a free agent.

Mostly, this was for New Orleans, the city that adopted Brees, the place where he helped form a perfect union. Brees was the quarterback who desperately wanted to feel needed. New Orleans was the city destroyed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the city that desperately needed help. — Greg Bishop, 2010

Roger Craig

It was a typical Roger Craig moment. Late in the third quarter of last Sunday’s game against Dallas, Craig took a short pass from Joe Montana at the left sideline, turned upfield, gained 15 yards, tossed the ball aside and jogged back to the 49ers’ huddle without the slightest show of emotion.

With that play, Craig became the first player in National Football League history to surpass 1,000 yards both rushing and receiving in the same season. For almost anybody else, it would have called for a celebration. But for Craig, it was all in a day’s work. — Ira Miller, 1985

Larry Fitzgerald

Everything about Larry Fitzgerald seems elongated lately. It is in the way he leaps above and between defensive backs to catch passes, and how his braided hair flows from his white Cardinals helmet and falls on his shoulders.

Even the number on Fitzgerald’s back, 11, stands tall. His coach, Ken Whisenhunt, and his quarterback, Kurt Warner, said Fitzgerald might still rise to greater heights.

“When you see a dynamic player like that who wants to be great, the sky’s the limit,” Whisenhunt said. — Joe Lapointe, 2009

Luke Kuechly

But tucked away in the farthest corner of the same cavernous room, far from his brash and bold teammates, is where linebacker Luke Kuechly quietly hangs his jersey.

Kuechly, the defense’s 24-year-old leader, doesn’t seek the spotlight. He is “laid-back,” as his fellow linebacker Shaq Thompson described. He rarely says anything that isn’t expected, and he doesn’t have anything hanging above his locker aside from his nameplate. When prodded by a reporter to give himself a nickname, he said, simply, “How about ‘Luke?’” — Jodie Valade, 2016

Adam Vinatieri

The ball was snapped cleanly and went dead center through the uprights, a 48-yard field goal that beat the Rams, 20-17, as time expired.

That was not snow swirling in Vinatieri’s face, as it had two weeks ago, when the kicker sent the Patriots into overtime with the Raiders with a 45-yard field goal to tie the game, then kicked a 23-yarder to beat the Raiders. Tonight it was victory confetti. — Judy Battista, 2002

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Matheus Nunes was a reluctant right-back. In fact, he simply did not want to play there.

“I spoke to so many people. I have a psychologist. I spoke to my friends. I would tell my friends all the time, ‘I’m not a full-back, I’m not a full-back’. And they would always say, ‘No, but you play so good there. You play so good’.

“The team-mates, Bernardo Silva and Ruben Dias, were so annoying all the time as well. They were in my head constantly. ‘You were good there, you were good there. You need to accept it’. And I was like, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no’. All the time.

“But yeah, at a certain point, you just have to see what the people are saying. You can’t be denying it for the rest of your life. If you do, maybe you miss your chance. And if I did that, I would have missed it.”

Nunes is in typically high spirits as he sits in a conference room just down the road from Seoul’s Gyeongbokgung Palace, which has stood since the year 1395.

Manchester City are in town to continue their pre-season preparations amid record-breaking temperatures in South Korea. “It’s so hot,” Nunes says with an exasperated smile as he takes his seat. The walk from the car to the hotel is enough for this professional athlete to break into a sweat.

Over the course of 30 minutes, he talks about his role as the joker in City’s dressing room, gives an insight into the squad dynamics and recalls Pep Guardiola’s departing message, but mostly he talks about becoming the club’s stand-out right-back, and the process of embracing his move to that position from midfield.

As recently as this April, City’s then manager Guardiola said “Matheus Nunes is becoming one of the best right-backs in the world”, and while the Catalan was prone to some exaggerated comments regarding the 27-year-old Portugal international, that sentiment cannot be far from the truth.

“Honestly, if I didn’t change my mindset, I would never have played good there and he would never have said stuff like that,” Nunes says. “He probably said that because he started to see what others couldn’t see, which was that I can actually do the role — and not just do the role but do the role very good.

“But for me to do that, I had to believe in myself first. Otherwise, I wouldn’t do it. And I feel like that was the main thing for me, changing my mindset and thinking I can actually be what he was saying.”

Nunes is expected to be a key player for new City manager Enzo Maresca (Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)

To understand Nunes’ progression over recent seasons, it is necessary to go back to the start. He was signed from Wolverhampton Wanderers in August 2023, with City anticipating a shift in the Premier League landscape that would require dynamic running through midfield.

Guardiola had called him one of the best players in the world when City played against his Sporting CP team in 2021, but when asked about his statement a couple of years later, he laughed it off. “He is not.”

City’s move towards dynamism in midfield was warranted, as the capture of Elliot Anderson this summer proves, but Nunes’ days of providing that are over. One of Guardiola’s other famous Nunes-related comments is that he is “not clever enough with the composure” to play in the middle.

“He didn’t mean it that way,” Nunes says. “He spoke to me the day after. He said that’s not what he meant. What he told me was that in small spaces — like Bernardo (plays), for example — he felt like I was not that clean sometimes. It’s not like I was not smart enough. He said he would never say something like that.

“He never got the chance to actually speak about this, so (people) don’t know that, obviously. But I don’t think a player who’s not smart would be able to play as many different positions as I did, and play well.”

Amid City’s worst season of the 10-year Guardiola era, the 2024-25 debacle when they won just 11 of 31 matches from October to March, having won the previous four Premier League titles in a row, Nunes was used on the left wing at times, and then thrown in at left-back against Manchester United for a pre-Christmas derby.

Neither side played well, but City were on their way to a morale-boosting 1-0 victory when Nunes conceded a penalty that led to an 88th-minute equaliser. Amad then ran off Nunes to score a 90th-minute winner.

“I’m not going to lie. Individually, I would say this is probably the most difficult game,” he says.

“Like, in my head after the game, my head was…. when you do mistakes as a midfielder, you would never affect the game like the effect of that one. I did one mistake and it led to a goal, and then you end up losing the game, and that’s all you think in your head, you know?

“But it was not only that. It was me coming to a place where it was uncomfortable for me, a position where it was uncomfortable for me, not being able to accept it, because I wasn’t accepting it.

“In my head, ‘I’m not a full-back. I’m not a full-back’. That’s all I was thinking about. It was difficult.”

It is clear that the next six months were not easy for Nunes, who played infrequently and, when he was picked, was asked to play a role he was not willing to accept. It was not until the end of that season, with City competing in the first expanded Club World Cup in the United States, that things started to change.

“If I was playing, for example, one game, then I would be five games on the bench, and then I would play again as a full-back. It’s six months in total, but I played maybe 10 or 15 games. I didn’t have the consistency that I wanted to actually be comfortable in this position and to change my head around,” he says.

“I think in the Club World Cup, I felt like I did very good games as a full-back, so then my mindset started to change a little bit. I was like: ‘Oh, I can actually play good in this position’ because if you look to the games, for example, in the Club World Cup, and other games as well, I remember, attacking-wise, I played very high as a No 10 or as a No 8 that can get to the box.

“Attacking-wise, playing for City as a full-back, you play a very important offensive role. And defending is the thing that I had to learn the most. I feel like it was in the World Cup that I felt the most comfortable, or actually start to change my mindset because I thought: ‘Oh, I can actually play good and do similar things that I used to do when I was a midfielder’, making crosses and giving assists, getting to the box. And yeah, I felt like, maybe some stuff (but) there’s not a big difference. Maybe that’s why I started to change my mindset.”

Nunes became a mainstay of the team, with the help not just of Guardiola, but assistants Pep Lijnders and especially Kolo Toure, a stalwart at centre-back for Arsenal’s Invincibles side two decades ago, who hammered home the defensive side of the game.

He impressed so much that he has been dubbed ‘Cafunes’, after the great Brazil World Cup-winning captain, by fans online. And also the players.

“This started with Bernardo, actually,” Nunes laughs. “When I was playing as a winger, he would call me Thierry Henry. Then I played as a full-back and he called me Cafu. It was different people giving me different nicknames in the club. My friends started calling me that as well, and I had to accept it.”

He paints the picture of how much of a fun character Bernardo was around the club, but it was Nunes himself who earned the reputation of joker-in-chief, alongside John Stones. Josko Gvardiol, speaking on the Hong Kong leg of this tour, called them soulmates and partners in crime.

“That is why me and John clicked; he was always a joker,” he says. “Once I arrived, he saw I was like that. Him and Bernardo, I would say the three of us were the jokers of the team.

“It’s always good to have a laugh — what’s the point of life if you’re not having a laugh?

“And these are the people that you spend most of your time with; you spend more time with these guys than with your family. Sometimes you get sick of them because you see them so many times. And if you don’t have a good environment, there’s no point in being there. You don’t want to be working in a place where the vibe is not good.

“I just try to do that, and try to be happy. I’m just being myself, and then I end up being a clown sometimes.”

Bernardo and Stones have left the club this summer after long City careers, of course, and Nunes is typically honest about how much of a loss not having them around will be.

“Massive,” he says. “Everyone knows. They won everything, were involved in everything over 10 years. They were two of my best friends, also Nathan (Ake, another departure since the end of last season). They are going to be huge losses.

“The guys who left the club in the last two years have been the people I’ve been very close with. We’ll miss them so much. Not only on the pitch. I like to talk off the pitch — you don’t know how they are off the pitch. I’ll miss the daily interaction, going for breakfast and starting to p**s John off in the morning.”

Nunes gets emotional, though, when he remembers the final days of last season, specifically when Guardiola broke the news to the squad that he would be stepping down. He showed them a video of the team’s highs, his dressing-room speeches and other conversations with players that had been captured by the club’s videographers during his decade in charge.

“It was unexpected,” Nunes says. “We thought there was a chance of him leaving, but until he actually says it you don’t know if it’s going to happen. He spoke to us in the auditorium, and it was a very emotional day. A lot of people were crying. It’s very hard to say goodbye to someone who gave so much to us all, someone who put the club to a level that seems unreachable again. What he did was unbelievable. It is difficult to talk about.

“I remember that day, when you start to see everything on the screen, it becomes real that he is leaving. It didn’t seem real. It felt weird and awkward to actually have to believe it. A lot of things are going to change. I’ve never been in the club without him. Stuff like this. It’s never easy to say goodbye.”

Life has moved on quickly, though, with former Guardiola assistant Maresca returning to lead City into a new era.

Unlikely as it may have seemed, even to himself at this time last year, Nunes is going to be a big part of it.

Welcome to our Who am I? game.

The rules are simple. Each day there’s a new footballer and the challenge is to guess who they are in as few attempts as possible.

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Today’s player and clues set by BBC Sport’s Huzaifah Khan.

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