Great talent combining with prestigious awards making for sometimes dreadful TV.

It should never take more than four hours to faithfully give six great men their due.

This time the problem lies with the format, not the network.

The NFL Network's Rich Eisen(great to see him on ESPN again if just for a night) injected humor as MC.

Reporters Trey Wingo and Tom Jackson were on point and entertaining.

But the introduction by Bob Hayes Jr., of his late father, illustrated just how the format handcuffed the networks.

Hayes' taped speech was so poignant and so heartfelt — talking about "the pain in his heart" that his father felt of former snubs and how "that pain is gone" — he made us realize how few of those moments we got during the long night.

For the most part, the pre-taped introductions, a new wrinkle, worked. Randall McDaniel having his former assistant principal O.K. Fulton introduce him was a touch of class and Tracy Foster gave us a side of Rod Woodson we might not have gotten. Ted Cottrell (beautiful suit by the way, since the yellow-jacketed inductees looked like they were going to find clients houses near good schools) was funny talking about Bruce Smith.

But the live intros were at times stultifying. After the taped intros, we didn't need another 15 minutes of introduction.

The inductees have earned the right to speak as long as they desire. But even if they each took up 20 minutes Saturday night (including those who spoke for Hayes and the late Derrick Thomas) that left two hours of television.

Why not keep the live introductions to 2-3 minutes, shorten the broadcast, and allow ESPN and the NFL Network to do what they do best?

•More interviews: You couldn't move a first-down marker without hitting an HOFer. Put them on tape and sprinkle through the night.

•More highlights: There are viewers who never saw some of these guys play. More thousand-word pictures, less thousands of words.

•More family: As Hayes Jr., proved, you can't go wrong with family. Most of the inductees pointed out relatives in the crowd. How great would it have been to hear from them?

Woodson gets defensive:

As a new Hall of Famer, Woodson has the gravitas to talk about football rule changes. As an NFL Network analyst, he's got the forum.

"The five-yard chuck rule was in play when I was a player but they gave leeway to you, eight yards or so, as long as you didn't impede the progress of that player," said Woodson, one of the NFL's greatest defensive backs. "But nowadays if you touch them at 51/2 yards, they are throwing the flag, which I can't stand. It's a ticky-tack call.

"If you are a football fan you have to understand that most of the rule changes don't make sense," he said. "Most of the rule changes are a knee-jerk reaction to something that happened that year before. Think of the Tom Brady rule. That wasn't in the making for 10 years. It happened because it happened to Tom Brady."