I’m not sure how the Denver Broncos so deeply offended the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but they must have done something wrong, because this is getting ridiculous.

On Tuesday, the NFL announced that Cowboys owner/general manager Jerry Jones and former league commissioner Paul Tagliabue had been selected as Contributor finalists for the 2017 NFL Hall of Fame class. Broncos owner Pat Bowlen, who was also a candidate, was not voted in as a finalist.

Any which way you splice it, it’s difficult to make heads or tails of the NFL’s decision.

While Jones is likely the most recognizable owner in the league, if not all of sports, it’s difficult to find a single area in which he and his Cowboys have outperformed Bowlen’s Broncos.

And that’s without mentioning Bowlen’s accomplishments off the field.

As 9News’ Mike Klis detailed yesterday, Bowlen, who was the chairman of the league’s TV committee, was the leader behind the NFL’s revenue explosion.

Bowlen, the Denver Broncos’ owner since March 1984, will get serious consideration for two  reasons: One, his work  as chairman of the TV committee that helped explode the NFL  from one of  the three  major  sports that – incomprehensibly as it may seem  now – claimed it was  losing  money from its TV packages in 1991 to what is now a $13 billion a year monolith.

It was Bowlen’s decision to bring in the Fox network as a partner starting with the 1994 season that changed the world of sports broadcasting rights fees. Bowlen is also considered the father of NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” that since its inception in 2006 has usually been the highest-rated show on television each week.

Sadly, though, Bowlen’s omission is just one more in a long line of Hall of Fame snubs.

Despite being tied for the most Super Bowl appearances in NFL history (8), the Denver Broncos have just four players enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.