Pro Football Hall of Fame voter Jason Cole completes an annual survey that polls former NFL players, coaches, executives, owners and more to get a look at how the Hall of Fame debate could shape up. Cole asked these individuals to select a Hall of Fame class of no more than five men from a list of 15 Modern-Era finalists. Three-hundred-and-twenty-eight people responded to Cole's survey this year, and both Steve Atwater and John Lynch were among the top seven vote getters. Atwater finished second with 143 votes (43.6 percent of the vote) and Lynch finished seventh with 121 votes (36.9 percent). With the exception of Troy Polamalu, who earned 266 votes (81.1 percent), the survey offered murky results. Atwater and Lynch were separated by just 22 votes, and four men sit clustered between the two Broncos safeties. DenverBroncos.com caught up with Cole in Miami on Friday to hear more about the survey — and what it might suggest about Atwater's and Lynch's chances for being selected.

Jason Cole: "I think that, look, I've gotten to the point after eight years of doing it where I can do it by text message, which becomes efficient. You can't physically have 300 — it's now 330 people I've talked to — you can't have 330 conversations with people. It's not efficient, right? But you can text message people and after a while you know who they are and what their biases are and what you're trying to do is take everybody's opinion, and the more opinions you have, the more you mitigate one opinion overcoming another. That's the danger when you only talk to 20 people. You might run into three or four who overwhelmingly think this guy belongs in, or this guy belongs in. And that skews your perspective. So I think that helps. Is it a be-all end-all? Atwater finished second, which you probably noticed. Does that mean he's an automatic [lock] to get in? No, because once you go from 15 to 10, you would take all the votes of the people who voted for the guys 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 and you would put it back in the hopper, basically. And then you would have to decide. And so it's not really scientific in the same way that we run the meeting. I think it's great for a couple of things: figuring out who's at the high end. Who's the obvious guy? And maybe who's not really in the running this particular year. Because things can change a lot. And then I think the second thing it's good for is when you have multiple players at one position, trying to sort of rank them the best you can. Safeties became a little bit easier. I think it's clear that it's Atwater and Lynch as the second and third guys, and Butler can wait, as you probably saw. Offensive linemen, it didn't really help at all. You take it for what you can. That's how I look at it. Again, it's not a pure system."