Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

The 1966 Philadelphia football card set contains 198 cards, and it was almost certainly printed on a single, standard 264-card sheet. This means that 66 cards were repeated on the sheet, and so there are 66 double prints in the set. The price guides have not identified the double prints, however.

By comparing an uncut half-sheet with PSA’s population report, I believe I was able to identify the double prints in the set. I added an explanation to my 1966 Philadelphia virtual uncut sheet page and marked the cards I think are double prints in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

I haven’t seen the second half-sheet, so I could be wrong. Those who collect the set know, though, that some cards are much easier to find than others, and the cards I have chosen as double prints match up pretty well with cards that are easy to find.

The Gale Sayers rookie card, shown here, is one of the double prints. PSA has graded nearly twice as many examples of this card than of Dick Butkus’s rookie card, which is also in this set.

Yesterday I added a virtual uncut sheet of 1962 Topps football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Looking at the sheet–and having looked at numerous other uncut sheets–I convinced myself that the price guides have misidentified many of the short prints in this set. I would be interested in your feedback.

(Click the image to see the uncut sheet page.)

Today I added virtual uncut sheets of 1948 Bowman football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The numbering of the cards on the sheets shows why some of them are short prints, and the positions of the cards on the sheets shows why some are scarce in high grade.

(Click the image to see the uncut sheet page.)

• Search nearmintcards.com for 1948 Bowman football cards
• Search eBay for 1948 Bowman football cards

As you have probably heard, today is the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of Monday Night Football. The New York Jets played the Cleveland Browns on Monday, September 21, 1970, and the Browns won 31-21. Below are the 1970 Topps cards of the stars of the night: Matt Snell, who had 108 yards rushing for the Jets, and Homer Jones, who had a 94-yard kickoff return for a touchdown for the Browns. There is a box score for the game on pro-football-reference.com.

According to Wikipedia, Marlboro was the first sponsor of Monday Night Football. The Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which banned cigarette ads on television and radio, didn’t take effect until January 2, 1971. It has been forty years since the ads were taken off the air, but I can still recall their jingles.

The 1970 Topps set happens to be the first one I completed as a kid. I remember selling my duplicates for a penny each–what they cost at the time–and using the proceeds to buy more cards. I also remember that my teacher told me to knock it off, because I was selling them during class. The elusive Greg Cook was the last card I needed to complete the set. I probably traded a Bart Starr or a Joe Namath to get him!

There is a great thread going in the Collectors Universe forums about favorite “combo” cards. I had not heard the term before, but it appears that combo cards are simply cards that feature more than one player. (Team cards don’t count, because they’re, you know, team cards.) Some of the cards posted in the CU thread have been autographed by all of the players–very cool.

Most of the cards posted in the CU thread are baseball cards, which isn’t surprising, since the card companies printed far more baseball cards than cards from other sports. What does strike me, though, is how few combo vintage football cards there are. The 1968 KDKA Steelers set is composed entirely of combo cards, but that is a minor regional set. Beyond that, I can think of only a few combos: the 1955 Topps All-American Four Horsemen card, the 1966 Philadelphia Morrall/Scholtz and Gabriel/Bass cards, League Leader and All-Pro cards in some of the 1970s Topps sets, and 1969 Topps 4-in-1 cards, which were actually meant to be separated into four stamps. Of these, only the Four Horsemen, Morrall/Scholtz, and Gabriel/Bass–a grand total of three cards–picture multiple players in the same image.

Vintage baseball cards, on the other hand, feature plenty of multi-player images. Some of the baseball cards posted in the CU thread are batting duos and trios from the same team: Aaron and Matthews; Brock and Flood; Schmidt, Rose, and Bowa. Where are all the football cards like this? Where are Unitas and Berry, Hornung and Taylor, Morris and Csonka, the Million Dollar Backfield, the Fearsome Foursome, and the Purple People Eaters? The football card folks had no imagination.

Some combo baseball cards even picture players from different teams in the same image. There’s Aaron and Mays; Banks and Aaron; Brett and Carew; Killebrew, Mays, and Mantle; on and on. I imagine that some of the multi-player baseball images were pieced together from multiple photos, but how many football cards picture players from different teams standing next to one another? Zero that I can think of. There have been Pro Bowls every year since 1951, but where are the cards of dream backfields, the league’s meanest linebackers, or even dueling punters? Someone must have taken photos–why didn’t the photos make it onto cards?

Oh well, I guess I have a little baseball card envy today. If you can think of more combo football cards, let me know.

• Search eBay for: Four Horsemen, Mays and Mantle, Banks and Aaron
• Search Nearmint’s Cards for: 1955 Topps All-Americans, 1966 Philadelphia

A few vintage football cards show diagrams of plays. To me the diagrams seem like filler, and I am not fond of them. I can’t think of a better subject that starts with “X,” though, so here’s a quick rundown. (Hmm, does that mean I’m using them for filler, too?)

The 1964 and 1965 Philadelphia sets include a “Play of the Year” card for each team. On the front of each card is a diagram of the play and a small image of the team’s head coach. The small images are a nice touch, I suppose, but I would have preferred dedicated cards with full-size images for the coaches.

Among the coaches on the Play of the Year cards are Don Shula and Vince Lombardi. Neither coach, to my knowledge, was pictured on card of his own during his career. The 1964 Play of the Year cards could be considered Shula and Lombardi’s rookie cards, but I haven’t seen them designated as such. Pictured here are the 1964 Packers Play of the Year card and the 1965 Philadelphia Colts Play of the Year card.

The back of each team’s Play of the Year card includes a list of the offensive players, which I like. Occasionally a player’s friend or relative will ask me if I have a card of the player, but I have to tell him that the player never appeared on a card. Since some cardless players’ names appear on the Play of the Year cards, I can at least offer one of those cards to the friend or relative.

As I wrote last year, the Play of the Year cards actually feature some pretty ordinary plays. I theorized then that Philadelphia chose short plays so the diagrams would fit on the cards. Could the Lions’ play of the year really have been just a ten-yard completion? “But Jim, what about that 75-yard TD pass from Earl Morrall to Terry Barr?” “Sorry, Lou, it won’t fit on the card.” I am sticking to my theory.

The Philadelphia cards are the only ones I can think of with play diagrams on the front. A couple of other issues have them on the back. One of these is the 1955 Bowman set, which has a generic play diagram on the back of most cards. Cards of players with lots of stats don’t have diagrams on them, but cards of linemen, defensive players, and rookies all do. Some of the generic diagrams appear on multiple cards, too. Filler, I tell you.

Finally, we have the 1976 Wonder Bread set, which gets my vote for the worst card backs ever. Each features a diagram one of Hank Stram’s favorite plays, along with a detailed description of the play. As I complained in my article about the set, what kid would give the diagrams a second look? But Stram had just taken over as the Saints’ coach in 1976, so perhaps Topps (who printed the cards for Wonder Bread) was trying to ride the buzz about that. Whatever buzz there was didn’t last long, though: even with Stram’s playbook, the Saints went 7-21 in 1976 and 1977. Maybe the Saints’ opponents studied his Wonder Bread cards.

• Previous: W is for Wonder Bread–and Other Food Issues
• Next: Y is for Yale
• All of the ABCs

One of my readers, Steve, recently called my attention to the card shown here, a 1949 Silber’s Bakery Colts Y.A. Tittle card. Huggins & Scott has the card up for sale in their current auction, and they kindly let me copy the image.

I hadn’t seen this Tittle card before, and I hadn’t heard of the Silber’s Bakery issue. Reader Steve also sent me a link to a book, called Football in Baltimore: History and Memorabilia, that contains a description of the Silber’s Bakery set and pictures of two more of the cards. (One of the cards pictured in the book is Rex Grossman, grandfather of Redskins quarterback Rex Grossman III. The elder Grossman played for the Colts and Lions from 1948 to 1950.) There are also pictures of a few Silber’s cards on the SGC web site, along with a full list of the cards in the set.

Tittle’s Silber’s Bakery card is a pre-rookie card; his rookie card is a 1950 Bowman. (For more pre-rookie cards, see my pre-rookie card page.) It is also one of the few cards on which Tittle appears bareheaded. As I wrote in an earlier article, Tittle apparently preferred to wear his helmet for photos. The image on his Silber’s card is the nearly the same as the one on his 1951 Bowman card, shown here. I imagine that whoever colored his jersey 49ers red enhanced the trees in the background, as well.

In 1949, when the Silber’s Bakery cards were issued, the Colts were still in the All-American Football Conference, or AAFC. The Silber’s set is now the second set of AAFC cards I am aware of, the other being the 1946 Sears Cleveland Browns set I wrote about a few weeks ago.

In 1950, the AAFC folded, and three teams from the AAFC–the Colts, Browns, and 49ers–joined the NFL. This Colts team disbanded after the 1950 season, and Tittle joined the 49ers. Three years later, the Dallas Texans moved to Baltimore and changed their nickname to the Colts. The second Colts franchise stayed in Baltimore until 1984, when they moved to Indianapolis.

Old football cards weren’t packaged just with bubble gum. They also came in and on packages of cereal, bread, hot dogs, potato chips, and dairy products. Some food issues were regional: they included players from a single team and were distributed only in that team’s part of the country. I covered most of those issues in K is for KDKA–and Other Regional Sets. In this article I’ll cover the food issues that were distributed nationally and included players from multiple teams.

1974-1976 Wonder Bread and Town Talk Bread

In 1974, 1975, and 1976, Topps printed small sets of football cards for distribution by Wonder Bread. The cards from all three sets are plain, plentiful, and cheap. The 1974 Wonder Bread set includes thirty cards of star players, and its design closely resembles 1971 Topps. The cards of the offensive players, punter, and kicker have red borders, and the cards of the defensive players have yellow ones. Some of the images on the Wonder Bread cards–such as the Willie Brown pictured here–also appear in Topps sets.

The 1975 and 1976 Wonder Bread sets each contain twenty-four cards. Each set represents an all-star starting lineup: offense, defense, kicker, and punter. I described these sets in “New in the Gallery” blog articles, so I’ll just point you to those: 1975 Wonder Bread Cards and 1976 Wonder Bread Cards.

Topps also printed a variation of each Wonder Bread set for Town Talk Bread, a brand that was distributed only in Western Pennsylvania. I did a little research, and I found that in 2005, the Town Talk and Wonder Bread brands were owned by the same company. Apparently, the two companies were already affiliated in the mid-1970s.

The differences between the Wonder Bread and Town Talk cards are trivial. According to Beckett, the 1974 Town Talk cards “are distinguished from the Wonder Bread issue by the absence of a credit line at the top of the cardback.” On the 1975 and 1976 Town Talk cards, the credit line on the back reads “Town Talk Bread All-Star Series,” rather than “Wonder Bread All-Star Series.”

Because they were distributed in only one area, the Town Talk cards are much scarcer than the Wonder Bread cards. Most of the Town Talk cards I see are priced ten times higher than their Wonder Bread counterparts. You can usually find a few Town Talk cards on eBay.

1962 Post Cereal

1962 Post Cereal was a large set for its time, with 200 cards. The cards came on the backs of cereal boxes, several to a box, so they are all hand-cut. The set contains several pre-rookie cards of Hall of Fame players; one of them is the Bob Lilly pictured here. You can see the rest on my pre-rookie card page.

The images on the Post cards are amusing. Most show the players in fake action shots, and the players appear to be hunching over to fit into the frame. Y.A. Tittle is wearing his helmet, of course, and I believe he is the only helmeted player in the set. (See Y.A. Kept His Hat On.) As I wrote in a previous article, the Post cards used footnotes to indicate which players had been traded during the off-season. Each card of a traded player shows both his old team and his new one. I can’t think of another vintage football card set that explicitly identifies the traded players.

Two of the cards in the Post set have variations. Both cards, Jim Ninowski and Sam Baker, have footnotes because the players had been traded. On each of these cards, the asterisk for the footnote can be either black or red. Yes, we nutty card collectors need to have them both.

1952 Wheaties

The 1952 Wheaties set is a sixty-card, multi-sport set. It contains two cards each for thirty athletes, and the cards came ten to a box on Wheaties boxes. The cards are slightly smaller than standard trading cards, at 2 by 2 3/4 inches.

Six of the thirty athletes in the set–and hence, twelve of the cards–are football players: Doak Walker, Otto Graham, John Lujack, Tom Fears, Glenn Davis, and Bob Waterfield. I don’t yet have them in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, but there is a picture of an uncut panel of Wheaties cards in one of my earlier blog articles.

1970 and 1971 Kellogg’s

Yet another cereal company, Kellogg’s, got into the football card game in 1970. Kellogg’s included small, plastic-on-paper “3-D” cards in their cereal boxes in both 1970 and 1971. The Lance Alworth card pictured here is a 1970 Kellogg’s card; the Jim Hart is a 1971 Kellogg’s.

The Kellogg’s cards came in thin paper wrappers that you could see through, and I know at least one person who collects the cards still in the wrappers. I make fun of him, but I actually think it’s cool. The 1970 Kellogg’s cards were available as a complete set via mail order, but the 1971 cards weren’t, so the 1971 cards are scarcer. The plastic coating on the cards makes the corners sturdier than cardboard, so the cards are easy to find in high grades. The plastic is susceptible to cracking, however.

Both sets feature facsimile signatures on the front, and lots of stats and detailed personal information in tiny print on the back. They’re pretty cool cards, and I imagine that kids made their moms buy lots of cereal to get them.

You can see both 1970 Kellogg’s and 1971 Kellogg’s football cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

Other Food Issues

As I said at the top, several other food issues were distributed regionally. These regional issues include 1959 and 1960 Bell Brand Rams, 1960 Mayrose Cardinals, 1961 Lake to Lake Packers, and 1961 Golden Tulip Chargers. You can read about them in K is for KDKA–and Other Regional Sets.

One group of food issues I haven’t covered yet is the run of 1959-1964 Kahn’s Wieners sets. I’ll write about those in a separate article.

• Previous: V is for Values
• Next: X is for X’s and O’s
• All of the ABCs

What is My Card Worth?

I get a lot of email from people asking what their old football cards are worth. To answer this question, I put together a couple of web pages, Football, Baseball, and Other Sports Card Values and Where to Sell Football, Baseball, and Other Sports Cards. For quick answers, check out those pages. For more details, read on.

Most times, the answer is “not much.” The reason is that most vintage cards are not rare: the card companies printed great numbers of them, and their supply far exceeds demand. Our moms threw out a lot of cards, but just as many cards survived the years.

Not many of them survived undamaged, though. When we bought the cards as kids, we played with them and beat them up. We flipped them, put them in our spokes, sorted them every which way, wrote on them, and then tossed them into shoeboxes. I still have some of the cards I bought as a kid, and most of them look as if I kept them in my back pocket. Some of those priceless gems are pictured here.

So, though most cards aren’t rare, they can be scarce in perfect or near-perfect condition. (See G is for Grading.) This is where demand can exceed supply and push prices up. Serious collectors seek cards that look like they’re straight from the pack, and when there are more collectors who want a card than there are high-grade examples of it, the card becomes valuable.

Some cards are rare in any condition–1894 Mayos, for instance–so even the beat-up ones are valuable. If you find one of those behind the fridge, hang onto it. Nobody has asked me to appraise a Mayo, yet, though. Typically it’s a water-stained 1974 Topps Art Malone card with “Jimmy” written on the back.

Factors Affecting Supply

There is no way to know exactly how many copies of a card were printed or how many exist in high grades. There are, however, indicators of supply that people who write price guides take into account when assigning prices to the cards. Some examples:

• Relative scarcity – Though exact print numbers of vintage cards are not known, with experience in the hobby, you can begin to tell which sets were printed in greater numbers than others. My experience tells me, for example, that high-grade 1959 Topps football cards are easier to find than 1958 Topps cards.
• Series – The card companies sometimes released cards in series: Series 1, Series 2, etc. Some series had smaller print runs than the others, so the cards in those series are scarcer. Typically the later series had the smaller print runs, presumably because kids buying the cards lost interest as the season went on.
• Short prints and double prints – Each card typically appeared more than once on an uncut sheet of cards. If a card appeared less often than most of the others, it is called a short print. If it appeared more often than most of the others, it is called a double print. A series can have either short prints or double prints–depending on which were the exception on the sheet–but I’m not aware of any series with both. See my 1963 Fleer Virtual Uncut Sheet page for an example of a sheet containing short prints.
• Errors and Variations – Some cards had errors that were corrected during production, so both the error cards and corrected cards were printed in smaller numbers than the rest of the set. (See E is for Error Cards.) Some cards had two or more variations–for example, Lance Rentzel’s name appeared in either black or red on his 1970 Topps card–and each variation was printed in smaller numbers than the rest of the set.
• First and last cards – Theoretically, the first and last cards of a set got more wear from rubber bands and such, so their supply in high grade is lower. I think it’s bunk, but the price guides price the first and last cards significantly higher because of this assertion.

Another factor that affects a card’s supply in high grade is where it was on an uncut sheet. (See U is for Uncut Sheets.) The corners and edges of uncut sheets tended to get damaged in production, just as the corners and edges of individual cards do when handled. This tendency is hard to quantify, though, and as far as I know, none of the price guides take a card’s sheet position into account. The example I always use of a scarce corner card is the 1960 Fleer Jim Woodard, which you can read about on my 1960 Fleer virtual uncut sheet page. Though all 1960 Fleer cards were printed in equal numbers, the Woodard card, which was on the bottom left corner of the printed sheet, is much scarcer than any of the other cards in the set.

As I said above, to my knowledge, in years past, the card companies did not publish the number of cards they printed. (Perhaps they do now; I don’t know much about modern cards.) The card grading companies, however, keep records of how many of each card they have graded. These records are called population reports. If you have a subscription to PSA’s population report, for example, you can go to their web site and find out how many 1960 Fleer Jim Woodard cards they have graded (eighteen, as of today), and how many they have assigned a grade of 9 (just one). By looking at the population reports, you can get an idea which cards are scarcer than others. Population reports are imprecise indicators of the overall population, though: collectors tend to get expensive cards graded more often than cheaper ones, and sometimes they crack graded cards out of their cases and get them re-graded, throwing off the population numbers. Plus you never know when the person holding all the mint Jim Woodard cards is going to fetch them from his mom’s attic and send them all to PSA.

Factors Affecting Demand

Moving to the buyer’s side of the transaction, here are some of the factors that affect demand. I have discussed most of these in earlier articles.

• Set popularity – Some sets are more desirable to collectors because of their design and the players they include. For example, most football card collectors really like the 1955 Topps All-American set.
• Player popularity – Some players are more popular than others, naturally. Hall of Famers, Heisman winners, and players who were famous outside of football (e.g., Jack Kemp) are usually more in demand than average players.
• Player potential – This is much bigger factor for players who are still playing, but it can also affect retired players who are Hall of Fame candidates. If a retired player–for example, Jerry Kramer–still has a good shot at the Hall of Fame, the prices of his cards will tend to be higher than the cards of a player who is not being considered.
• Rookie cards vs. non-rookie cards – Collectors like to collect rookie cards, especially of Hall of Famers. (See R is for Rookies.)
• Team popularity – As I wrote in an earlier article, some teams have a larger following than others. I find that Packers, Raiders, and Cowboys cards sell more readily than cards from other teams.
• News – A player’s death or a team’s performance can increase the demand for that player’s or team’s cards, though this effect is usually temporary.

Price Guides

I presume that to assign the prices to the cards in a given set, people who write price guides gather a sample of actual retail card prices, then consider the factors above to get the prices for the rest of the cards. The assigned prices are usually in the ballpark, but there are plenty of cases where they are not. Often cards are much scarcer in high grades than the price guides indicate, and sometimes they are far less in demand than the price guides appear to think they are.

In addition to price guides, there are services that provide a history of the prices realized for graded cards on eBay and in other auctions. The services are useful, but their sample sizes are often small. If three PSA 8 1967 Philadelphia Atlanta Falcons logo cards sold on eBay in the last year, and their selling prices were $72, $49, and $25, what should you expect to pay for one? And are you willing to search eBay each week and wait for the next one to appear? I use these services, but I also consider other factors when deciding what to pay: the prices realized for similar cards, how frequently the card is available for sale, the person selling the card, and how nice the card is for the grade. To me, a PSA 7 that is well-centered is worth a premium over one that is noticeably off-center.

The bottom line is that no price guide or pricing service is perfect. They will usually get you in the ballpark, but keep in mind that the prices can be based on small samples or large generalizations, so the prices for some cards can be off by multiples. As with anything, the more educated you are and the harder you shop, the better bargains you can find. Personally, I try not to sweat it: if I pay a reasonable price for a card I want, I’m happy. Sometimes I’m happy even if I pay an unreasonable price. For some people, the thrill is in getting cards as cheaply as possible; for me, fretting over a few dollars takes the fun out of it. To each his own, of course.

• Previous: U is for Uncut Sheets
• Next: W is for Wonder Bread–and Other Food Issues
• All of the ABCs

Occasionally you will see uncut sheets of vintage cards up for sale. Studying uncut sheets can give you insight into why some cards are much harder to find than others. For example, by looking at the uncut sheets for a set, you can see why some cards are considered short prints or double prints. For most sets, the price guides indicate which cards are short prints or double prints, and they adjust the cards’ prices accordingly. I say most, because I believe some short prints are not documented–those in the old Philadelphia sets, for instance.

(Image from legendaryauctions.com; click on it to see whole sheet.)

Short prints and double prints are just part of the story. A card’s position on an uncut sheet can also affect its scarcity, because cards on the corners and edges of the sheets were more likely to be damaged in production. I have not seen this factored into price guides’ prices, though: if two common cards were printed in equal numbers, the price guides will usually–if not always–assign them the same price.

The price guides do assign higher prices to the first and last cards in a set, asserting that the first and last cards generally got more wear than the other cards. Supposedly, lots of kids sorted their cards into numerical order, put rubber bands around them, and banged them around. In practice, though, I find that first and last cards aren’t noticeably scarcer in high grades than the other cards, unless they happened to be on the corners and edges of the sheets.

A recent–and timely!–thread in the Collectors Universe forums includes pictures of numerous uncut baseball card sheets and a nice discussion about short prints and double prints. The thread shows the patterns that the card companies used when arranging cards from sets of different sizes on the sheets. Depending on the size of the set (or series within a set), the card companies repeated rows of cards on the sheets in different patterns. I recommend reading the thread.

Pictured here is the card I always use as an example of one that is scarce because of its position on the sheet. It’s a 1960 Fleer Jim Woodard card, and it was in the bottom-left corner of the sheet. The Woodard is easily the toughest card in the set–PSA has graded only four of them 7 or better–and a PSA 8 would sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay. Most other PSA 8 1960 Fleer commons sell for $10-20.

Over the past year, I have put together a number of “virtual” uncut sheets in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, including one for the 1960 Fleer set. I have included a little discussion for each sheet, as well. Rather than repeat the information here, I’ll just point you to the pages for the sheets:

• 1948 Bowman
• 1948 Leaf
• 1949 Leaf
• 1950 Bowman
• 1951 Bowman
• 1952 Bowman Large
• 1953 Bowman
• 1954 Bowman
• 1955 Bowman
• 1956 Topps
• 1957 Topps
• 1958 Topps
• 1959 Topps
• 1960 Fleer
• 1960 Topps
• 1961 Fleer
• 1962 Topps
• 1963 Fleer
• 1963 Topps
• 1964 Philadelphia
• 1965 Philadelphia
• 1966 Philadelphia
• 1967 Philadelphia
• 1968 Topps
• 1969 Topps
• 1970 Topps Super

Here are more of the ABCs:

• Previous: T is for Topps, Part 4: the 1970s
• Next: V is for Values
• All of the ABCs

Topps has printed football cards every year from 1955 to 2009, but since this is a vintage football card blog, I need to stop somewhere. Which years are considered vintage? There is no official definition, but most collectors put the end of the vintage era between 1970 and 1975. As a kid, I collected cards until 1973, so that’s where I’ll stop with this article.

1970 Topps

The 1970 Topps football set is the only set I completed as a kid. I’m not nostalgic about it. Looking at all of the football sets that preceded it–Topps and otherwise–I think the 1970 Topps set is drab. As in 1958 and 1967, Topps used a portrait style on their 1970 cards, and the “matting” covers a large portion of the images. Also, starting in 1970, Topps no longer had the rights to print team logos on cards. In 1968 and 1969, Topps used the team logos to dress up the cards, but in 1970 the logos were gone. Not only that, but in 1970, Topps used only player photos that did not include helmets, in order to avoid showing the team logos on them. Sets prior to 1970 included a lot of nice photos of players with their helmets, but starting in 1970, if Topps showed a helmet on a card, they had to airbrush its logo away.

Like the 1969 Topps set, the 1970 Topps set was released in two series of 132 cards. Card #132, the second series checklist, was included in both series, so it is a double print. As in the 1969 set, some of the second series 1970 cards have scratch-off backs. As in 1969, most of them went unscratched. (See S is for Scratch-Offs.)

Though I’m not fond of the set, there was one great thing about it: every second series pack included a Super Glossy insert card. The 1970 Topps Super Glossies are easily my favorite insert set, and perhaps my favorite set overall.

1971 Topps

1971 Topps is my favorite regular 1970s set. The colored borders on the 1971 Topps cards make them brighter than the other 70s Topps cards, and also more challenging to find in high grade. (Cards of AFC players have red borders; cards of NFC players have blue ones.) The cards don’t have team logos on them, but the little cartoon football players on the front are kind of fun. There’s a different cartoon player for each position.

The 1971 Topps set was the first set to acknowledge the players that were All-Pros the previous season. The All-Pros’ cards have borders that are half blue and half red, like the Paul Warfield card shown here. The 1971 Topps set was another 263-card set released in two series, and its second series checklist appeared in the first series, as well.

It is in the 1971 Topps set that we see the first airbrushed helmets. Though the set doesn’t include any “in action” cards labeled as such, three of the regular cards–Joe Kapp, Jake Scott, and Dennis Shaw–show images of the players in action, and the logos on their helmets have been airbrushed away. This was the start of a dreadful practice.

1972 Topps

In 1972, Topps fully embraced airbrushing. The 1972 set included 42 “Pro Action” cards, and the helmets on those had to be airbrushed. Topps also used sideline photos for a few players, and they had to airbrush the helmets on those, as well. While they were at it, if a player had been traded to a different team, Topps just airbrushed an old photo to give him new colors. Why bother getting a new photo when you can just airbrush an old one?

The 1972 Topps set did have some firsts: it was the first to include “league leaders” cards, and it was the first to include cards for the previous year’s playoff games. Both of those are nice features. It was also the first to give All-Pro players both a regular card and an All-Pro card–overkill, if you ask me. Some star players–Floyd Little, for example–appear on four cards: regular, All-Pro, league leaders, and Pro Action.

This set was also the first–and, to my knowledge, only–football set to be released in three series. The third series appears to have been an afterthought. Why do I think this? Well, the first two 1972 series had a total of 263 cards, like the full 1969, 1970, and 1971 sets. The second series checklists from those sets appeared in both the first and second series, and so did the 1972 second series checklist. If Topps had planned a third series in 1972, wouldn’t they have continued this pattern and included a third series checklist in the second series? Also, 38 of the 88 third series cards are All-Pro and Pro Action cards, basically fillers. The remaining 50 cards are player cards, and though a few are Hall of Famers, none of them are major stars. The biggest names of the day–Unitas, Sayers, Simpson, Bradshaw, Namath, Staubach, Butkus, Griese, and Dawson–are all in the first or second series. And none of the league leaders who appear on cards 1 through 8 are among the player cards in the third series.

The third series was also released very late in 1972. I know I had lost interest in cards by the time they came out, because the only third series cards I had in my childhood collection were from a pack my brother gave me for Christmas. Evidently not many other kids bought the third series cards, either, because when I resumed collecting in 1989, they were scarce and worth much more than cards from the first two series. Larry Fritsch Cards apparently bought a lot of unopened third series cards, though, and as Fritsch has been selling them, the prices have fallen. Not only have a lot of third series cards entered the market recently, but they’ve all been brand new! Fritsch still has unopened boxes of 1972 Topps third series cards for sale.

1973 Topps

In 1973, Topps went to the other extreme and released all of their football cards in a single series. If the modern era is defined by large sets released in a single series, then 1973 is the beginning of the modern era for football cards. Topps was now clearly going for quantity over quality: there are 528 cards in the 1973 Topps set, and they are the plainest of the plain. Gone are any nice touches, even simple things like using the team’s colors in the little ribbon on the left side of the cards. Topps did, at least, use the same ribbon colors for all of the players on the same team. All St. Louis Cardinals cards, for example, have blue-and-orange ribbons.

Surprisingly, though Topps dramatically increased the number of cards in their set in 1973, they omitted some of the special cards they introduced in 1972. Like the 1972 set, the 1973 Topps set contains league leader cards and cards of the previous year’s playoff games, but it does not include Pro Action or All-Pro cards. The 1973 set does include three funky boyhood picture cards, but the bulk of the set is player cards. The large increase in the number of player cards meant that a lot of players made their first appearance on a card in 1973. I might be off by a card or two, but I count 196 rookie cards in the 1973 set! To me, the number of new faces is the set’s best feature.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a 70s set without some serious airbrushing. Here are a couple of beauties. The Paul Robinson card looks like a face-in-hole picture.

As I said at the top, 1973 was the last year I collected cards as a kid. Coincidentally, that’s about the end of what most collectors consider the vintage era. It’s also when Topps appeared to go into full cost control mode. By 1973, Topps was using the sparest of designs, they evidently chose not to spend money to license team logos, and they crudely airbrushed old photos of players rather than acquiring new ones. If I remember correctly, they did not include inserts in packs of 1973 cards, either.

I presume that with no competition, the company was just minimizing costs to maximize profits. Or, maybe, because inflation was high in the 70s, they were trying to reduce costs so they could keep prices low. Their customers–kids like me–didn’t care much what the cards looked like, so long as our favorite players were on them. Now, though, as vintage card collectors, we have dozens of old sets to choose from, and I prefer most 50s and 60s cards to those from the 70s.

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You can’t talk about vintage football cards without talking about Topps. Topps printed football cards in 1950, 1951, and every year from 1955 until 2009. Earlier this week, I was a little apprehensive about writing this post, since that’s a ton of sets to cover. Then I realized that since I run this place, I can split the topic up however I want!

Since this is a vintage football card blog, I’ll cover the Topps sets until the mid-1970s. That still leaves over twenty sets to talk about, so I’ll break them down further and do just a few years at a time. This is part one, the 1950s.

1950 Topps Felt Backs were Topps’s first football cards. They left nowhere to go but up. The Felt Backs are homely little suckers, especially when compared to Bowman’s attractive 1950 set. (See B is for Bowman.) You can see most of the 1950 Felt Back set in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

There are a few sources of information about the Felt Backs on the ‘net: An article on the PSA web site has a description of the set, but no pictures. (I assume the author of the article, Staff Writer, has left the company.) The Redskins Card Museum has nice pictures, both front and back, of the Redskins Felt Backs. The Topps Archives Blog has a picture of a window display for the cards, and a picture of a birthday card with a Felt Back pack attached. The birthday card is kind of cool, and there were birthday cards like it that had other toys attached, such as balloons.

I do like one thing about the Felt Backs: the whimsical adjectives describing some of the players. James Murphy is a “deft passer and quarterback.” Bimbo Cecconi is a “blazing halfback.” Bob Bucher is a “tough guard.” And so on. And the little pennants on the back are interesting. Who knows, maybe the cards will grow on me.

Topps’s next offer, 1951 Topps Magic, was more standard than the Felt Backs, but still innovative. As I wrote in S is for Scratch-Offs, the magic part of the cards was the scratch-off section on the back. Most of the cards I see have been scratched, and unscratched cards carry a premium, price-wise.

Like the 1950 Felt Backs, the 1951 Magic set featured college players. Several of the players–Bill Wade, Babe Parilli, and Marion Campbell, for example–went on to have long pro careers, and they appeared on numerous cards in later years. Parilli had the longest career of any of them, playing nineteen seasons for six NFL, CFL, and AFL teams!

After 1951, Topps took a break, and Bowman continued to print cards of NFL players. When Topps returned, in 1955, they produced the 1955 Topps All-American set. This classic and popular set has its own place in the ABC’s, so I won’t discuss it here. See A is for All-Americans.

In 1956, after buying out Bowman, Topps was finally able to print cards of NFL players. Sandwiched between the 1955 All-Americans and the equally classic 1957 set, the 1956 Topps set is somewhat overlooked. I like the cards, though. As I wrote in B is for Bowman, the 1956 Topps cards have elements of both the Topps and Bowman issues from 1955. Like the 1955 Bowmans, they have colored backgrounds and auras around the players, and like the 1955 Topps All-Americans, the have the team name and logo in a little box on the front.

The 1956 Topps cards are also the same size as 1955 Bowman and Topps cards. 1956 was the last year Topps printed cards in this large size, though. To my knowledge, except for the 1965 Topps “tall boys,” all of the Topps sets since 1956 have been the smaller standard size. I assume they made the change to save cardboard.

The 1956 Topps set was the first to include team cards, a nice feature. To my knowledge, it’s also the only set that identified the players on the team cards. I wish all sets did. I sell a lot of team cards to friends and families of the players, especially players who did not appear on cards of their own. Because the images of the players are small on team cards, it is sometimes hard to tell the players apart.

As I mentioned above, the 1957 Topps set is another classic. Like the 1955 All-Americans, 1957 Topps cards have both a portrait and an action shot, a design that collectors find appealing. (Topps would use it again in their 1962 set, another popular issue.) There are six rookie cards of Hall of Famers in the 1957 set, including Bart Starr and John Unitas, the league’s premier quarterbacks for the decade to follow.

1957 Topps was the first football card set to be released in two series. Most of the second series cards are scarcer than cards in the first series, and many are poorly centered. The challenge of finding the cards in high grades, combined with the attractive design and big names in the set, make the 1957 Topps set fun to collect.

In 1958, Topps took a step backward, in my opinion. The 1958 Topps cards are darker than in 1957, and their images are not as clear. The dark colors–such as the black on Jim Brown’s rookie card–tend to show snow and scuffing, as well. And I think the “matting” covers too much of the images: the effect is like looking at the players through a telescope, or a knothole.

The 1958 Topps set is also smaller than its predecessor: 132 cards, released a single series. To me, it is like the 1953 Bowman set, a letdown after a classic. Unlike the 1953 Bowman set, it has a couple of key rookie cards–Brown and Sonny Jurgensen–and those are the cards that save it.

Rounding out the decade is the 1959 Topps set, a return to bright, colored backgrounds, and two series of cards. For a fun summary of the set, see T.S. O’Connell’s article on the Sports Collector’s Digest web site. For a discussion about some of the cards that are tougher to find, see my virtual uncut sheet page for the 1959 Topps set. I can’t add much to what’s written on those pages, so I’ll just let you check those out.

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• Next: T is for Topps, Part 2: 1960-1963
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There are lots of scary images on old football cards, but this Don Hutson 1963 Stancraft playing card struck me as the Halloweeniest. He looks like he’s wearing a homemade super hero costume. Add a pair of antennae, and he could be Ant Man!

The 1963 Stancrafts are an interesting set. I have read that they were issued for the opening of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1963, so though most of the players in the set eventually became Hall of Famers, only 17 were members the year the set was printed. (Hutson was one of the initial 17; you can see the rest on the Pro Football Hall of Fame site.) The cards were issued as a two-deck bridge set: one deck with red backs and one deck with green backs in a red plastic tray.

You can see the full set of 1963 Stancraft Playing Cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery.

Pictured here are two cards I listed for sale yesterday, both 1968 Topps cards graded PSA 5. Each of them has a tiny hairline crease that I had to use a magnifying glass to see. If not for the hairline creases, my guess is that PSA would have graded both cards 8 or 9.

To me, graded 5′s like these are the best value in the hobby. Typically, a card graded Excellent has a problem that you can see from a few feet away: worn corners, serious printing problems, horrid centering, obvious surface wear. Cards like the ones pictured, though, look perfect until you tilt them in the light and perhaps use magnification. And, being 5′s, they sell for a small fraction of what an 8 or a 9 would sell for.

I’m not sure where the hobby’s aversion to creases came from, but even the faintest half-inch crease on the back of a card is a killer for a card’s grade. Have collectors always downgraded cards so harshly for the faintest of creases, and the grading companies just incorporated that harshness into their standards? Or was it the grading companies who decided that any crease, no matter how faint, is devastating to a card’s value, and collectors just accepted that?

As I wrote in G is for Grading, your personal tastes can differ from the grading companies’ standards. When they do differ, it can present opportunities for bargains on cards that you find perfectly attractive. To me, the biggest bargains are cards with tiny, faint creases–especially on the back. On some cards, such as the old Bowmans, it’s actually sometimes hard to distinguish light creases from lines that occur naturally in the paper.

Joe Namath’s 1965 Topps rookie card is easily the most expensive regular issue football card of the 1960s. Come to think of it, it might also be more expensive than any regular issue 1950s card. Why is it so valuable? Well, just being a rookie card of a Hall of Fame player is enough to make it expensive, since collecting Hall of Fame rookie cards is a popular endeavor. (See H is for Hall of Famers.) The 1965 Topps “tall boy” set is also a classic, and one of the most popular vintage sets. And Namath himself, of course, was a flamboyant personality playing on a large market team. Remember his “guarantee” that the Jets would beat John Unitas and the Colts in Super Bowl III? How about his pantyhose ad, and his Noxema ad, with Farrah Fawcett?

Still, I have a hard time justifying the price of the Namath card, and it might be another card whose price is inflated by the price guides. (See the Jim Lansford discussion in B is for Bowman.) Just compare Namath’s rookie card to Bart Starr’s 1957 Topps rookie card: the Starr card is only slightly easier to find in high grade than the Namath, 1957 Topps is also a classic set, the Packers won a lot more championships, and most people think Starr was a better quarterback. Yet the Namath sells for two or three times more than the Starr? It seems that either the Namath is overvalued or the Starr is undervalued.

Might the Namath be more valuable because it is a short print? Well, it’s possible that the price guides added a premium for that, but I am not convinced that it even is a short print. The guides say that there are 132 short prints in the set (or 44 double prints, depending on how you look at it), but that sounds fishy to me. Assuming that the 176 cards were released in a single series–and I haven’t read anything to the contrary–my guess is that they were printed on a 198-card sheet, with 22 double prints. I don’t know why Topps would have used more than one sheet if the cards all fit on one. My Beckett catalog isn’t much help; it says merely that “Since this set was not printed in the standard fashion, many of the cards were printed in lesser quantities than the others.” Well, gee, Dr. Beckett, what fashion was it printed in?

To see what I’m talking about, you can look at a half-sheet of 1969 Topps basketball cards on the sportscards.info web site. The basketball cards are also tall boys, and the half-sheet of tall boys holds 9 rows of 11 cards, or 99 in total. A full sheet of tall boys would thus hold 198 cards.

An article on the PSA web site sings the praises of the 1965 Topps set and describes the challenges in finding high-grade cards: poor centering, print marks, etc. Since that article covers the basics, I won’t repeat them here. One point in the article is inaccurate, though, or at least outdated: it says that the set’s two checklists are scarce, and that one of the checklists is the second-most valuable card in the set. PSA’s own population report, however, shows that many of the other cards in the set are scarcer than the checklists in high grades, and some of them sell for more than the checklists. (The last PSA 8 Jim Colclough to sell on eBay, for example, went for $909.) If what I have observed in other sets holds true, the cards most difficult to find in high grades are the ones that were on the corners and edges of the sheets.

The PSA article doesn’t mention that there were only eight AFL teams in 1965, so the 1965 Topps set has over 20 cards for each team. That is far more cards per team than most vintage sets provided, and it allowed Topps to print cards for players who typically would not have appeared on a card. In particular, the set contains an unusual number of cards of linemen and defensive players, and many of those are the players’ rookie cards. Pictured here is one example: the only card of defensive back Gerry Bussell. (Thanks to Pastor Scott for this observation–see his comment on D is for Defensive Players.)

As they did every year from 1960 to 1967, in 1965 Topps grouped the cards by team. I like this feature: first in the set come all of the Patriots, then come all of the Bills, and so on. Also, if I know a player’s team, I can locate his card quickly, even if I don’t know his card number. This is because the teams are in alphabetical order by city, and the players are in alphabetical order within each team. I wonder if it is coincidence that 1960 through 1967 were also the years that Topps had competition in the football card market, and, except in 1960, their competitors grouped the cards by team, as well. In 1968, when Topps again had no competition, they reverted to the random ordering they had last used in 1959.

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