A few colleges in the 1970s distributed playing cards of their football teams; I am guessing that one company printed them for most of the schools. You can see the decks I have so far on the Playing Cards page of the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Each time I added a set, I wrote a blog article about it. Here are the links to the articles:

• 1972 Auburn Tigers
• 1973 Nebraska Cornhuskers
• 1974 Colorado Buffaloes
• 1974 Nebraska Cornhuskers
• 1974 West Virginia Mountaineers

There are several other 1970s college decks out there, and I hope to find them and add them to the Gallery. If you know where I can find any of them, please let me know. These are the decks I know of:

• 1972 Alabama
• 1973 Alabama
• 1973 Auburn
• 1973 Florida

In addition to the 1970s college cards, I know of two other decks of pre-1980 playing cards that picture football players. The first is 1963 Stancraft playing cards, which were issued in conjunction with the opening of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The Gallery’s 1963 Stancraft playing cards page includes more details about the set. The second is a deck produced by the Littlefuse fuse company; it contains pictures of famous linebackers–and fuses! You can read about the Littlefuse Linebacker playing cards in a previous blog article.

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• All of the ABCs

I distinguish oddball items from inserts (see I is for Inserts), though some inserts also fit the description above. Why? Well, since inserts came in packs of cards, most of them are familiar to collectors, and there are enough of them to group them into a category of their own. Oddball items are the unfamiliar, the hard to categorize, the things that go under “miscellaneous.” They have brand names you might never have heard of, like Glendale and Drenks and Salada.

Any number of items can be considered oddball, and I’ll list just a few here. I don’t collect many of them–you have to draw a line somewhere–so I’ll mostly provide links to other places. The only oddballs I have in my collection are playing cards and stamps, which aren’t too far removed from trading cards.

Stamps

I am familiar with three sets of vintage football stamps that were not inserts: 1964 Wheaties, 1969 Glendale, and 1972 Sunoco. Each of the sets had an accompanying album into which you could stick the stamps. I recently added the 1964 Wheaties stamps to the Vintage Football Card Gallery, and you can read about them in an earlier blog post. (One of the Wheaties stamps, Raymond Berry, is pictured here.) I don’t yet have the 1969 Glendale stamps, but that didn’t stop me from writing a little about them, too.

I don’t have 1972 Sunoco stamps yet, either, but they are plentiful on eBay. They appear to have been distributed both in packs and on sheets. The base set is huge: 12 offensive and 12 defensive players for each of the 26 teams, for a total of 624 stamps. On top of that, Sunoco released an 82-stamp update set. Among the 706 stamps are numerous players who never appeared on cards. I like seeing unfamiliar players on cards (or on oddballs), so one of these days I’ll buy a set of the Sunoco stamps. PSA’s set registry shows the composition of both the base set and the update set.

Discs

1976 was the year of the disc. Five sets of football discs were printed that year: Coke Bears Discs, Crane (potato chip) Discs, Buckman Discs, Saga Discs, and Pepsi Discs.

1976 is newer than I typically deal with, and I have never had much interest in the discs, so I don’t know a lot about them. I assume that the same company printed all of them, since I don’t know of any others printed before or since 1976. A friend sent me a couple of Crane Discs once; they’re about the size of a beer coaster. Pictured here is one of them, Charley Taylor.

The PSA registry shows all of the players in the disc sets, and you can see lots of examples on eBay.

• 1976 Buckmans Discs: composition, examples
• 1976 Coke Bears Discs: composition, examples
• 1976 Crane Discs: composition, examples
• 1976 Pepsi Discs: composition, examples
• 1976 Saga Discs: composition, examples

Playing Cards

I initially included playing cards under Oddball items, but there are enough of them that I thought they deserved their own category. See P is also for Playing Cards for a list of vintage playing cards that picture NFL and college football players.

Other Oddballs

As I said at the top, I don’t own many oddball items, and my knowledge of them is limited. Here are a few more, along with links to the set compositions and some examples. As I learn more about them, I’ll give these oddballs sections of their own. If I am missing your favorite, let me know and I’ll add it here.

• Previous: N is for National Chicle
• Next: P is for Philadelphia
• All of the ABCs

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.