Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Today I added the ability to search for error cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery. You can combine that search with other searches and find, for example, all error cards of hall-of-famers or all error cards of Philadelphia Eagles. To do the fancy searches, see the Advanced Search page.

Though I have the search working, I don’t yet have all of the error cards identified in my database. If your favorite error card is missing, leave a comment and I’ll get it in.

Can you spot the error on the 1969 Topps Sonny Jurgensen card shown here?

Steve Liskey, from The Cowboys Guide, recently asked me if I planned to add scans of the backs of the cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. My first thought was “Are you out of your mind, Steve?” But then I told him that scanning just the fronts has taken an enormous amount of time, so I will probably never get to the backs. (Another visitor had a more modest suggestion: providing a single example of a card back for each set. Now that sounds like something I can accomplish–someday.)

It turned out, though, that Steve was particularly interested in the backs of 1966 Philadelphia cards. Why? Well, because as shown on the Dennis Claridge card to the right, each card in the 1966 Philly set has a player pictured on the back who is not the player on the front. (That’s Roman Gabriel on the back of the Claridge card.) Steve collects Dallas Cowboys cards, of course, and he wanted to know which cards have a Cowboy on the back.

Now that’s a serious collector, and I understand completely the desire–no, the need–to get every one of whatever type of cards you collect. If you collect a certain team, of course you want the cards that picture your team’s players on the back. So what I will probably do–again, someday–is note which players appear on the backs of the 1966 Philly cards so that the cards show up in searches for the players and their teams.

It had occurred to me even before Steve wrote that a player collector might want any cards on which his player was pictured, whether the player was identified on the card or not. That’s why, for each 1966 Philadelphia team play card, I have added the names of all the players appearing in the action on the front of the card. For example, for the Cowboys play card shown here, I included all five players pictured–three Cowboys and two Giants–in the list of players appearing on the card.

While adding players for the team play cards, I noticed that some of the players don’t appear on cards of their own. For example, to my knowledge, the Cowboys play card above is the only card on which Jerry Rhome appears. (Jerry is the holder for the kick.) I sell a lot of cards to players’ friends and relatives, and I suspect that this extra information will someday help a player’s grandson find his granddad on a card he didn’t know existed.

Search for 1966 Philadelphia cards on: eBay, Nearmint’s cards.

Today I put together another “virtual uncut sheet” page, this time for 1963 Fleer cards. More reasons to be skeptical of your price guide!

I spotted an uncut sheet of 1970 Topps Super cards on eBay this week, so I thought I’d create a virtual uncut sheet for that set. My previous virtual uncut sheets have been 1959 Topps and 1960 Fleer.

As I wrote in an earlier post, the cards in this set have attractive fronts and ugly backs. In addition to the photo, each card features the player’s name in script that looks like a signature. It’s not a signature, though: the script is the same on all of the cards. While 1970 Topps Super baseball cards have facsimiles of the players’ actual signatures, the football cards got short shrift.

One of last week’s posts was about a virtual uncut sheet of 1960 Fleer football cards that I created for the Vintage Football Card Gallery. I got some nice feedback on that, so today I created another, this time a virtual 1959 Topps uncut sheet. This one was a little less challenging, since I had a picture of a real sheet to look at, but I still learned a few things. For one, you only have to look at a couple of these to see that a card’s position on the sheet greatly affects its availability in high grade. It’s remarkable that the price guides don’t recognize this. They must know what the sheets looked like, since they know which cards are short prints, but to my knowledge none of the guides consider sheet position when assigning prices.

I’ve never seen a full uncut sheet of 1960 Fleer football cards, so I created a page in the Football Card Gallery that shows what I think an uncut sheet looked like. I’m calling it the Virtual 1960 Fleer Uncut Sheet. To piece it together, I looked at some uncut strips like these and filled in the blanks. The page also shows some wrong-back cards from the set.

Awhile back, a collector called to ask if I had any 1962 Post Cereal cards, because he was interested in the Bob Lilly card from that set. He said he collected pre-rookie cards of hall-of-famers, and that the 1962 Post Lilly was one he still needed. An interesting idea, I thought.

Today I added a page to the gallery that highlights a few pre-rookie cards. I included a few well-known players that aren’t in the hall of fame, in part because I wanted to include a few 1961 Nu-Cards. The Nu-Card set is one of the few vintage college sets, and it contains cards of a lot players who went on to play in the NFL and AFL.

Yesterday I added the 1959 Bell Brand Rams set to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Like the 1960 Bell Brand Rams, these cards were distributed in packages of Bell Brand potato chips and corn chips, and they are difficult to find. The cards are sturdy and attractive, with a high-gloss finish unlike other issues of the time, but many of them were cut off-center. Each card features a facsimile of the player’s autograph, a nice touch except that some autographs are tiny relative to the size of the cards.

The 1959 set includes a pre-rookie card of hall-of-fame coach Sid Gillman. In 1960 Gillman moved to the Los Angeles Chargers of the new American Football League, and his “official” rookie card, a 1960 Fleer, is with the Chargers. Why is it his official rookie card? That’s debatable, but it is generally accepted that a rookie card must have been printed by a major card company, and cards from regional issues such as Bell Brand are not considered for rookie cardism.

Of course, a player’s rookie card would be more accurately called his first card. I often get emails saying “you say that so-and-so’s rookie card was 19xx, but he was a rookie in 19yy.” And so I have to explain. Oh well, it’s too late to change it now.

I recently added 1960 Bell Brand Rams cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery–or at least the first half of the set. These cards were distributed in packages of Bell Brand potato chips and corn chips, and they are very tough to find in nice condition.

Looking at PSA’s population report, the cards appear to have been issued in two series–or maybe half were included in potato chips and the other half in corn chips? With two exceptions, PSA has graded more cards numbered 1-18 than cards numbered 19-39. The first exception is card #2, Gene Selawski, which I understand was pulled from production when he left the team early in the year. The second is card #30, Charley Bradshaw, which appears many more times in the population report than any other card from 19-39. Perhaps Bradshaw replaced Selawski in the potato chips?

There are three quarterbacks in the set–Frank Ryan, Bill Wade, and Buddy Humphrey–and they all got playing time in 1960. None of them lasted much longer with the Rams, though: Wade and Humphrey played for other teams in 1961, and Ryan went to the Browns in 1962, making room for Roman Gabriel.

Yesterday I added the full set of 1970 Topps Super cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Not to be confused with 1970 Topps Super Glossy insert cards, these are large cards that were sold separately from the regular 1970 Topps cards. The cards are colorful and attractive, and because they are elongated, most show a good portion of the player’s uniform. Some of the players’ pictures are the same as on the regular 1970 Topps cards, some are the same as on the Super Glossies, and some are completely different from the other 1970 Topps issues. The Joe Namath card, thankfully, doesn’t show him with a Band-Aid on his head.

The backs show the same information as the regular 1970 Topps cards, but the large amounts of white space make the backs look like an afterthought. On the set I have, a few of the backs have paper wrinkles from the factory. It’s best just to enjoy the fronts of these cards and not turn them over.