Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

Jim Copeland, who played guard and center for the Cleveland Browns from 1967 to 1974, passed away on June 4. Copeland played in two NFL Championship games: in 1967, against the Baltimore Colts, and in 1968, against the Minnesota Vikings. After his NFL career, Copeland served as athletic director at William and Mary, Utah, Virginia, and Southern Methodist. There is a nice photo of Copeland and a summary of his career at VirginaSports.com.

To my knowledge, Copeland did not appear on any football cards–not unusual for a lineman. He did, however, appear on the 1972 Sunoco Stamp pictured here. There are twenty-four players per team in the base 1972 Sunoco Stamp set–twice as many as in a typical card set of the time–so the set includes numerous players who never made it onto cards. As I wrote in an earlier article, the photos of several Browns in the Sunoco set, including Copeland, were from a mud game against the Colts.

As I reported earlier, a few weeks ago I bought a set of 1972 Sunoco Stamps, and now I’m scanning them for the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Yesterday I did the Cincinnati Bengals and Cleveland Browns. As I’ve said, overall, I’m not fond of the images used in the set. The stamps are small, and because the images are mostly action shots, you can’t see much of the players.

When scanning the Browns cards, though, I noticed that several of the action shots pictured the Browns in a mud game. Now these I like! I love watching weather games, be they in snow, rain, mud, or wind. For one thing, I prefer defensive battles to offensive shows, and bad weather slows the offenses down. For another, it’s just fun to see guys flopping around in the mud. To me, the weather is part of the game, and playing in a dome is playing something short of real football. I’ll take a mud game in Cleveland or a snow game in Buffalo over a dome game anytime.