Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

In honor of Alex Karras, who passed away this morning, today I identified all of the cards of Outland Trophy winners in the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The Outland Trophy is awarded annually to the nation’s outstanding college interior lineman; Karras won it in 1957. You can see the all-time list of winners on the sportswriters.net site.

Pictured here are cards of two other winners, a 1960 Mayrose Cardinals Mike McGee, and a 1974 Wonder Bread Mike Reid. Click here to see the rest, or use the Gallery’s advanced search page to do more complex searches.

Did you know that Alex Karras finished second in voting for the Heisman Trophy in 1957? I didn’t, until I saw his name on the Heisman Trophy web site. While browsing the Heisman site, I also found other players whose cards I have, but whom I hadn’t known were Heisman candidates. I thought that a page featuring these candidates and their cards would be interesting, so I assembled one and added it to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Have a look!

Yesterday I added 1978 Country Kitchen Vikings photos to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. Pictured here is one of them, Tommy Kramer, who happens to be one of this year’s College Football Hall of Fame inductees. (The full list of 2012 inductees is here.) I listed the Country Kitchen set under Food and Regional Issues.

Yesterday I added 1976 Buckmans Discs to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. The discs were distributed by Buckmans Ice Cream and Bakery (now out of business) in Rochester, New York. Oddly, though Rochester is only about 75 miles from Buffalo, there are no Buffalo Bills in the 20-disc set. There are no New York Giants or Jets, either. See my Gallery page for the discs for more details. I filed the discs under “Oddball.”

This week I added 1962 Topps Bucks (most of them, anyway) to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. These were inserts in wax packs of 1962 Topps football cards. See my gallery page for a short description of the set.

This week I added 1973 Auburn playing cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. One of the cards, picturing Mike Fuller, is shown below. Fuller is one of four players in the deck who later played in the NFL.

The Auburn cards are among several sets of college playing cards that were printed in the early 1970s. See the Gallery’s playing card page for the others I have collected.

This week I added 1975 Fleer Immortal Roll football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. There are 84 cards in the set, one for each Pro Football Hall of Famer as of 1975, except for Jim Brown. The set includes cards of several early players who, to my knowledge, had not appeared on a card before. Here are two of them, Joe Guyon and Mike Michalske.

Today I added a few more pieces to my partially completed virtual uncut sheet of 1957 Topps football cards. Below are two miscut cards that provided clues: a Dick Bielski card with a bit of Elroy Hirsch showing on the left side, and the back of a Paul Hornung card that shows a sliver of Sid Youngelman’s card along the bottom. You can click on either card to see how the sheet is progressing.

For a full list of the virtual uncut sheets I have assembled, see my article U is for Uncut Sheets. As always, if you happen to have pictures of full sheets, partial sheets, or miscut cards that would help the effort, please send me an email.

This week I added 1971 O-Pee-Chee CFL football cards to the Vintage Football Card Gallery. One thing I enjoyed about adding the cards was finding a few players who had also played in the NFL or AFL, but who did not appear on NFL or AFL cards. One of them, Dave Raimey, is pictured here. Raimey played for the Cleveland Browns in 1964, then he played ten seasons in the CFL and made the Canadian Football Hall of Fame.

In the notes for the 1971 O-Pee-Chee cards, I identified all of the players who also played in the NFL or AFL. I also marked the players who are members of the Canadian Hall of Fame. Check ’em out!

Yesterday I showed you some miscut 1967 Topps cards that I picked up at the National; today I have a handful of 1961 Topps cards. I hope to collect enough of these to determine what uncut sheets of 1961 Topps cards looked like. I have not seen an uncut sheet, partial sheet, panel, or strip of 1961 Topps cards, so I am starting from scratch with this set. To see what I have so far, check out my 1961 Topps virtual uncut sheet page. As always, if you have miscut cards that would help the project, I would love to see them.