Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

In 1956, Topps held a logo lookalike contest, and Norm Willey won it with this pose. No, not really, but he does look like he’s doing an eagle imitation, doesn’t he? I have always loved this card for the pose.

I tried to think of other players who resemble the logos on their cards, but I didn’t come up with any. There must be players who look like mean bears or lions. Can anyone think of more?

• Search for Norm Willey cards on: Nearmint’s Cards, eBay

If you are going to collect cards, you need to learn to grade them. To the untrained eye there is little difference between a mint card and a near mint card, but there can be a tremendous difference in value between the two. Some sellers, not surprisingly, tend to overgrade their cards, and you need to be able to judge a card’s grade for yourself to ensure that you’re getting what you’re paying for.

Third-party grading companies can help in this regard: for a fee they will assign a grade to a card and encapsulate it in plastic. If you buy a card that has been graded by one of the major companies–Beckett Vintage Grading (BVG), Sportscard Guarantee Company (SGC), or Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA)–you can be reasonably assured that the card is accurately graded, authentic, and unaltered. There are other grading companies, as well, but be cautious if you stray from the big three.

The first step in learning to grade is to read the standards. Each of the big grading companies has a published set of standards, and they are all similar. Each has its quirks, though. PSA uses “qualifiers” to note exceptional problems on cards, such as a mark on an otherwise high-grade card, instead of just giving the card a lower grade. SGC uses a 100-point scale, but they actually use only a few values on the scale (10, 20, 30, etc.), and they map their 100-point scale to the more standard 10-point scale. (Strangely, 98 maps to 10, but 100 doesn’t map to anything!) SGC and Beckett distinguish between Mint, Gem Mint, and Pristine, but I don’t believe a grader could ever consistently apply these various degrees of “mint.”

Note that in the grading standards, many of the flaws a card can have are introduced in production: poor centering, print lines, wax stains, and so on. To a collector, these problems are as serious as wear and tear. Beware of eBay auctions that proclaim that the cards are from “vending,” because even if the cards were taken directly from a pack, it is likely that they have some factory flaws. “Vending,” “nice,” “L@@K,” and “Wow!” are useless terms in auction titles: a good seller will attempt to grade the cards, and put the grade in the title instead.

After you have gotten familiar with the grading standards, look at scans of graded cards online–on eBay, for example, or on my sales site–to see if you can tell why they are graded as they are. (This is easier to do with cards in lower grades. Cards in higher grades have smaller flaws, and the flaws are often hard to see in scans.) After looking at scans online, find some to examine in person: look at a friend’s, find some at a card show or dealer, or make some small purchases online. Start slow, to get the hang of it.

When looking at graded cards, you’ll find that the 1-to-10 grading scale is not linear. While you can probably tell a 2 from a 5 from across the room, you might need a magnifying glass to see the difference between a 7 and a 10. You will also find that sometimes a lower-grade card will look nicer than a higher-grade card. This could be because the grading company goofed–it happens–or, more likely, it could be because the grading standards don’t jibe with what your appeals to your eye. A card that is perfect except for a hairline crease on the back will most likely be graded a 5, while a card that is faded or out of focus could get an 8 or 9. A crease is a crease, but fading or poor focus is more of a judgment call, particularly if the grader doesn’t have similar cards to compare with the card he is grading.

Because your tastes might differ from the standards, and because grading to the standards is somewhat subjective, you will sometimes hear the mantra “Buy the card, not the holder.” All this means is that you shouldn’t base your decision to buy a card solely on the grade a grading company has assigned to it. Make sure that the card also appeals to your eye, and that you think it’s worth the price you are paying for it.

So now you’re thinking, hmm, if there can be such a small difference between a 7 and a 10, and if lower-grade cards can actually look better than higher-grade cards, and if the card grading companies sometimes make mistakes, why is a PSA 10 worth so much more than a PSA 7? Well, that’s a good question. The answer: card collectors (and collectors in general, I’m guessing) are an extremely fussy bunch, we’re continually trying to upgrade our collections, and the grading companies are usually accurate in their grading. We’ll often pay dearly to get a card with four sharp corners, rather than one with a fuzzy corner or two. Some collectors also participate in set registries, where you can show off your collections and compete with other collectors for the highest-graded sets. PSA, SGC, and Beckett all have set registries, and the competition between collectors can touch off amazing bidding wars in auctions for cards that are scarce in high grades. For the grading companies, the set registries were a stroke of marketing genius.

To sum it up, yes, grading is somewhat subjective, but a card’s grade is nonetheless key to determining its value. If you plan to spend much money on cards, you should learn to grade so that you don’t have to rely on sellers’ opinions. For expensive or high-grade cards, third-party grading companies can offer assurance that the cards meet their grading standards. But consider your own tastes, too. Do you prefer good centering or sharp corners? Does a tiny crease bother you if the card is otherwise flawless? How important is the back to you? Collect the cards that appeal to you, but learn to grade so you can determine what to pay for them.

(More on pricing later. For now see my pricing page.)

• Previous: F is for Fleer
• Next: H is for Hall of Famers
• All of the ABCs

Talk of senior Hall of Fame candidates made me think of Alex Karras, who went from an almost-Hall-of-Fame football career to a successful acting career. According to The Internet Movie Database, he was even nominated for a Golden Apple Award. (No, I hadn’t heard of it, either.) Karras’s IMDB page has a long list of the films and TV shows in which he appeared. He is best known for playing George Papadapolis on TV’s Webster, and for playing Mongo in the movie Blazing Saddles.

Pictured here is Karras’s rookie card, a 1959 Topps. Below is a clip of Mongo.

• Search for Alex Karras cards on: Nearmint’s Cards, eBay

Dick LeBeau and Floyd Little were recently named the 2010 senior finalists for induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame site provides biographies for the two stars and describes the process for choosing the senior nominees.

LeBeau’s rookie card is a 1965 Philadelphia, pictured here. Like many defensive stars, LeBeau played several years before a card company decided to print a card of him. LeBeau entered the NFL in 1959, and he finally got his rookie card in his seventh season.

Little’s rookie card is a 1968 Topps, released in his second year. Little appeared on a lot of cards in his career, including four in the 1972 Topps set alone.

Judging by recent history, it is likely that at least one of the two senior nominees will be elected to the Hall. The Hall of Fame’s senior nominees page shows that at least one senior candidate has been elected each year since 1998. Since 2004, when the senior committee began nominating two players per year, nine of the twelve nominees have been elected. One, Bob Hayes, was not elected in 2004, but he was given a second chance and elected in 2009.

• Search for Dick LeBeau cards: Nearmint’s Cards, eBay
• Search for Floyd Little cards: Nearmint’s Cards, eBay

Billy Parks, who played five years for the Chargers, Cowboys, and Oilers, died on July 22. Shown here is Parks’s rookie card, a 1973 Topps. Though the card says Parks was still with the Cowboys in 1973, he actually played for the Oilers that year.

According to his page on the Long Beach State Hall of Fame site, as a rookie with the Chargers, Parks led the league in catches for the first ten games of the year, before breaking his arm.

The Fleer Corporation printed football cards each year from 1960 to 1963. In 1960, 1962, and 1963, Fleer had rights to the AFL players, while their competitor, Topps, had rights to the NFL players. In 1961, both companies printed cards of both AFL and NFL players.

The 1960 Fleer set contains players and coaches from the original eight AFL teams. Since 1960 was the first year of the AFL, many of the players were coming to the league from college, and they are shown in their college uniforms. 1959 Heisman winner Billy Cannon is one example, in his LSU uniform. Other players are shown in uniforms of NFL teams they played for in prior years: George Blanda, for instance, is in a Bears uniform. Some of the players in the set were either cut before the season or did not get any playing time, judging by the records at pro-football-reference.com. Jim Woodard and George Blanch, both with the Raiders, are two players who do not appear on that site.

I recently created a page in the Vintage Football Card Gallery that shows a virtual uncut sheet of 1960 Fleer cards. As you can see on that page, an uncut sheet contained all 132 cards in the set, so no cards were short-printed. Because of where they were positioned on the sheet, however, some cards are much more difficult to find in high grade. The scarcest card is Jim Woodard, in the bottom left corner of the sheet. The corners of the uncut sheets evidently got damaged just as the corners of cards do.

The 1960 Fleer set contains the rookie cards of Hall of Famers Ron Mix, Hank Stram, and Sid Gillman, as well as the rookie cards of Jack Kemp and Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon. (Sid Gillman also has a pre-rookie card in the 1959 Bell Brand Rams set.)

The 1961 Fleer set contains 220 cards, and it was released in two series: the first with 132 NFL players, the second with 88 AFL players. The cards in each series are sorted by team nickname. In the first series, the Bears cards are first, then the Browns, Cardinals, Colts, Cowboys, and so on to the Vikings. The second series has the Bills, Broncos, Chargers, etc. Interestingly, most of the photos of the NFL players show them standing, hands on hips, but most of the photos of the AFL players are action shots.

The 1961 Fleer virtual uncut sheet page shows what the second series sheets looked like, and it shows how the cards’ placement on the sheet has affected their availability in high grade. Though the price guides assign higher values to the second series cards, in reality they are more common than the first series cards, and they sell for less.

The 1961 Fleer set includes the rookie cards of two Hall of Famers, Jim Otto and Don Maynard, both AFL players. Because Topps also printed cards of AFL players in 1961, Otto and Maynard also have rookie cards in the 1961 Topps set. The 1961 Fleer set also contains two notable errors: the player on Goose Gonsoulin’s card is not Goose Gonsoulin, and the Packers logo is backward on every Green Bay Packers card.

Finally, the set reflects the changes to the leagues in 1961: the Vikings were an NFL expansion team, and the AFL’s Chargers moved from Los Angeles to San Diego.

The 1962 Fleer set contains 88 cards, and it appears to have been printed in smaller numbers than the other Fleer sets. The cards are attractive, but they suffer from poor quality control: many of them were cut off-center, and many have large amounts of wax on the back. The cards are grouped and ordered by city: Boston first, then Buffalo, Dallas, Denver, Houston, New York, Oakland, and San Diego. I have not seen an uncut sheet, but because the first four cards in the set are scarce in high grades, I’ll bet that they were on the left edge, as they are were on sheets of 1963 Fleer cards.

The only Hall-of-Famer rookie card in the 1962 Fleer set is that of Billy Shaw. Shaw is the only player in the Pro Football Hall of Fame who never played in the NFL.

The 1963 Fleer set contains 89 cards: 88 players and an unnumbered checklist. The addition of the checklist caused the Bob Dougherty and Charles Long cards in the set to be short printed, as discussed on my virtual uncut sheet page for the set. The set also has a variation that none of the price guides acknowledges: cards with numbers divisible by 4 come both with and without a bottom stripe on the back. See the 1963 Fleer uncut sheet page for a discussion of that, too.

The 1963 set contains the rookie cards of three Hall of Famers: Len Dawson, Lance Alworth, and Nick Buoniconti. It also reflects the AFL’s two team changes in 1963: the Dallas Texans moved to Kansas City and became the Chiefs, and the New York Titans changed their nickname to the Jets. According to Wikipedia, the Titans were sold in 1963 and moved to Shea Stadium, which is close to LaGuardia Airport, and they hence became the Jets. One of the new owners was Leon Hess, founder of the Hess Corporation. The early Jets colors and logo were made to resemble Hess’s.

1963 marked the end of Fleer’s short run. In 1964, Philadelphia Gum Company obtained the rights to print cards of NFL players, and Topps in turn obtained the rights to the AFL.

• Previous: E is for Error Cards
• Next: G is for Grading
• All of the ABCs

A page at pro-football-reference.com called “Cups of Coffee” lists all of the pro football players who appeared in only one NFL, AFL, or AAFC game. Of course, when I discovered the page, I wondered if any of the players had appeared on football cards. I perused the list and came up with these:

Ronnie Knox

Ronnie Knox played in one game for the Chicago Bears in 1957, but he did not throw a pass. It appears that he was the fourth-string quarterback, a rookie playing behind three veterans. Topps, oddly, printed cards of all four Bears quarterbacks in 1957. Knox also spent a few seasons in the CFL, and he appeared on a few CFL cards. You can usually find them on eBay.

Buddy Allen

Buddy Allen had three carries in one game for the Denver Broncos in 1961. He apparently at least tried out for the Oakland Raiders the year before, because his only card is the 1960 Fleer card shown here. It is possible that he was on the Raiders’ roster in 1960, but the rosters I have found online show only the players who actually played in regular season games.

Jim Yeats

Jim Yeats appeared in one game for the Houston Oilers in 1960, but he did not have any stats. The card pictured here is his 1960 Fleer card. Unfortunately, on his only card, Fleer misspelled his name. I heard from one of Yeats’s relatives a few years ago, and she told me that he was with the Packers in 1958 and 1959, and that he was still with the Oilers in 1961. He evidently did not see playing time those years.

1960 was the first year of the AFL, and the teams’ rosters apparently were not final when Fleer chose the players to include on their cards. Many of the players on 1960 Fleer cards did not see playing time in the AFL.

Don McKissack

Don McKissack played in one game for the NFL’s Dallas Texans in 1952, two years after he was drafted by the Los Angeles Rams. If you count variations, he appeared on two cards in the 1950 Felt Backs set: a brown one and a yellow one. (The price guides assign higher prices to the yellow 1950 Topps Felt Backs, but the brown ones are actually scarcer.)

Mark Burke

Mark Burke saw playing time for the Philadelphia Eagles in the last game of the 1976 season. He returned one punt for fourteen yards, not too shabby. He appeared on the 1974 West Virginia playing card pictured here.

Steve Haggerty

Steve Haggerty played in one game for the Denver Broncos in 1975, but he did not get any stats. Here he is on a 1974 Colorado Playing Card, though he had transferred to UNLV for the 1974 season.

Larry Joe

Larry Joe played one game for the AAFC’s Buffalo Bills in 1949. He had a pretty good game, gaining 82 all-purpose yards. Joe appeared on a 1948 Leaf football card–one of the tough high numbers–with Penn State. I did a quick web search for Joe and found that he still holds the Penn State record for career kickoff return average.

Sam Etcheverry, a Hall of Fame quarterback for the Canadian Football League’s Montreal Alouettes, died on Saturday. Etcheverry also played for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1961 and 1962. Pictured here are Etcheverry’s 1961 Topps and 1962 Topps cards. He also appeared for the Cardinals on a 1962 Post Cereal card, and he had several CFL cards in the 1950’s. I don’t have pictures of his CFL cards, unfortunately.

Having seen only his NFL cards, I didn’t know about Etcheverry’s accomplishments in the CFL. As a player he appeared in three Grey Cups (CFL championship games), and he was the league’s most outstanding player in 1954. He passed for 586 yards in one game in 1954, and in 1956 he had a 109-yard pass–no, not a typo, because the CFL’s field is 110 yards long. Etcheverry’s CFL Hall of Fame page has a nice summary of his accomplishments and a great photo of him throwing a jump pass. (I love this shot: see my jumping quarterbacks post.)

I don’t yet have CFL cards in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, but one day I hope to add them. It will be interesting to see how players like Etcheverry moved between the CFL and the U.S. leagues in their careers. With the addition of the Cowboys and Vikings to the NFL in 1960 and 1961, and with the creation of the AFL in 1960, the talent pool in the NFL was somewhat diluted, and I imagine that other longtime CFL players also got their shot at the NFL in the early 1960’s.

• Search for Sam Etcheverry on: Nearmint’s Cards, eBay.

Errors on vintage football cards are common, presumably because the card companies intended the cards for kids, and they did not worry much about quality control. The errors range from incorrect player positions and statistics to reversed images and cards that picture the wrong player.

The most common error on vintage cards is probably misspelling of the player’s name. Pictured here is one example, Brian Piccolo’s 1969 Topps rookie card, which has his name misspelled Bryon on the front and Bryan on the back. Some players’ names were especially problematic: Sonny Jurgensen‘s name is misspelled on at least two cards, and so is Woodley Lewis‘s. Philadelphia Gum misspelled Herb Adderley’s name four years in a row, and Topps also misspelled it once. (How about Bob Hoernschemeyer, you ask? Well, guess what, Bowman got that one right every time!)

People sometimes ask me if error cards are valuable. The answer: usually not. Most errors were not corrected in production, so the error cards are no scarcer than the other cards in the set. (Price guides refer to these as uncorrected errors, abbreviated UER.) If a card company did correct an error in production, one version or the other–the error or the corrected card–can be much scarcer than the other cards in the set, and hence more valuable. Two examples come to mind: First, in the 1955 Topps All-American set, some of Byron White‘s cards were printed with Gaynell Tinsley‘s bio on the back, and some of Tinsley’s were printed with White’s. Topps corrected these errors after production began, and the incorrect versions are scarcer and more valuable than the corrected ones. Second, in the 1957 Topps set, some copies of Will Sherman‘s card have white space where “RAMS” was supposed to go. Topps also corrected this error in production, and the “No Rams” version is scarcer and more valuable than the corrected version.

In regard to pricing, then, the error and corrected versions of a card are really just considered variations of the card. When a card has two variations, some collectors will desire both, and the scarcer one is generally worth more. It’s the same with errors and corrected cards.

Occasionally people send me scans of what they think are error cards, but what they actually have are cards with printing or processing problems: off-centering, double images, print marks, etc. These production flaws are not considered errors, and in most cases they hurt the value of the card. If a production flaw is particularly bad–say the card is miscut so badly that it includes part of the next card–a collector might pay a bit for the novelty, but usually the card will be worth far less than a card without the flaw.

Also, now and then someone will list a card on eBay that has been mislabeled by a grading company, claiming that it is a valuable error. It’s not. At least one grading company makes these so-called “mechanical errors” frequently, and the errors are just a nuisance to get corrected.

As I wrote a while back, the Advanced Search page in the Vintage Football Card Gallery supports searches for error cards. I have most of the major errors identified in the Gallery, and I am gradually adding the minor ones.

• Previous: D is for Defensive Players
• Next: F is for Fleer
• All of the ABCs

Pictured here are all of the Green Bay Packers in the 1953 Bowman football card set. That’s right, it’s just the two quarterbacks, Tobin Rote and Babe Parilli. What happened to the rest of the players?

When I saw that the set had only two Packers, I thought it must be a mistake, but I double-checked and found that it was correct. Why, I wondered? Had the Packers been terrible in 1952? No, according to pro-football-reference.com, they went 6-6. Were Rote and Parilli the only good players on the team? Well, no, Bill Howton had 13 touchdowns and 1231 yards receiving in 1952. Bob Mann had a respectable 517 yards receiving in 1952, and he had had a 1000-yard season with the Lions in 1949. Deral Teteak was a Pro Bowl linebacker in 1952. These guys were certainly worthy of being on cards.

What other reason might there be? If it wasn’t that the Packers were bad, might Bowman have allocated most of the cards to the top few teams? No, that’s not the way it broke, either. The largest number of cards for a team–12–went to the Chicago Cardinals, who were 4-8 in 1952. Here are the number of cards each team had in the 1953 Bowman set, along with their 1952 record:

Looking at the 1952 league leaders, other omissions stand out: Dan Towler, who led the league in rushing in 1952, did not have a 1953 Bowman card. Joe Perry was third in rushing, and he did not have a card, either. Dick Lane (also see D is for Defensive Players) had 14 interceptions in 1952–still a record–and he did not have a card.

So I’m mystified: Did Bowman have contract problems with the Packers, Rams, and 49ers? Was it difficult to deal with remote teams? (Bowman was based in Philadelphia.) There were only 96 cards in the set, compared to 144 in Bowman’s 1952 sets–had they expected to print another series?

Oh well, I have never been fond of this issue, anyway. (See my posts on the early Bowman sets and the NFL’s use of white footballs.) The odd player selection is just another reason to dislike it. The 1952 Bowman Large set is a classic, and I continue to be surprised that the 1953 set fell so far.