Nearmint's Vintage Football Card Blog

It seems natural to put pictures of football players on playing cards, and I am surprised that not more teams have done it. Playing cards aren’t much different from trading cards, and there are close to 54 players on an NFL or college team. Throw in the coaches, cheerleaders, and mascot, and you can easily top off a deck.

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.

• Previous: P is for Philadelphia
• Next: Q is for Quarterbacks
• All of the ABCs

To a card collector, “oddballs” are collectible items that have some characteristics of cards–small size, two dimensions, pictures of players, team logos, and so on–but are not traditional trading cards. Some examples are coins, bottle caps, cap liners, discs, stamps, stickers, patches, pins, and playing cards. Many of them came on or in packages of food. Some were regional and featured a particular team.

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 four sets of vintage football stamps that were not inserts, and there are probably more. You can see 1964 Wheaties Stamps, 1969 Glendale Stamps, and 1972 Sunoco Stamps in the Vintage Football Card Gallery, and there is also a set of 1972 NFLPA Wonderful World Stamps, which I don’t yet have. Each of the sets had an accompanying album into which you could stick the stamps. A 1964 Wheaties stamp of Raymond Berry is pictured here.

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

There are lots of scary images on old football cards, but this Don Hutson 1963 Stancraft playing card struck me as the Halloweeniest. He looks like he’s wearing a homemade super hero costume. Add a pair of antennae, and he could be Ant Man!

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.