Tuesday, July 18, 2017

The Football Shoebox Part 1: 49ers to Buccaneers


It being the middle of baseball season, I'm nowhere near ready for football to start. I'm also not the biggest football fan in the world, I'll watch Bengals games and the occasional Sunday night or Thursday night game. I guess you could say I'm a casual fan. 

When it comes to football cards, I'm pretty picky. Typically I'll only buy singles of Bengals players I like but when a giant shoebox full of cards comes around, I can't really pass it up. As I mentioned in a previous post, this box came to me by way of a yard sale down the street two months ago (and yes, I'm just now getting time to write about it).

I don't know how many cards were in the box but a quick rummage through it gave me a general idea that there were cards from the 90s all the way up to Topps cards from just a few years ago. Some cards, maybe a half dozen or so, were bent and creased beyond recognition and were unsalvageable, other than that, everything looked to be in really good shape. I sorted the box by teams then went through the team stacks to look for cards to keep. I found a decent handful for each team that was in there and the rest either went in the trade box or in the Goodwill donation bag.

Since there was so much, I've decided to split up my findings over a multi-part series of posts. Each post will have roughly 6-7 teams and will show off the cards I'm keeping for each team. So here's the first in the series, the 49ers to the Buccaneers


San Francisco 49ers


I only kept some of the 49ers cards but as you can see, these are from the 90s. I specifically kept Ken Norton because I'm considering starting a side collection of football players (or anyone from any sport for that matter) who also participated in wrestling. Also, a nice succession of 49er QBs from Montana to Young to ... Elvis Grbac?

Chicago Bears


This is mostly the Rashaan Salaam show here with four of the five Bears cards being of his. The other, Rick Mirer, is technically a Bears card as that's the team is lists him with despite being shown in a Seattle uniform.

Cincinnati Bengals


I only gained seven new cards for the Bengals collection out of the box but since they were mostly Pro Set cards I never would have bought out of a five or ten cent box in the first place, I'm fine with it.  I like the Jeff Blake "transactions" card for the fact that it's sort of an update card in which he went from the Bengals to the Saints.

Buffalo Bills


Some pretty nice cards here, mainly of Jim Kelly, but a few others as well. One day, I'm going to to a comparison piece on 1995 Fleer baseball vs. 1995 Fleer football as they used the single division crazy design on it too.

Cleveland Browns


I'm sure running the gamut here with Vinny Testaverde, Bernie Kosar, Eric Metcalfe, and even a Topps Total card.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers


To be honest, I'm not sure why I kept some of these. Regardless, I love the mix of the old school orange and white uniform with the new red and gold uni. Also, look on the bottom left .... it's a kicker card!!

For the first set of teams, not a bad haul and, sorry Broncos fans, there weren't any cards of theirs in the box. Zero, zilch, nothing. Still, I'm pretty satisfied with this batch and there's lots more where that came from.

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