Night Owl Cards

   It's January, so it's time for a football-centric post.   Football these days is full of fret and consternation. There's a big Bills game today that will have me all uptight (I'm writing this beforehand so either "Go Bills" or "the Jaguars have ugly uniforms"). And that's the way it's been for decades, lots of good vs. evil and plenty of disappointment.   But it wasn't always that way. For example, I picked up this 1976 Topps football card of Patriots quarterback Jim Plunkett recently while ordering a Dodger card and looking for something else to help out with shipping. This jumped right out at me, I love that set and Plunkett brings up good vibes despite my view of the Patriots these days. In fact, I don't remember him with the Patriots at all, nor with the 49ers --just with the Raiders when he led them to a Super Bowl title and all the talk was about this "old guy" that Oakland picked up off the scrap heap (Plunkett was...

  How about this? I'm posting about completing a fairly large set for the second time this week!   It just happened this way. Don't expect another one of these for months, unless cards start falling from the sky.   The final card to finish the 1979 Topps football set arrived this week. This set is one of two Topps football sets from my childhood that I collected and now hold an incredible amount of nostalgia, despite only casually following football back then. I finished the 1977 football set at the end of 2020 and, now, more than four years later, the other beloved football set is done.   I received a big boost on this set in April of 2023 when I came across a binder of '79 Topps football at a show and the dealer offered it to me for 30 bucks. That's when I began to really chase it. Although it's loaded with stars, there aren't many pricey cards in the set and I wasn't faced with trying to land a bunch of superstars at the end. In fact, this was the last c...

  By my count , I have completed 61 sets, discounting smaller insert sets.   Out of those 61, all but three are baseball sets, which shows where my devotion lies. Two of the non-baseball sets are the 1991 MusiCards, both the U.S. and U.K. versions.   The other is the 1977 Topps football set. I completed it this week.     The last two cards arrived in the mail, two linemen together. They weren't particularly difficult to find. I had just forgotten about them and in looking through my binder realized they were missing.   Now it is complete and I couldn't be happier. This is my all-time favorite football set ... by a significant margin. It's possibly in my top 10 or 15 sets ever made, regardless of sport.   I know some collectors find it too gaudy or possessing the same drawback that other '70s Topps NFL sets have -- no logos. The poses are corny. There are too many players without helmets. What's with all the weird sideline shots?   Those people cle...

  Even though it's clear to me that I'm enjoying the hobby more this year and being much more productive as far as my collecting is concerned, I still need convincing. I've collected by buying packs at the store closest to me since I was a wee owl 45 years ago. It's a habit that's been difficult to break when that's all you've known as the Way To Collect. But now that card aisles remain vacant, I keep coming up with good reasons why regular pack purchasing is pretty pointless. Earlier today, while continuing to sort through all of my Dodgers dupes, I noticed again how rookies overrun Topps products. My dupes from the last 10 years were absolutely saturated with rookies that are now long forgotten, even if the product is only a couple of years old. Players like Zach Lee, Trayce Thompson and Alex Guerrero dominated my recent doubles. People can't wait to get rid of these sudden no-names. And when you look back on that product from three years ago, you real...