Night Owl Cards

  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...

  I've talked about my history of collecting football cards here and there. Most of my childhood football-collecting involved the 1977 and 1979 Topps football sets. I also saw some 1975 and 1976 football a little bit but I didn't collect any. When the 1980s hit, I ignored football cards completely. But I still watched it all through the decade. I remember Jaworski and Plunkett, the 1982 shortened season, the Ickey Shuffle; the Redskins teams and the Smurfs, Marcus Allen, the USFL, Marino-Duper-Clayton, The Fridge, Dit-ka, Kelly landing in Buffalo, the Eric Dickerson trade, the Broncos and the lopsided Super Bowls, and 49ers-Bengals Part II. I was there for it all. But football cards? I couldn't have told you most of the designs 15 years ago.   I've slowly caught up and there are a few '80s Topps football designs that I've long admired -- not enough to try to collect any of the sets, but enough to be attracted when the cards are essentially free. During the most ...

    I just soldiered through another Jim Nantz broadcast to watch the Buffalo Bills wrap up a victory and the second seed in the playoffs.   It's the completion of an emotionally exhausting week for the Bills after the on-field collapse and hospitalization of  safety Damar Hamlin, and I am, once again, very proud of my favorite team. Weeks before this happened, I was watching head coach Sean McDermott during a press conference after the Bills' win over the Dolphins and it struck me how impressed I was with McDermott as a coach. He answered reporters' questions, he smiled, he joked a little, he wasn't defensive, it was not at all what I am used to with a lot of NFL coaches. Many of them can be jerks, oafs, condescending generals, I've seen it in person. McDermott doesn't seem to be like that. He's a true leader. I think a lot more people came to that conclusion this past week. This prompted me to look around and see what I could find as far as a football card...

My falling out with the NFL has been ongoing since I started this blog, probably even before that, going back to the turn of the century. I've documented my disconnect with the sport several times on this blog . It's quite the difference from when I followed the NFL avidly during the 1980s and 1990s. I still like watching the game and I much prefer it to the college football version. But the inability of the Bills to make the playoffs, combined with the NFL taking itself so seriously, and its players taking themselves so seriously, and the league being the stage for the worst behavior of humanity, and the terrible way it goes about tackling various problems, has sapped any enthusiasm I have for the sport. Because of this, I have bought very few football cards in the last two decades. I never bought that many to begin with, but there are certain years in which I sought them out regularly. These days I buy maybe a pack once every three years. But you saw a pack of --...

I don't know about you, but for me No vember has been a weird month, both on the blog and elsewhere. For one, readership always goes down in November. Always. It's been that way since I first figured out you could calculate such things. I don't know why that is. The weather is almost always crap in November, you'd think people would focus on more sedentary activities. Second, a lot of people either stop talking about or paying attention to baseball cards in November, which might be the answer to the paragraph above. I'm a baseball guy, so I'll never stop talking about baseball cards just because the season's over. But I guess some people do. Third, I'm broke in November. Well, I'm broke a lot of other months out of the year these days, but no money in November has been a constant for the last six years. Finally, it gets odd for people in November. I don't know if people sense they're getting to the end of the year and they assess t...