Are you ready for some football?

Even though I haven't paid much attention to football in the last couple of years, that doesn't mean that I am no longer a fan of the sport, I'm just not a fan of the sport in it's current form. With that being said, one would to have to be living under a proverbial rock to not know that, following Sunday's "Big Game", another season will officially be in the books. So, since I did have a few (not nearly as many as usual) football cards in with last year's COMC stash, I figured this would be as good of a time as any to show them.

I picked up this '59 Y.A. just a couple days before his passing last October for around $4. 1959 was the first year of Y.A.'s supposed decline, which was followed by an even worse year in 1960. And as most people know by now, that is when the 49'ers decided to trade their "washed up" quarterback to the Giants, to which he responded by leading the New York to three straight championship games.

Sometime before last summer I came across a seller who was in the process of liquidating their store. I don't know if they didn't have very much to begin with, or if I was just late to the sale, but either way, by the time I saw it there wasn't a whole heckuva a lot left that was of interest to me, except for... eight cards in the 1960's football category, all of which were in really good shape, and all just happened to be Boston Patriots. Needless to say, I bought all eight of them, I mean how was I supposed to turn down the above trio of '61 Topps for less than 50 cents each?

And a solid trio it was, all three guys were members of the original AFL Boston Patriots, and Jim Colclough and Bob Dee were both named to the Patriots All-1960's Team. Chuck Leo never got the chance to earn too many accolades, as just four games into the 1962 season he suffered a severely torn hamstring in a non-football related accident, which effectively ended his career.

In today's NFL, it would be basically impossible to imagine a flanker/kicker being the most important/popular player on a team, but were you to travel back in time some fifty years, you'd find Gino Cappelletti being just that (although it was in the AFL, but you know what I mean)... so much so, that he even earned the nickname of "Mr. Patriot". He is the AFL's all-time leading scorer (1,130 points). It was until 2005, that his Patriots all-time leading scorer record was broken (Adam Vinatieri), a few of his other records have also since been surpassed, but considering that he was playing 14 game seasons, it's amazing to think that so many of his numbers took so long to eclipse.

The above '68 Topps was bought from the same seller as the three 61's, which for some reason, I decided to scan, hence all the pixilation. Everything else in this post that isn't from that seller was photographed on a different day, I thought I'd point that out, just in case anyone wonders about the varying image quality. Now that I got that out of the way, how about seeing a few more needed 68's (different sellers though):

Dave entered the '68 campaign coming off of the best season of his, at that point, ten-year pro career. Taken by the Saints in the 1967 expansion draft, Dave led the league in interceptions (10) and was selected to his first Pro Bowl, which also made him the first Saints player to ever do so. A few years prior, Dave was also a member of the 1963 Chicago Bears championship team.

Randy was drafted in 1966 by the Atlanta Falcons, making him the newly formed franchise's, first quarterback. Randy never quite lived up to his former All-American status, although playing for such bad team, certainly didn't help. He played with four teams during his ten-year NFL career, and spent one season ('74) with the Hawaiians in the World Football League. After football his life completely fell apart, should anyone be so inclined to read about the sad details, you can do so by clicking here  and here.

As a result of their respective Super Bowl appearances earlier in the year, Topps decided to do something a little different by giving all the players from the Packers and Raiders a specially designed horizontal card, each of which featured a different comic style background. I really wish Topps had done this for the whole 1968 set, as I absolutely love the look of these cards. Not surprisingly, there are a number of hall of famers amongst these horizontal cards, including this Doctor Zhivago.

This group of '69 Topps was the other four cards that I was able to get from the Patriots seller. I should have scanned these individually, but I didn't, and it's too late to go back and redo it now.

Cappelletti and Colclough are making their second appearance here today, this time joined by
Mike Taliaferro, who played for the Patriots from 1968-70, making the all-star team in 1969. The other new face to be featured in this quartet is Jim Whalen, who was yet another member of the Patriots All-1960's Team.

I don't if I will ever collect all of the 1970 Topps Super Glossy inserts or not, but Jack Snow here, was just too cheap for me not to buy.

The football section of my hoard wasn't made up entirely of vintage, there were also a few newer and shiny things as well, namely this quartet of cheaply acquired 2001 Topps Archives Reserve:

One of the nice things about the Archives Reserve set, is that the checklist is comprised of pretty much all hall of famers, as well as a few guys who haven't quite made it yet. One could make a very easy case that, John Brodie, who has yet to be enshrined, is much more hall worthy than Joe Namath... but of course, Joe has the name recognition, which unfortunately, is sometimes more important than statistics.

I put in an order with a seller on the Beckett Marketplace just the other day, which was made up of nothing but football cards, so for anyone out there who enjoys the pigskin posts, I should have another one ready to go within the next couple of weeks.


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.