Football '13 Week 12: Throwback Thursday.

       While I am hardly a bandwagon jumper when it comes to the Saints, I have to admit, I have not suffered nearly as much as longtime fans have.  I got into the game just as the team has hit its stride as a perennial contender.  After all, this is a team that took 20 years just to make the playoffs and more than 30 years to actually win a playoff game.  I am spoiled in retrospect. 

At 8-2, the Saints are in the driver's seat to win the division and with a few breaks, they could be the number one seed in the conference.  That last point is critical as teams have a habit of coming into the Superdome and getting thoroughly destroyed. At the beginning of the year, The Falcons looked like a huge obstacle in all this.  Instead, they are a minor speed bump.  Hopefully, they will not play spoiler and just lay down at home as they have to seemingly every other team this year. 

Seeing as this game is on Thursday night, I figured it would be a good time to do a little Throwback special for the Saints.  Since I have covered the actual design of these cards before, lets instead look at the players and overall teams for the Saints from back before they could even dream of finishing above .500.

1987 Saints: 12-3.

Well, okay, this was the first glimmer of hope.  This was the first season the Saints finished above .500 and also the first they made the playoffs.  They lost that first playoff game to the Vikings 44-10.  In fact, they lost their first 4 playoff games by a cumulative score of 123-56.

1986 Saints: 7-9.

You will notice as we go through these pages that the kicker and punter always seem to be prominently represented for the Saints.  In sets where they were only making 10-12 cards per team, this is not the sign of a quality team. 

1982 Saints: 4-5.

During a strike year, the Saints won 4 games.  This was more games than they had won in 6 of their first 13 seasons.  Oh, and remember that punter/kicker observation from before?  The Saints once drafted a punter in the first round.  That man was Russell Erxleben.  Now, as crazy as this notion seems when your team is terrible, you would think if you are going to use/waste your first draft pick on a punter, he would be one hell of a punter, right?  Well, of course he flamed out in about six years.  He even eventually spent time in federal prison.  And weirdest of all, this is not the worst thing the Saints ever did during the draft.  Aren't those black and gold uniforms handsome, though?

1981 Saints: 4-12.

Looking at the faces of the players on these cards, you would think they had spent time in 'nam recently rather than playing professional football.  Only the kicker is kind of almost breaking a smile, and that's only compared to the other faces on this page.  This was a year after The Aints and their 1-15 season so this team was comparatively a great improvement.  Yikes.

1979 Saints: 8-8.

Between 1967 and 1986, this record was the high water mark.  Actually, when speaking of New Orleans, maybe that is the wrong turn of phrase.  All praise Chuck Muncie: Original Hipster.  The man had a look.

1978 Saints: 7-9.

Seven wins was as many wins as they had in the two previous seasons combined.  Archie Manning deserved better than the teams he was saddled with in the 70's.  As it is, he has the lowest winning percentage of any QB in history.  I guess he got his revenge through his bloodline by unleashing Eli and Peyton on the world two decades later.

1974 Saints: 5-9.

You gotta love the poses on these cards.  Everyone looks like they walked right off the set of The Longest Yard or North Dallas Forty.  Bob Pollard not only looks like a serious serious man, he has the same name as the lead singer of my favorite band ever not named The Beatles.

My complete pages of team years ends there.  From there, it is all 3x3.  This might be for the best as the records are more of the same: 1975 2-12, 1973 5-9, 1971 4-8-2.  At least they only played 14 games back then.

Happy Feller?  Seriously? 

1972 2-11-1, 1970 2-11-1, 1969 5-9. 

Dan Abramowitz sounds and looks like he should be your accountant and not a pro football player.  Instead, he was one of the best players of the early Saints.  And I gotta say, the late 60's and early 70's posed pictures are 100x better than the candid sideline photos of players without their helmets on from the late 70's and early 80's.  Such jaunty angles and variety.  Scroll back up to those 1981 cards again and these.  It looks like it's not even the same sport.

Saints.

     I grew up in northern New Jersey.  Most people have their prejudices and cliches about New Jersey and lemme tell you, they are all true and a thousand times worse.  But my roots aside, growing up anywhere usually locks you in to a certain set of teams to root for.  Given my geographic heritage, it makes sense that I am a New York Mets fan, it certainly makes sense that I am a New Jersey Devils fan, and heck, I am even a erstwhile New York Knicks fan.  So how the hell did I become a New Orleans Saints fan?  A number of factors conspired to make this come to pass.

     You should know, I grew up a New York Giants fan.  Joining my other fabulous childhood athletic role models Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry is Lawrence Taylor (what a morality threesome there).  Those Big Blue Wrecking Crew teams of the late 80's and early 90's are still held in high regard with me and my brother.  So what happened?  Well, first of all, I moved to Boston for college in the early 90's, right around the time age and Ray Handley got together to destroy everything that was good about those Giants teams.  Out of sight was out of mind.  Plus, I had so much going on in college that sports, and especially football, was the first thing that got lost in the shuffle.  Also around this time, my mother started dating a new gentleman.  Well, that is not entirely true, he was barely a man, he was a good 20 years her junior.  And while this situation set me and my siblings aback a bit, we eventually accepted and grew to love this man.  It was like having another brother, rather than a step dad.  And he was a huge New Orleans Saints fan.  Huge is actually a very weak word to use here.  Gargantuan perhaps?  I think you get my point.  His passion rubbed off on the rest of the family.  My mother, who grew up in the 1960s and therefore was bound by law to find Joe Namath dreamy, had grown up a New York Jets fan, but her allegiances switched pretty quick.  They used to fly down to New Orleans a couple times a year to enjoy the city and take in a game or two.  In the early aughts, it occurred to them that they could buy season tickets for the price of the two or three games they were buying, so they did that instead.  They were New Orleans Saints season ticket holders living in New Jersey.  Now that is some hardcore fandom.

     Unfortunately, this is where our story takes a tragic turn.  In 2005, the city of New Orleans was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.  You may have heard about it, it was in all the papers.  Then more tragedy, this time more personal in nature; in early 2006, that man my mother dated, and who was such a wonderful part of my family, suddenly and unexpectedly died of a heart attack at the age of 37.  This threw our entire family into mourning and disarray.  The city my mother loved was destroyed and the man she loved was dead.  She was, needless to say, a tad depressed.  My siblings and I decided it would be a good idea if we did what we could to cheer her up.  We asked her what would help.  She told us it would be nice if we could accompany her to New Orleans for the football games in 2006, as it would be a great tribute for her man and our tourist dollars would help the city.  We agreed.  I volunteered to go to the first game.  I had never been to New Orleans and, truth be told, I had never even to an NFL game (tickets to Giants games were next to impossible to get in my youth).  That first game back at the Superdome in New Orleans is legend.  The atmosphere was electric and it was the rare time a sporting event transcended those bounds and helped heal a whole city.  I was hooked; I became a Saints fan that evening for life.  I became a Saints fan because I love the city.  I became a Saints fan because the team has a great bunch of fans and I wanted to be a part of that. I became a Saints fan out of tribute to a fallen friend.

       Those season tickets are still part of the family, as they have been since 2002.  We all still go down with my mother and watch games.  We were even rewarded with the 2009 team.  I was at the NFC Championship game that year in the Superdome when we beat the Vikings to go to the Super Bowl for the first time.  When the overtime kick went through the uprights, that was the absolute loudest noise I have ever heard.  Most of the NFL gear I own is Saints gear.  I call myself a Saints fan.

      So, when you look at my football card collection, you will find a big hole where you would think the Saints should go.  I have a mess of Giants cards from my youth, but I didn't collect football cards for a long long time.  In the mid to late aughts, I started to gather some Saints cards and a few obligatory pages were created...

Drew Brees:

Deuce McAllister: (probably my all time favorite Saint)

And my usual mishmash of vintage stuff that I found amongst some boxes:


And that was about it. How could I call myself a fan and have less than 40 Saints cards in my collection?  I decided to purchase some lots to augment my collection and in the last year or so, I went a little nuts.  When I was in New Orleans, I went to some shops and bought lots.  When I was in Cooperstown (no, really) I bought a bunch of lots.  I went on eBay and bought a bunch of lots.  As has been mentioned a few times on this blog already, my organization skills are less than stellar and now I have a 3200 count monster box full of unsorted Saints cards.  I am slowly going through them...making team sets, collating them by year, plucking out inserts and cool players for pages, etc.  It has been a slow process, made slower by the fact that I am already neck deep in dealing with shrinking other parts of my collection while growing this one.  But it works out well because when I get tired of getting rid of things, I go through the Saints cards, knowing they are here to stay. 

So far, making actual pages has been hit or miss, as I have found some great cards but no real unifying themes:

Longways inserts:

Shiny Inserts:

Rookie Inserts:

Random Inserts:

Random random inserts:

Wait, those stickers are neat, and here, look at the backs:

Anyone remember those Huddles dolls? Talk about a relic of their time; who knew they had cards too?

Ugh, this is all a work in progress and I have a lot more to do, obviously, and I will keep you posted as it evolves.  I do at least have one page done for certain.  One of the lots I bought on eBay was padded with a boatload of 1990 Action Packed cards, including at least 20 Bobby Heberts:

If anyone needs a dozen of these cards, let me know.  Also, if you have any Saints cards you'd like to get rid of or something fancy to trade, please email me, they will (eventually) find a good home.