Football '14 Week -2: The Tyler Rose.

       Tonight for the Saints is the third preseason game, the "dress rehearsal" for the season opener and I might consider turing off the FXX Simpsons marathon to watch it.  We can all agree there is nothing more insubstantial that preseason football, so here instead for consideration is one of the most substantial players of all time, Earl Campbell.

One of my earliest football memories was watching The Houston Oilers on CBS and seeing Earl Campbell just destroy everyone in his path.  I was mesmerized that the fastest man on the field was also the strongest.  Whoever he didn't run over he just out ran, he was amazing.  If you never watched Earl run, it was as if Barry Sanders, Adrian Peterson, and a Cat Bulldozer had a love child, here,  see for yourself.

Earl's first three years in the league were incredible, and heck, his next three weren't too shabby either.  Alas, the body can only take so much punishment so by his seventh year, it was obvious his legs were betraying him.  As was any superstar's right of passage back in the 1980's, Earl spent his last two years in the league a shell of his former self for the New Orleans Saints.  Bum Phillips brought him in with the hope to recharge him but after the 1986 season, Earl retired.

As you can see from the last two Nine-of-a-Kind pages, The Tyler Rose found himself enshrined in Canton five years after he retired.  He was always a favorite of mine and is the standard to which I hold all other running backs I have ever seen since - remember, I never saw Jim Brown play live, I am not that old.

Football Week 7: Random Shiny!

      I have spent the last few months trying to sort out the miasma that is my football binders into something with the appearance of a collection.  The deeper in I get, the more messy everything appears to be.  I want to streamline things the way I have my baseball and (for the most part) my hockey collection.  I want nice nine pocket pages with a single theme.  I want my favorite players and cards well represented.  I want it to look like someone applied a modicum of thought to the whole thing.

That brings us to this couple of pages I found this morning.  They are kooky.  They are full of random cards.  Sure, random can be fun sometimes, but wow, these bring random to a whole new level.  I truly would like to know what I was thinking when these pages were created: "Hey! This one is kinda shiny...this one is die-cut...this one is die-cut and kinda shiny, I think I'll stick it in here!"  That would seem to be the maximum amount of brain power that went into this one:

Ahhhh, the late 90's and early aughts were such a wonderful time.  Cards with a patchwork of foil, cuts, see-thru, reflectors, refractors, and whatever the hell dufex is.  This page is glorious in its representation of that era.  I am almost tempted not to change this one at all.  It is so organically haphazard that it almost seems planned.  I really wish it was.  The scan does not do it justice either.  That Tamarick Vanover (great name alert!) in the upper left is a Trophy Collection card. The Jim Harbaugh (current 49ers coach) in the middle left is a Stadium Club Dot Matrix parallel.  Yeah, maybe those card styles mean nothing to you, but in real life, they are sooooooo shiny.  The scans of the Kevin Greene and Edgerrin James on the right kinda show how shiny these cards are.  I could probably blind drivers from 50 yards with that Greene card.  The bottom row is a a trio of foil drenched die cuts.  Upper Deck really loves that little curved notch they used on the Kerry Collins card; they used it as recently as 2010. 

This page has a companion.  Unfortunately, it is not nearly as connected by its randomness:

It would seem that with this page, I really was just sticking cards in the pages.  The Rocket Ismail in the upper left is a Members Only Stadium Club cards and is very shiny (shouldn't he be wearing a jacket?) and apparently, I went completely 5th grade and put in a couple of Marion Butts cards.  That Joey Harrington card in the center square is just as epic as it would appear.  All foil and lightning bolts, it looks like ol' Joe is getting his comeuppance for years of sucking by being electrocuted.  Too bad that insert set was only 6 cards, because a design that dramatic deserves a page of its own.  Sadly, it is downhill from there for this page.  There is a Rick Mirer card that is 1 out of 90,000 - wow, so limited - and a couple of Raiders cards, though one of them is an Upper Deck hologram card of Fred Biletnikoff.  Then it looks like I just stuck a Tom Jackson card in for no reason, since it is neither shiny nor die cut nor a parallel nor anything that would tie it in with the rest of these.  Last but not least is that Earl Campbell card in the middle bottom, which is from 2005, proving I have looked at this page in the last couple years and did nothing about it.  That said, Earl Campbell was a monster.  Never saw him play?  Go take a look...he was amazing.