cardpocalypse 7 day trading card challenge, day 3: blood in the collection

are you ready for some football? it's day 3 of the cardpocalypse 7 day trading card challenge here in gcrl-land.  time for my favorite football card in my collection.

by the time the baseball season ended in 1978, i had completed my set and so i was looking for the next thing. i went straight to football. my neighbors were big cowboy and steeler fans, while i rooted for the rams. there were also a lot of raider fans where i grew up, due to the fact that john madden, the raiders' head coach, had ties to the area. i will admit that i followed the raiders as my afc team for that reason.  anyway, i came close to completing that 1978 topps football set, missing only the hollywood henderson card. i bought some more football in 1979, but after the rams lost to the steelers in the super bowl, i pretty much stopped. i may have purchased a couple of packs in 1980, but even though team logos were back (!), lawrence mccutcheon had moved on, and i wasn't in to it.  when vince ferragamo was lowballed by the rams and went to the cfl for the 1981 season, i was pretty much done with the rams.  i came back a couple of years later coinciding with ferragamo's return and the emergence of eric dickerson, but left the rams for good in favor of the vikings in 1985 after ferragamo was traded to the bills.

i am fairly certain that i threw away the vast majority of my football cards around that time or perhaps earlier in the decade. i may have sold them at a swap meet (i do remember selling my 1982 baseball card doubles at the local swap meet, so maybe my football was there, too). at any rate, i had only a few football cards to my name until 1993 or so.  i had kept my tony dorsett rookie, plus a few other stars of the day. maybe an earl campbell card from 1979, a joe thiesmann rookie from 1975 that i somehow acquired, and a few others.

then i started a mark brunell collection in 1993, and also bought a few star singles around that time that i still have. my brunell collection is pretty large, and there are some cool cards in there.  my favorite football card, however, is this one

i obtained that 1999 upper deck century legends jack youngblood autograph from the traveling box that stale gum started many years ago. for those not familiar, several collectors (including yours truly) added a bunch of vintage and other cards to a box that got sent around the country. you would take cards out for your collection and put cards back in to the box in exchange. i was added to the mix sometime after the box had been around a couple of times, and i got only two passes at it before it went missing. the story was that one collector put it in the mail without tracking and it got lost. i called bullshit because it was a priority mail flat rate box that even back then came with tracking, but whatever. i still got my youngblood auto so i shouldn't complain. youngblood was a stud, and he stood with mccutcheon as my first favorite football players. come to think of it, i should see if there is an autographed card of mccutcheon out there somewhere (there's not).

oh, and this 2008 upper deck masterpieces adrian peterson is a nice card, too.

it's the only non-brunell, non-youngblood football card that i actively sought out since the early 1980's.