HOF Spotlight: Arnie Herber

Name: Arnie Herber
Position: Quarterback
Pro Career: 1930-1940, 44-45
Team Affiliation(s): Green Bay Packers, New York Giants
College: Regis College, Wisconsin
Induction Class: 1966

Brief Bio: If every great innovation in football needs a great player to initiate it, then Arnie Herber was the great player to initiate the forward pass. He may not have been the first to do it and he may not have been the greatest in all of history, but Herber was the first great quarterback. From his very first game as a professional football player, Herber won games with that forward pass and when Don Hutson was brought onto the scene in 1935, the young NFL saw its first dominant pass-catch tandem. The Packers won four titles with Herber at the helm and he won the league passing title in 1932, 1934, and 1936. During the league’s struggles to find players during WWII, Herber returned from retirement to lead the New York Giants to the NFL Eastern crown in 1944. Herber was also a competent rusher and could kick and punt with the best in the league.

Career Stats: 129 games played; 40.9% career completion percentage; 8,041 passing yards; 81 passing TDs; 3 rushing TDs (official stats were not kept until Herber’s third pro season)

Featured Card: 2002 SP Legendary Cuts Autographs #LCAH. As a Hall of Fame player who hails from the beginning of the NFL’s history, Herber does not have a true rookie card. One higher-end substitute can be this 2002 cut autograph card. Trivial Beckett value is $600. No copies of this card are currently on eBay although there are a handful of junk wax era HOF cards available for $1-3.

NOTE: You can find all of my Hall Of Fame Spotlight Features by clicking the HOF Spotlight banner above.

Rock the Vote!

Okay, it may not be a huge election and Pearl Jam isn’t playing a special benefit concert, but you should definitely VOTE for your favorite Online Community, Blogger, and Video Box Breaker in the Upper Deck Awards, now live. Here is the official press release from UD headquarters:

Voting Starts Today for Upper Deck’s ‘Social Media Awards’

Nominations have closed. Now it’s time to vote on the industry’s best online trading card communities, bloggers and video box-breakers

Carlsbad, CA (March 29, 2010) – Many in the trading card industry were very happy last week when Upper Deck announced its first-ever “Social Media Awards” designed to recognize the top trading card online communities, bloggers and video box breakers. Upper Deck’s Facebook page where nominations were being accepted saw increased traffic as passionate collectors wanted to share their favorite picks with others. Now that the nominations have closed, Upper Deck has opened up official voting for the awards today.

“It’s been a lot of fun to see trading card communities, bloggers and video box-breakers get excited about the opportunity that comes with the Upper Deck Awards,” said Chris Carlin, sports marketing manager for Upper Deck. “To be honest, recognition like this is long overdue as many of those nominated have put in a tremendous amount of work to make this industry better as they are certainly passionate about it. We hope it will be seen as a healthy competition designed primarily to help create awareness for all those nominated and ultimately to recognize those who have been doing some great things in their respective categories.”

To vote for your favorite, visit Upper Deck’s Facebook page or click to links from here:

Best Online Community

Best Blogger

Best Video Box-Breaker

The top five communities
will receive links from Upper Deck’s Community page and will be featured in an article on the Upper Deck Blog.
The No. 1-rated online community will receive a trophy, a variety of unopened product, a LeBron James-signed UDA basketball and a 2009 NFL Rookie Photo Shoot signed football (autographed by more than 25 players) to use as giveaways with their community of loyal collectors.

The top five bloggers will receive links from the Upper Deck Blog and
will also be featured as part of an entry about their blogs there. The top-rated blogger will receive a special trophy, a variety of unopened product and a 2009 NFL Rookie Photo Shoot signed football.

The top five video box-breakers will receive a free box of Upper Deck product to review and have their individual videos featured on Upper Deck Diamond Vision. The top video box-breaker will receive a variety of product for the next year and have every video of theirs featured on Upper Deck’s Diamond Vis
ion site.

Voting ends on Monday morning, April 5, at 9:00 a.m. PDT. Winners will then be announced on Wednesday, April 7.

Currently, the bloggers poll has by far the fewest votes, so get out there let your voice be heard.

New Features

Just a quick update to highlight two new features to the blog:

1) SIDEBAR 2010 RELEASE CALENDAR – Located on the right-hand sidebar, you will now find a 2010 Release Calendar. All 2010 football releases will be listed here as they are announced. Product delays and cancellations will be updated as quickly as possible. Full product details and box break reviews will be provided as available.

2) SUBSCRIPTIONS – You may now subscribe to First and Goal to receive new postings and updates directly in your mailbox. WordPress users need just click “Subscribe Now!” and the email address on file with WordPress will be used. All other readers will need to enter the preferred email address.

If you have any thoughts or feedback on the new features, or have ideas for new features you would like to see added to First and Goal, just let me know and I will see what I can do.

Product Review: 2010 SAGE Hit Low Series

The 2010 football card year is officially underway. Which is cool, because unlike real calendars, we don’t need no stinkin’ end to the previous year before we start the next (2009 Exquisite isn’t due out until 3/30…not that it will be “stinkin’” by any means). As I bluntly alluded to in an earlier post, the first product of the year, for me, is 2010 SAGE Hit Low Series (sorry, Razor U.S. Army All American Bowl).

The Box

Hobby boxes come with 30 5-card packs for a total of 150 cards. I purchased this box from Blowout Cards for $104.99 shipped, which translates into a $0.70/card ratio. This is a bit higher than I would prefer for a college-themed set, especially since they are all undrafted rookies at this point. The box promises (on average) 6 autograph cards per box and at least 1 insert card per pack.

1 insert in each of these bad boys

The Breakdown:
Base Cards (#1-50): 120 – 100%
   1x: 14 (all The Program subset cards)
   2x: 13
   3x: 13
   4x: 9
   5x: 1
Parallels: 13 (10 Silver; 3 Gold)
Inserts: 14 (9 Prospectus; 3 The Write Stuff; 2 Make Ready #/50)
Autographs: 6 (1 Base; 4 Silver; 1 Gold #/250)

Click images for full-sized scans

FIRST AND GOAL’S FOUR DOWNS:
1st Down, Design: The base card design is actually pretty nice in my opinion; clean and crisp. The HIT and team logos are well placed and while I’m not usually a fan of sidebar text, it works for this design. I might expect more from a major manufacturer, but for a “micro company”, these are actually quite good. I would like to see more information on the card back though. They also need to work on the cutting process. While scanning, I noticed some of the cards are not the same size while others had issues with right angles on the corners.

2nd Down, Inserts: The parallels are well done, although they look like a base card with silver or gold glitter pressed on top (none of it rubbed off on my fingers thankfully). The Prospectus cards are good — nice design and good tidbits of player info on the back. The Write Stuff, while easily lending itself to an autograph parallel, is a waste. Those cards did nothing for me, especially with the facsimile signature being on the card back. The Make Ready cards were also odd. They look like printing plates, but they are just normal cards that only received 1 of the 4 printing colors. It looks like they were searching for an insert to serial number. The autographs are nice (no redemptions!) although I’d rather see just one autograph set with maybe one variant. There are too many autograph sets to chase. I am undecided if hand numbering the gold parallels (rather than using a serial number stamp) is good or bad, especially from a fake-scare position.

3rd Down, Collation: Meh. What do you expect when you get 150 cards when the base set is only 50 cards? I do not like getting doubles from the same box, and this box had doubles aplenty. The Program subset was almost another insert as I only pulled one double of the 15 in the set. I would rather see a lower card count (and lower price) for the box to avoid so many doubles. And if duplicates have to exist, shoot to give me 3 of each card instead of 2 of some and 5 of another. Also, a word of warning if you are only buying a few packs: I pulled the 6 autographs from 3 consecutive packs in the middle of the box and again in the final 3 packs. So unless you are the first to pull from a box, you probably shouldn’t plan on pulling an autograph if other pack buyers catch onto that trend.

4th Down, Overall Value: In two words: not good. Sam Bradford autographs are running a little over $60 right now and a few others are pulling $25, but most cards are generating less than $5 on eBay. 25 ct. lots of even the best future rookie base cards are going for around $2.50. With a per-card price of $0.70 (or $17.50 if you look at price per “hit”), you might as well wait. If you really want this set and are not concerned with prospecting, wait until after cards featuring these guys in NFL unis (or at least card logos) are released. These completely college themed cards should plummet after that.

RED ZONE RESULTS: MISSED FIELD GOAL I applaud a young and small company for going out and producing a great looking set with pack-inserted autographs. However, the base checklist is just too small and the inserts almost too numerous to make this product really worthwhile. There are no penalties or turnovers here, but 2010 SAGE Hit Low Series just couldn’t light up the scoreboard for me.

NEXT UP (tentatively): 2010 Press Pass Football

Blogosphere Kindess, Pt. 3

To risk sounding like a broken record, I will once again say that the thing that has amazed me the most since beginning this blog is the incredible good nature and kind-heartedness of my fellow collectors and bloggers. I once again have someone who deserves much thanks from yours truly. The card you see below is why:

1997 Score New Breed #17 Emmitt Smith

There is nothing paticularly special about this card. Granted, I am discounting the fact that it is an Emmitt Smith card and that it is a shiny insert from 1997. Let’s not get hung up on the details. But on the surface, this one lone card is not significant. I received it in a plain toploader wrapped inside a blank white piece of paper in a plain white envelope from a fellow collector. So no, there is nothing spectacular about this one card, even though it was sent to me completely free of charge. What’s makes this card so special to me, then? For what it caps off.

A fellow Emmitt Smith enthusiast has been sending me Emmitt cards over the past few months. Somehow he stumbled upon this humble blog, looked over my Emmitt Smith Collection list, and informed me he had about 30 Emmitt doubles that were not on my list and he would be willing to trade them to me for just 7 of my doubles that he did not have. Of course! Practicing due diligence in the skepticism realm, I waited to even gather his request until I received his package. And boy did he deliver. I was thrilled. A bunch of brand spanking new Emmitts for nothing more than a few of my dusty doubles. That was great.

And then just like an infomercial host, I got a “But wait! There’s more!” email from him. He told me he retrieved a huge bundle of Emmitts he sold to a co-worker for which he never got paid. He said he’d send me anything that wasn’t on my list, so I should make sure it was updated. Lo and behold, this fella sent me well over 100 new additions to my collection. Holy cow! And these weren’t all base cards from 1993. He included a lot of sweet inserts and high end base cards that would have cost me several pretty pennies to get online. We arranged another trade, this time me sending him all of my Michael Irvin, Jerry Rice, Warrick Dunn, and Ray Lewis cards. That might sound like a lot, but for whatever reason, I did not have an abundance of any of those players, which was completely fine with him.

Since then, he has sent me at least three additional single cards that I did not previously have, the latest being the Score New Breed pictured above. And what makes it even cooler? He continually sends these Emmitt Smith cards even though I have been blasted at work and haven’t had a chance to package and mail my end of the deal. He just keeps sending new cards and always says “Don’t worry about it. I know you’ll get to it. Take your time.”

This kind fellow collector, whom I will simply call Catch22 since I don’t know if he would want me to share his actual contact information, is not necessarily a fellow blogger, but he does have his own Emmitt Smith card website, The Emmitt Zone. His collection beats piss out of mine and is worth your while checking out. His packages are also a big reason I have been so slow in updating my own Emmitt card site, but that is a problem I am happy to deal with.

Thanks, Catch22. Here’s hoping that we have many more trades between us…and that I finally get your package mailed out…

Fresh Arrival

Like any quest, my goal to buy and review one box of each 2010 football product needs to start somewhere. That start? 2010 SAGE Hit Low Series. The box arrived in the mail yesterday and I am hoping to rip into it and post the breakdown by this weekend, assuming I am not completely distracted by the implosion of the remainder of my NCAA March Madness bracket (I know I failed to write a post about this last weekend, but the NCAA tourney is hands down my favorite sporting event of the year — hands DOWN!).

Still sealed and fresh from the factory!

And just in case you are impatient and really need your fix of cards featuring college unis, here is an old “gem” of Emmitt Smith:

1996 Classic NFL Rookies #75

Hopefully that was enough to hold you over for a few days.