How much do you care about your other teams in the offseason? For me, it's not always a lot.
It's hard for me to get too fired about sports that aren't actually actively scheduling contests among their teams. I'm not sure if I've always felt this way or if it's been a somewhat recent thing, but aside from this week's draft and the ensuing flurry of signings and trades that will commence in the week that follows, I can't say I'll be giving the Blazers a ton of thought. It's not that I don't care, either. This is the team whose allegiance I was born into, and I will holler at the TV and at the court from the nosebleeds with the ragiest of them when the season begins in earnest. However, my NFL fandom can barely register with more than a blip during the actual season, so the 24/7 NFL news cycle is completely grating to me. I have by and large avoided ESPN since MLB Network came to exist for this very reason.
Mets Cardboard unloaded some sportsball cards on me from these other sports a few months back, but every card included was a player from yesteryear. This won't be as hard to write about as, say, Sam Bradford or Arron Afflalo. (Afflalo was barely a Blazer long enough for me to learn how to spell his name correctly, incidentally.) The Mets aficionado has been waiting (patiently?) for months and months for me to hold up my end of the bargain, so I am hoping the massive package of baseballers headed his way in the next few days can somehow make up for the lost time.
Sabonis is one of my all-time faves, and on this card he gets teamed up with a couple of other European players of the day, one (Danilovic) that I've never actually heard of. These somehow just didn't pop as much as the old 1980-81 Topps cards. We don't get a rare glimpse at Vlade in a Hornets uniform but we do get the teal borders.
In addition to Blazers, there were also many Eagles to be found, many from the Tecmo Era. Bubby Brister showed up in green sometime in the SNES portion of the Tecmo Era, which is how I found out about most NFL transactions back in those days.
Randall is hands down my favorite football player of all-time. One of these days when I get my Eagles cards organized I'll start cataloging my Cunningham cards and entering them in Zistle as I've done with my other player collections. I don't have many, so if any of you have some QB Eagles cardboard examples, feel free to drop them on me. I won't mind.
Early '90s football cards were like the stock market and crack combined, but mostly focused on the devastating letdown that comes with a good drug/money high. This is some fancy see through card made out of plastic. bank accounts and tears.
Here we move out of the Tecmo Era for a moment and into the NFL 2K era. The Duce is loose!
I don't remember Pro Set ever having a high(er?) end product, but here you go. Pro Set Power. It's been unleashed.
Yeah during the off season for one sport I'm usually too busy thinking about the one that is currently going on. That was basically how it was when I was a kid, I didn't know or care about the whole drafting process (plus it wasn't as public friendly as they are now-days) I just followed my fave teams, mostly my Homie teams during pre-season training and during the playing season. I still don't do the whole draft watching thing. I never followed it much before it was mainstream and I still don't follow it now BECAUSE it is mainstream. I just like to know about the players my teams drafted.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a kid it was during the days when the card collecting was just during the season when the card companies put out the cards. Around 1976/77 a friend of mine turned me onto my LCS which at its beginnings was almost literally just a hole in the wall. It was in the back corner of a used book store and they were open weekends Saturdays only at first. I still basically just stuck to thinking about what was in season at the time. A few years later they took over the entire space the bookstore had held (the bookstore owner either died or sold it), then moved across the street, years later moved across town, and this past fall another move across town.
Sometime in the early 90s I switched gears to thinking about whichever sport whenever, but I still tend to concentrate just on whichever is in season. Right now it's Elmer Season.