I've been in the middle of a highly competitive Tecmo Super Bowl season along with a few friends lately. Tomorrow will be the third and final session, where someone will walk away with a virtual 1991 Super Bowl ring while the rest will be lamenting their defense's ability to properly time and execute a dive tackle. My original intent all along was to do a post about all of the real life versions (on football cards, of course) of the principal players, but as is often the case I got rather lazy. There was one name, however, that stood out and that name is John Fourcade. I won't claim to have a great enough memory now to remember who the majority of the players were from the 1990 NFL season, but I found it surprising that the team that I drew out of a hat (the Saints) had a backup quarterback that I'd never heard of. Naturally, I dug up my overflowing box of crappy early '90s football cards and found this little gem.
First of all, just take in this picture for a minute. What was Pacific thinking? Not willing to conform to one of the two logical choices for back of card orientation, someone broke out of the box (probably the same someone who chose this color scheme) and decided that there was no need to use convention. "Let's like... rotate it man... it could be all... y'know... diagonal!" If no amount of drug intake influenced this, I think I would be a bit disturbed.Anyway, back to Mr. Fourcade. I was just killing some time the other night reading about replacement players during the 1987 NFL strike. It turns out that Fourcade was one of those players. I found this pretty fascinating in contrast to the way picket line crossers were treated in the MLB, who to this day still aren't allowed admission to the Players Association or any of its benefits including inclusion in video games. Fourcade played at pretty much every level of professional football in his career, but saw the end of his NFL days by 1991. He's been less frustrating than Steve Walsh in our Tecmo season, however.
