Good Luck Ducks, Week 6: Get Sparty

Oregon hosts Michigan State on a Friday night, just like the college football gods intended. 

 

Tonight, it will truly feel like the Ducks are part of the B1G. Well, that's aside from the whole Friday thing. Part of expanding to eighteen schools meant that, for broadcast reasons, Friday games were going to be part of the mix for, well,  most of the schools. Oregon hosts a traditional conference school in the green and white that they've played a few times in the past that they may someday form a new rivalry with. Or not. It's tough to say.

Last week, the Ducks won comfortably on the road over an outmatched and outgunned UCLA team that is still adjusting to a new head coach. This week, they are hosting a 3-2 team that is coming off of a blowout home loss to Ohio State. The Spartans also bring in a familiar face in ex-Oregon State head coach Jonathan Smith. This might be one night that a bunch of Beavers fans could be pulling for their in-state rival, given the lingering bitterness of their prized head coach, alumnus and former QB jumping ship as the conference was imploding.

 

It should be a fun night at Autzen Stadium, with the full complement of the student body on campus and the typical shenanigans that a Friday college night brings. The Ducks have yet to play what feels like a "complete" game this season. I'm confident that Oregon will be up for showing the rest of the conference (and football watching country) what the move to the B1G is all about tonight.

The Spartans are led by a former Oregon State backup quarterback in Aidan Chiles, who has struggled with interceptions so far this season. Look for the Ducks to continue to establish some consistency on defense, while looking out to stop Chiles' ability to scramble and move on designed runs. (Look for me to enjoy the rest of the weekend without having any football games to worry about after tonight.)

Notes and such:

• I haven't said much about the uniforms this season, but they been nothing short of wonderful to look at, blending all of the latest modern flourishes with a look back to the mid-'90s uniform era, which just so happens to be when I attended. Tonight they are going for something different, as Dan Lanning's family helped design these to help "Stomp Out Cancer".
• Do they have any history at all? Oregon holds a 4-3 edge, with their last meeting coming in 2018 in the eminently forgettable Redbox Bowl, where the Ducks squeaked out a 7-6 win. Prior to that, the two schools met for home-and-home series three separate times, most recently in 2014/2015.
• Ducks ranking this week: 6 (AP). Oregon climbed up a couple of ticks this week while awaiting the arrival of the actual CFP rankings.
• Dillon Gabriel Heisman Watch: Gabriel seems to be a step or so outside of the conversation this week, but wins over Ohio State and Michigan could change that dramatically. You never know!
• Game time is 6:00 PM PDT on FOX. Go Ducks!

World Headquarters Edition

Green football and loads of baseball. 

 

Awhile back, Dennis from Too Many Verlanders came into a bunch of cards and was generous to share some of the spoils with yours truly. As is often the case, the package came with an excellent selection of football guys I collect. You know, the guys in green! Nick Foles is near the top of my list of modern Eagles to collect as he led the team to the promised land not too long ago, so it's always great to pick up something fun like this rookie patch thing.

Green means Ducks as well (mallard green!) DAT was a fun player to watch, always a complete blur on the field. (Didn't they call the offense "the blur offense" at one point?) Many of my favorite looking Oregon cards were made by Upper Deck for some reason.

Patriots rookie (well, last season) Christian Gonzalez looks especially good here in a green parallel version. I'm glad this is from the draft set where Gonzalez is wearing his college gear, although I'm sure I'll eventually have a bunch of his cards where he's wearing that dastardly Patriots garb.

Marcus Mariota may not be wearing green here, but it's alright by me.

These playing card-themed inserts are pretty silly. I don't know that I've seen any other ones besides Gonzalez.

DAT is back again, this time on another Upper Deck card in acetate.

I don't think I have a clue about this brand. Pro Picks? It blends in with Wild Card and Leaf and Sage and whatever other small potatoes college brands are out there. I never really see this kind of stuff on shelves.

Akili Smith's son, also a quarterback, is set to join the Ducks next year. I wonder how much influence Smith Sr. had on his son's recruiting decision, considering how different things are at UO now than they were in the late '90s.

It's back to Eagles territory we go with a few more former Birds. The current team is set to open their season with the Packers in Brazil shortly.

I always thought Mack Hollins would make a much better name for a lineman, or at least not a skill position guy.

Jalen not-Hurts looks absolutely thrilled to be stuck inside this Christmas ornament. Does Panini release a holiday-themed version of their Donruss football set like they do with NBA Hoops, or was this just part of the regular set?

After all of those football guys to get your football weekend started (FOOTBALL!), here's a former Trail Blazer basketball pro. The backdrop of these cards looks like some cheesy computer generated graphic pattern that you could find in a Google image search or something.

The red bird baseball team can't avoid the green either.

Looks like mojo!

Elite Extra Edition is a weird and fairly janky looking product every year. It looks like this year, Panini got bored with their usual pink parallels and decided to unleash whatever the heck this is to the collecting world.

There needs to be a prominent set of round cards (or discs!) every year. It should be baked into every contract. I would actually order Slurpees if 7-11 ever decided to bring back their discs, and I never drink that kind of stuff.

We go from the circular to this die cut gem. I think these inserts are fairly tough to come by.

Speaking of tough to come by, I've run across these '90s Sportscenter themed inserts a bunch of times, but I'm pretty sure I've never seen a World Headquarters Edition parallel before. Nice!

Last, but certainly not least, is this huge pile of Topps Heritage cards (mostly short prints!) and Allen & Ginter minis that all checked off various needs from my various wants. One fuzzy picture from my phone can't possibly do this justice, but suffice it to say that I was very pleased with this overall.

Baseball is Back!

 

Baseball cards are back as well, and they brought a few other sports with them. 

 

Let's hop in the wayback machine and check out some cards that Sportscards From The Dollar Store sent quite a few months ago -- last year, in fact. Yes, that means that I'm quite a bit behind in the blogging show-and-tell here, but I'm not going to explain myself or make any apologies for it. We're here to look forward, and forward we shall look!

Along with a really nice '78 O-Pee-Chee HOFer came a few Cardinals cards, including another one of those "so weird, it must be Panini!" cards that features a silver ink autograph on a leather swatch. If I'm not mistaken, this might be the one year (2019) that they brought typically high end Leather & Lumber brand to retail, which would also mean it was my first dip into the Panini Points realm.

Like many a pitcher with a rocket arm before him, Trevor Rosenthal seemed to burn hot quickly and then more or less disappear. Since departing St. Louis, where he was a full time closer, Rosenthal has logged big league innings for four other organizations but hasn't made it back to the big leagues since the cursed 2020 "season".

Well, I assume you all know all about Stan the Man's story, so let's just take a beat and enjoy a cool looking card. I'm sure that photo has to be colorized, but I don't care.

Moving on to tackle football, buckstorecards always finds me some really fun Oregon cards. Bonus points should be awarded for catching a Duck in Duck gear.

There's no gear here at all, and this weird Panini Day set seems to have a lot of unaccounted inserts in the TCDB files, which can be a bit frustrating. No, I don't really want to figure out my own checklist for this set. Panini can be a real nightmare when it comes to that stuff.

Haloti Ngata is a very large man, so it must have been difficult to fit him in the frame here,. They almost nailed it, but not quite.

I really like the design of this old Topps Finest Donovan McNabb relic. It has a honeycomb thing going on.

This one isn't bad, either. There's no honeycomb, but there's still a hexagonal jersey swatch.

On the other hand, I feel that this design is unspeakably awful. The glittery background almost reminds me of "snow" on an old TV set. This might have looked better with more of a television theme to it, but what do I know? They don't consult me on these things for some reason.

Here's a Turkey Red design that I don't recognize. Did they ever make tobacco cards that looked like this? (I mean, besides the sticker signature, of course.)

I'll always wonder what Joey Harrington's pro career would have looked like if he had started off with a better franchise that didn't rush him to the field because they didn't really have any other options. He was never a big numbers guy, but he was more of a leadership pro. In the right system, I wonder if he could have thrived.

It's the man of many nicknames, FredEx, The People's Champ, etc. (Most of these he gave to himself.) He only really had that one memorable play, but it was definitely a stunner.

Here's another "bonus points" Ducks card.

Here's the first of a pair of fancy looking Dion Jordan "material" cards. Jordan has a ton of cards, and almost all of them are with him wearing Dolphins gear. He didn't really get a chance to make an impact in the pros until he got to Seattle, though.

How long are these rookie photo shoots for the NFL? There are so, so many different cards out there and so many dorky poses that they have to make.

This counts as a little bit of a patch, doesn't it? I can see a little bit of color there that isn't white.

I wish the careers of De'Anthony Thomas and Patrick Mahomes had overlapped a bit more. I could see DAT getting utilized more as a gadget type player once Mahomes started getting more established.

Our last Duck of a very excellent group of Ducks cards is a "Gold Zone" Score parallel of Penei Sewell, numbered to just 50. You can still find some interesting cards in a lower end product.

There's even a basketball card in the mix. Al-Farouq Aminu was a consistent presence in the peak years of the Blazers "Dame Time" era.

Sports cards with no printed name or photo on the front are a bit weird. I can assure you that this is a Brian Elliott card, a longtime goaltender who was still active in the NHL as recently as last year.

I do love a good team photo, even a hockey one. This is apparently from a 1990-91 Kraft Singles set. I'm not sure if it was a regional thing or a wide release, aside from the copyright info on the back telling us it was a Canadian release of sorts.

Too Many Sports

Trying to avoid the end of year sports fatigue. New cards like these will help. 

 

A couple of blog announcements before I get into the good stuff from Too Many Verlanders: 

• If you missed out on the big college bowl contest this year, don't worry. There's still plenty of time to pick a winner of the dumb greasy white condiment bowl game. All you have to do is leave a comment on the original post with your predicted score. Even if you did enter the big contest, you can drop a guess there as well. Winner gets some sort of new pack next year.
• I am no longer active on Twitter for reasons that should be fairly obvious by now. I am on Bluesky, however. Let me know if you need an invite. I don't post tons and tons of content, but you will get a link to any new blog posts as soon as they drop (or as soon as dlvr.it decides to post them.)

 

So, where was I? Oh, yes. Sports. I am suffering from quite a bit of sports fatigue right now. The Eagles seem to be hell bent on pissing away their season. The Ducks made quite a run towards a potential playoff berth but couldn't figure out how to beat Washington... twice. The Blazers are probably going to end up tanking for the third season in a row with an awful head coach. (I can handle a bad Blazers team, but they've never been less fun to watch than under Chauncey Billups.) The Timbers just finished up their second straight playoff-less season in a league where it's increasingly difficult to miss said playoffs. The Cardinals finished the past season with their worst record since 1995, a year where I am quite certain I watched zero baseball games.

And yet, the cards keep rolling on in from great trade pals like Dennis from Too Many Verlanders. Dennis sent tons of great stuff, including cards of lesser known Eagles players like Nate Allen. He also included a bunch of oversized cards, a baseball pin and other great things I can't even fit into this space here. For the sake of brevity (and my sanity), I just chose the cards that I scanned for the TCDB site to show off here.

Fortunately, no current Eagles were harmed in the making of this blog post. I might have had something really grumpy to say about them if they were. To be fair, Miles Sanders would probably rather still be with this trainwreck of a Philly team than his current 2-win Carolina Panthers.

In happier times, there was Donovan McNabb. I did realize the other day that I've seen the Eagles play in 3 Super Bowls (winning 1, though they really should have won all 3.) That's more title opportunities than some teams I root for.

I love the "New Breed" font on this Matt Barkley jersey card. So futuristic!

There was another version of last night's Eagles/Seahawks game that would have had Marcus Mariota starting in place of an ill Jalen Hurts. (And not ill, like '80s cool.) I wonder what that would have looked like.

Hey, it's baseball! Dennis included a few of these Moments & Milestones cards with the package. I'll never have them all, but it's fun to accumulate them.

At some point I may invest in a new scanner. I've had my current one since early 2009 when it was purchased at a Circuit City (!) closing sale. And it still works just as well as it did on day one, but part of me always wants to see if I can solve the "foilboard looks terrible when scanned" conundrum. (It does also tend to wash out certain colors like red, but there's probably a setting or two I could tweak there.)

Clayton Whoson? Apparently he quarterbacked Northwestern, a bit of trivia I would have maybe known if the Oregon Ducks had joined the Big Ten sooner. Erin asked me the other day who all was in the Big 10 now, and I got through maybe half the list before I gave up. I might be able to recite that list from memory by this time next year, but I'm not going to guarantee it.

Here's another of those Moments & Milestones parallel-o-rama cards. This is a rarer black version that is numbered to just 25.

We end things here with Akili Smith, whose son (Akili Smith Jr.) is an Oregon QB recruit for 2025. Of course, with the transfer portal madness, he'll potentially follow in the footsteps of Bo Nix, Dillon Gabriel (Oklahoma transfer for 2024) and Dante Moore (UCLA transfer). Or maybe not? Sometimes these dudes just up and leave.

Thanks again to everyone who has sent me cards this year! I'll try to be less grumpy next time.