Contest Results!

 

Another March Radness contest is in the books. Let's check the results!

With Michigan holding off UConn last night, we have some winners to announce in the annual March Radness thing.

Taking home the 1st Place prize is Bump and Run (Trevor P). Congrats! Jafronius was the only other entrant to pick the Wolverines to take it all, and as a result he gets the 2nd Place prize. In 3rd Place with the best non-Michigan bracket was Jeremy D. And finally, Erin who "Does not watch sports" came in hot with the worst bracket.

Congrats to everyone (except Erin, who will be annoyed with me if I try to give her any more cards) and many thanks for participating.

Bonus points to anyone who can spot the relevance of the image above.

Contest Update!

An update before the Final Four and a bunch of Christmas cards.

We're in the home stretch of the latest edition of the March Radness contest, and it all came crashing down for me on Sunday when Duke was felled by the shocking end to their contest with UConn. Huskies alum (and member of the back-to-back title teams) Donovan Clingan was just about to take the floor at halftime of the Blazers game we were at when he found out about the wild ending. While Jeremy sits in 1st place currently, I'm unsure of a path to victory for him as his predicted winner (Florida) is long gone. It all looks like it will come down to who takes the real title to determine our winner, with Trevor riding high with Michigan, both Brendan and Emily in play (Arizona), and Dominic lurking with his Connecticut pick. (Nobody tell Erin that she has clinched the worst bracket this year.)

Speaking of Michigan, we've got a ton of great cards to show today that came from big Wolverine guy Dennis of Too Many Verlanders over the holidays. Incidentally, the namesake of his blog is back in Tiger Town for what could conceivably be his final stop on his MLB tour.

I am pretty sure I have more "fancy" cards of Jeff Ayres (fka Pendergraph) than any of his normal base cards, but such is the way of the young hooper that doesn't blossom into a starring role in the pros. This one comes with a free mystery substance. I'm not going to forensically analyze this exactly, so let's just call it dirt?

I believe I have a lesser copy of this chunky jersey card of the one-time Cardinals closer. This one is a silver (or gray?) version numbered to just 149 copies, though.

Travis Outlaw was a bridge between the "Jail Blazers" era and the good vibes of the B-Roy/Aldridge days. Fun player! This is a fun card as well.

It's sort of amusing that this is called "Color Guard" when there is a distinct lack of vibrant color on it.

Here's a couple of other significantly more obscure Blazers on a signed card (or signed things affixed to a card, at least.) Portland certainly had some misadventures in the draft before landing Damian Lillard. Williams and Babbitt were a pair that didn't work out so well.

One of the things I like the most about Panini's draft sets is that they show players in the fully licensed college uniforms. This insert idea distorts the coloring and patterns of Franklin's Ducks uniform beyond recognition, unfortunately.

Hey, it's picture time! Encased cards don't scan so well, you see.

Here's a quick six-pack of cards from the various teams that I follow. Pacific really had some goofy designs.

And here's a nine-pack of all Ducks! I think my favorite here is the combo Freeman/Mariota card in their college uniforms.

I was fairly ambivalent about the Diamond Kings brand, but I do miss their framed parallels. This one is numbered to 99.

Blog favorite Ugo Amadi checks in here with a silver Prizm autograph from the much beloved Panini Prizm Draft Picks set.

And now we head all the way back to 1982 for a gander at a Garry Templeton Fleer stamp. I still have a lot of needs in the stickers and stamps areas.

The ticket motif that Panini Contenders is based on doesn't always work, but I like this design. The green foil helps as well. (Does anyone use paper tickets anymore? And they certainly aren't perforated, are they?)

It's baseball season! I hope everyone has been enjoying the first week of the long MLB marathon.

Contest Time! March Radness Year 17

Fill out a bracket and win some cards.

March Radness is back for another year! You probably know the deal by now. Fill out a bracket in my contest group and you may win a prize. I'm going with a simplified prize structure similar to the recent football postseason contest as that actually helped me get all of the prizes out the door before the next contest approached.

2026 rules:

• Selection Sunday is today, which means that you should be able to fill out your brackets very soon, if not by the time you are reading this. The games that actually count for the contest will start on Thursday, March 19th.
• Default ESPN scoring rules apply. You must fill out the entire bracket, including the tie-breaking final score of the final game.
• First place wins a 2026 Topps Heritage Value Box (blaster).
• Second place wins a 2026 Topps Heritage hanger box, while third place will win some sort of new(ish) unopened pack, subject to availability.
• As always, the worst (honest) bracket will get something, too.
• Click here now to join, and follow the "Join Group" link. The password is: radness
• Make sure to fill out your entire bracket prior to March 19th!

Contest Results... Bring on Baseball Season!

Congratulations to the winners!

Another football season is in the books, and we have a group of winners to celebrate. If you're in the list below, please reach out to me with your mailing address if you haven't already done so.

• Taking 1st Place (as well as the Mayo Bowl prize) is Jason K (BOWL SZN), who established a big enough lead at the end that the last couple of games didn't factor into the final tally.
• In 2nd Place is Brendan H (EternalSigh) with an excellent pick list that finished in the top 98 percentile of all ESPN entrants.
• Taking 3rd Place is Brandon L (leiber88 entry), who finished just ten points out of 2nd.
• And finally, there can't be a 1st without a Worst, and that "crown" goes to Timothy H (ESPNFAN7043205575). (We had one entry with a lower score, but unfortunately two of the games were not picked in that entry.)

Thanks to everyone for participating!

Pre-Semifinals Contest Update

With just three games left to play, let's check out the leader board (and some random cards.)

The annual college football pick 'em contest is about to come to a close, and according to the numbers, we may already have a winner. I'm not sure if this has happened before with a few games left to play, but Jason K. leads all entrants in total points, and no one has enough "max" points as it stands to catch him. Jason also won the Mayonnaise contest, so we may also have another unprecedented event as I don't recall anyone winning both contests. We still do have a few people jockeying for position to make it to the podium, with Brandon L., Elliptical Man and Dominic J. currently holding spots 2, 3 and 4 respectively.

I thought I'd throw up some cards (well, not literally!) for you to look at while you're here and selected the last 5 cards I've scanned. If I'm not scanning something for a blog post, it's almost certainly because it's a card I added to my collection in TCDB that was missing image(s). These are mostly football cards, with a Jalen Hurts bronze parallel and a 2022 JOGO CFL Alumni card leading things off. Jim Evenson is a Portland native who played at UO in the '60s before embarking on a pro career mostly north of the border.

Most of the cards in this post came to me in recent TCDB trades, but this one -- a Topps Season Tip-Off parallel, was plucked from a massive lot of cards I came home with from a card show last weekend. This heads to my Ducks binders as it features Chris Boucher. It's also the lone basketball card I scanned most recently.

Here's another Duck in a Ducks uniform. I love that. This is a red parallel from the 2024 Score football set.

Last up is a card from one of Panini's final releases, the 2025 Mosaic set. They still have a few more releases scheduled even though the calendar has flipped to 2026. I'm assuming the Topps license will only go into effect for the start of the 2026 season, or maybe shortly after the draft.

Enjoy the games (both collegiate and professional) this weekend!

Contest Reminder and a PWE Round-Up

Cards from little envelopes.

Before I get into today's crop of cards, here is your final reminder to go and sign up for the College Football Postseason prediction contest. It's Year 16! Can you believe that? It's time to start getting those picks in as the first game kicks off around 9:00 AM PST tomorrow morning.

It's now time for a year end recap of PWEs (Plain White Envelopes!) received in the second half of the year, or thereabouts. First up is a single Victor Scott the Sequel purple Chrome refractor parallel from 2024 Topps Heritage High Number, courtesy of Matthew of Number 5 Type Collection. It feels like it's been a few years since I've bought one of those hot box blaster things that contains those purple parallels, assuming that's still how these cards are distributed. With the 2025 set just around the corner (I think?), I'll have to figure out the best (cheap) option for opening some of those packs for myself.

Next up is another fine envelope from gcrl of cards as i see them. Pittman is the younger brother of Colts wide receiver Michael Pittman Jr. and was a strange case of someone whose on-field contributions never quite rose to his talent level. I don't normally collect Oregon players who transfer out and finish school elsewhere, but Pittman is in a Ducks uniform, so it works.

In addition to the nice autograph above, I also received this Jake Woodford card that's headed to top loader status.

This shows why it gets a top loader. It's one of those odd "Advanced Stats" parallels. I like the different approach to the stats here, but I don't like that all of the player bios are replaced with a boilerplate explanation on what advanced stats are.

Purple Topps flagship parallels are a rare bird, at least around these parts, where we don't have the stores that supply these exclusives (Meijer, I think?)

I completely missed out on the Topps All-Star Game set and am not entirely sure how they were distributed (at ballparks?), so it was nice to snag a few inserts from it. These cards look like they're die-cut or acetate or something, but they are just extra shiny and have a lot of dead space around the design.

I haven't checked lately, but I think Albert Pujols is still in the lead for having the most unique cards in my collection, even though I've never really sought out his stuff. At least it's one of the game's great players and not, I don't know, J.D. Drew?

This may have been the first year since 2009 where I did not open even a single pack of the new Chrome set, so it's been nice to slowly pick off some of my needs from the base set. I'm not against Topps Chrome, it's just that it's priced itself out of my budget.

Like many of his teammates, Nootbaar's name has been discussed in the trade rumors circle, but it would definitely be a "sell low" situation and I've been told that you generally shouldn't do that.

The Hamm King also delivered more Hamm! Excellent.

The third envelope just contained one single item, but it is a great one that has been affixed to my refrigerator since September. This really cool stadium giveaway comes courtesy of Baseball Cards Fan (and great blue heron enthusiast) Peter.

The final envelope of the bunch comes from Night Owl Cards and includes more Cardinals and set needs. The Jesse Haines card is from the 1961 Fleer Baseball Greats set, which caused a bit of a stir from Topps and their monopolistic ways back in the day. The design is excellent, but you already knew that.

Speaking of excellent design, I've said this before and I'll say it again. These Rookie Performers cards look great. I rarely praise modern Topps stuff, especially in the Fanatics era, but I always enjoy what they do with their insert designs that are inspired by the main set and era they're paying tribute to.

Here's another four-pack of minis from a few different Allen & Ginter sets. This year's A&G set is finally out, but I've yet to see any blasters anywhere.

Panini's continuing legal fight with Fanatics has been in the news this week. Everything I've read about it has made my eyes glaze over (to be fair, most details of court cases will do this to me), but it's clear to me that at least Panini tries to do different things with their products, even if both hands are tied behind their backs over the whole licensing thing. Topps doesn't even try anymore.

Here's the kind of oddball food-related baseball card that I really love. Apparently this known as the 1997 Wheaties set, even though the cards come from all sorts of different cereal brands. When is the last time there was anything interesting to cut off of the back of a cereal box?

We'll end things here with a triumvirate of 2025 Topps Heritage short prints. I swear I'm going to focus on putting some of these Heritage sets fully to rest one of these days.

Contest Time! College Football Postseason Pick 'Em #16

It's once again time to make the best college football postseason picks and win a prize!

Welcome back to Contest Season. This is the 16th year of the College Bowl Pick 'Em contest, although at this point it's more accurate to call it the College Football Postseason Pick 'Em contest.

Our past winners include Adam from Thoughts on Sox (2009-10), Mark from Stats on the Back (2010-11), AJ from The Lost Collector (2011-12), Royal Dan (2012-13), The Prowling Cat (2013-14), Jeff from One Man's Junk (Wax) (2014-15), Matt of Bubba's Bangin' Batch of Baseball Bits (2015-16), MrHaverkamp (2016-17), Anaconda37 (2017-18), Trevor of Bump and Run (2018-19), GLM1 (2019-20), Johnny G (2021-22), Nachos Grande (2022-23), Pete L. (2023-24), and Ginko-5 (2024-25). We've still never had a repeat winner!

If you want to just get to the free stuff, go to the bottom of the post for the sign-up link and make sure you submit picks for every game. There is a separate sub-contest for the non-ESPN people (or whoever!) which should only require a modicum of thought. If you don't have an ESPN account and don't want to give your personal information to Disney, there are burner email options out there (like Proton Mail)... just saying!

• First place will receive: a 2026 Topps Series 1 value box
• Second place will receive: a 2026 Topps Series 1 hanger box
• Third place will receive: a 2026 Topps Series 1 retail fat pack
• The Worst Place winner will receive: mystery unopened packs

At my discretion, I may include additional cards if possible.

Rules for 2025-26:

• Please email or DM me your contest information after you sign up. You can't assume that I will automatically recognize your contest entry name. [my Blogger profile / my Bluesky profile]
• Participants must sign up through the official ESPN link.
• Points are scored according to the Confidence System. This basically means that while you are predicting which team wins which bowl game, you will also be responsible for ranking how confident you are in each pick. This includes all FBS bowl games, the FCS Celebration Bowl, and all College Football Playoff games. The higher you rank those games, the more points you'll get when they win and prove that you're totally right and deserve all the I-told-you-so's in the world. See ESPN for complete details.
• You can change your picks at any time, so long as your pick is made before the official start time (usually the TV broadcast time) of each game. This is what ESPN calls a "rolling lock" time.
• Don't be a jerk and lose on purpose just to try and claim a prize. There are many, many of us who are bad enough at picking these without extra help.

Click here to sign up, and click on the 'Join Group' link! It's free! First-timers are always welcome! Password: quackquackquack

DEADLINE: There's a deadline of Saturday, December 13th at 9:00 AM PST. That's the start time of the first bowl game.

But wait... there's more! Available to all entrants as well as non-entrants who don't want to use ESPN, there's a bonus contest:

Leave a comment here predicting the final score and winning team of the DUKE'S MAYO BOWL before the Mayonnaising officially begins (the game is on January 2nd) and win a retail pack of new baseball cards. Whoever is closest gets it. Make sure you watch the end of the game because someone will be getting an actual mayonnaise bath!

(h/t to No Context College Football for the wacky photo.)

Contest Results and buckstorecards Cards

 

Genuine Coverage... Plus!

The 16th edition of the March Radness contest has concluded, and thanks to Florida's victory, there was a big shake-up in the final results. This also means that there was a new face on the top of the podium. Congrats to PSU wrestling dynasty (James C) for taking the top prize! In second place was fellow Cardinals fan Ray S, with Brian P taking third. Bringing up the rear and taking the mysterious worst place prize was none other than Bo Rosny. If you are one of these chosen few bolded names, please get in touch with me as soon as it's convenient so we can figure out the whole prize situation. As a side note, I still do have a couple of prizes to distribute from the winter bowl game contest, but that should get figured out here very soon.

As always, though, we're here to look at some cards. Today's offerings are from regular trader and all-around good guy Doug from Sportscards from the Dollar Store. The Blues have had a pretty incredible season which, heading into the playoffs, somewhat mirrored their 2019 Stanley Cup winning run where they fired their head coach about a month and a half into the season and ended up champions. This season they dumped their coach once again around six weeks into the season and turned things around. They were white hot in March leading into April, although it looks like they've dropped a few since their recent huge winning streak. Anyway, only Robert Thomas is still with the team. I do like the cardboard-y feel of these O-Pee-Chee cards and wish there was something like this in the baseball card world.

Here's a pair of champions from the 2024 Score NFL set. Score football is probably the best thing that Panini does, considering that it's affordable and typically decent to look at, while paying tribute to those old school Score sets.

Ricky Watters in his Eagles uniform came from the Tecmo Super Bowl III era, although seeing him in the modernized Eagles branding is a little jarring here.

I really like Jerami Grant (Portland native... technically!), but he really fell off a cliff this season. I don't have a lot of positive things to say about the Blazers in general right now, but I guess we shall see how this summer plays out.

Upper Deck's SPX sets are really a prime example of '90s sports cards excess.

Mookie Cook is a Portland kid but really just could not find much playing time in his time at UO. I hope he does well, of course, but him taking a bit of a half-step down to a WCC school (San Francisco) is interesting.

Here's a chunky Marcus Mariota card. Panini's "scope" parallels are kind of fun to look at with their circular patterns.

I know there probably aren't a ton of Jonathan Stewart megafans out there, but his career NFL totals of more than 7300 yards rushing and 1200+ yards receiving are nothing to sneeze at. The average pro running back's career is not a lengthy one.

*** PRINTING PLATE ALERT ***

Man, here's Mookie Cook again. Leaf did crank out a lot of cards of his. I wish this company or whatever it is would calm down and just put out a normal set or two with a few parallels, but it instead insists on driving anyone with a mere thought in their brain of compiling a checklist to the brink of insanity.

Bo Nix had a pretty impressive rookie season, so snagging a copy of his rookie card numbered to just 50 is a huge prize. I'm not sure that he's going to be a Hall of Fame type player or anything, but I think in the right situation he could prove to be pretty valuable at the helm of a good team for a number of years.

Rookie Johnny Wilson is also a Super Bowl champion. He's pictured in his college uniform as Score is always one of the first NFL releases of the season. He's a giant dude who I think could be useful in certain situations down the road.

The last card selection on offer is this Panini 'EEE' (as I like to call it) autograph of a St. Louis Cardinals prospect. Levenson was a 5th round pick in 2023 and is still at the A+ level of pro ball. There is a new Panini release ("Prospect Edition") that recently came out, even though it's branded '2024', that might be just a replacement for the Elite Extra Edition. I'm not really sure. I almost bought a blaster of it today, but I'm trying to temporarily save all of my cards cash for the back-to-back Topps Heritage sets this spring.