Good Luck Ducks, Week 12: Gopher Guts

It's a Friday night party as Mighty Oregon hosts some greasy and grimies.

We're already three-quarters of the way through the college football schedule now, as the Ducks are back on a short turnaround for a special Friday night appearance against Minnesota. In a conference jam packed full of eighteen schools, I suppose that there just isn't enough room for everyone to play on Saturday (or at least that's how the theory goes.) It appears that it's Oregon's time to play on a Friday this season.

The Ducks held off Iowa in another rainy slog, but there were more positive vibes around this win than the Wisconsin game. For one thing, Iowa is a legitimately good football team that just happens to run an offense that's stuck in some far away decade. To Oregon's credit, they were able to match the Hawkeyes at every step, resulting in one of the most run-dominant Ducks games on both sides of the ball that I can ever remember. Atticus Sappington (there's that name again!) and his 3 for 3 field goal performance, including the game-winning kick, won the day and kept Oregon's record at one loss.

The Minnesota Golden Gophers come in to Autzen Stadium with a 6-3 record, coming off of a blowout loss to Iowa before an OT win against Michigan State. They've been outscored 83-6 against ranked opponents (two of them) this season and most of their wins have come against subpar squads, but they do have an excellent pass rush that can't be discounted. While Dante Moore has adjusted to a more run-heavy offense as the season has progressed, you'll still expect him to make his share of drop-backs. Fortunately, the Ducks offensive line has held up fairly well this season, and their array of ball carriers should keep the Gophers guessing. Health is not on the Ducks side in the receiver camp, so they could be making use of a number of players that haven't gotten as many targets as they were forced to last week.

Notes and miscellany:

• A lot can happen in three weeks, but after Indiana survived a scare at Penn State last week, it's looking increasingly less likely that the Ducks will have a shot at playing Ohio State this year, unless the playoff bracket happens to swing that way. There could be an advantage (i.e. rest) of not playing in a conference championship game, of course. Oregon has a lot of work to do, however, as they haven't consistently looked like a playoff team over the course of an entire game in quite awhile.
• Opponent fun fact: Maybe this should just be renamed "Know Your Mascot", but it turns out that the so-called golden gopher is actually a certain type of ground squirrel and not a gopher at all. (We have an abundance of squirrels locally crawling all over the neighborhood, but as far as I know, none are of the "ground" variety.)
• Opponent history: Minnesota holds a 3-1 edge, with their most recent meetings occurring in the 1999 (Oregon win) and 2003 (Minnesota win) Sun Bowls.
  
• Game time is 6:00 PM PST on FOX in Eugene. Go Ducks!

Bubbling Up

The latest in a long line of excellent trade packages from Too Many Verlanders.

The year already feels like it's slipping away from me, so I know that it's well beyond time that I finish up some posts about trades I've received in 2025. I really don't want to head in 2026 talking about something I got, like, last summer. Since the vast majority of what I add to my collection has been coming from TCDB for the past few years, the bubble mailers full of surprise goodies have been something to savor. This particular one came over from TMV back in June, when things were finally starting to heat up here in Portland. Of course, we're now well into November and I've been looking for breaks in the gloomy weather all week to just to have a few moments to sweep a bunch of leaves off of my deck.

Anyway... cards! David Freese cards! While Randy Arozarena's 2020 playoff Babe Ruth act wrecked a lot of Freese's postseason records, he was pushed down the lists a bit more by some prolific players this year.

Vintage Blazers?! Nice! I am fairly certain that a bunch of these are going to end up being upgrades over what I already owned when I finally crack open the Blazers binders again.

A Bol Bol rookie rookie? I'll always take these! He may not have spent more than a blink at UO, but I'll always be fascinated by him.

It's a 20 year old parallel of a Hall of Fame Cardinals player? You can't knock that.

Three Blazers, er, legends all signed this slab of wood, or so the scan would have you think. They actually signed clear stickers that were affixed to this wood-like card-shaped object. I did like Jarrett Jack for a time, but he was made expendable when Brandon Roy came around.

Dion Jordan seems to have a ton of "hit" cards from his rookie year, or at least I seem to own a disproportionate amount of them. I will never mind this as he will always remind me of the tremendously fun Marcus Mariota era.

I think Jalen Reagor was supposed to be a speedly slot receiver type when he came to the NFL out of TCU, but he didn't seem to progress beyond a third option to pass two and made some costly errors on the field in his two seasons in Philly. It looks like he is out of the league now. I kind of like the design on this relic card, however, or at least the placement of the Eagles logo.

There's that man again (and his signature!) 

Jordan Matthews played more football for the Eagles than Reagor. However, after being a heavy target early in his career, he eventually became more of a guy you call up on the phone when you run out of healthy players.

The early 2010s will always be a special time for me and watching Oregon football, even though Chip Kelly is kind of a turd. Kenjon Barner was a huge part of that, and it was fun to hear him join the broadcast during a Ducks game earlier this year.

Jimmy Baseball! Now that he's been off the air for a full season, it's easier to enjoy his baseball cards and playing career.

Arik Armstead is with the Jaguars these days, and has certainly come along way from his days at Oregon when he was a two-sport player (football AND basketball... both kinds!)

The last one up is certainly the most special one, at least for me. As I continue to contemplate how I want to spend my card budget dollars, I know that excellent cards of the Wizard need to take precedent over any random blasters I decide to buy on a whim.

Good Luck Ducks, Week 11: Hunt and Peck

It's bird v. bird as the Ducks fly to the Central Standard Zone to take on some Hawkeyes.

Oregon is back on the football field this afternoon after their second bye week. Dante Moore had an extra week to recuperate from whatever happened to his nose, and the squad as a whole had an extra to gameplan for another tough and gritty defensive-minded Big Ten (capital B, capital T!) team. Are they prepared for a Big Noon Kickoff appearance? The game isn't actually at noon in any time zone, but FOX's big pregame show that isn't quite College Gameday is setting up shop early at the Iowa campus even though they aren't actually broadcasting the game.

As with the previous season's meeting, the Wisconsin game was a slog and not very fun to watch for most of the game. The weather conditions certainly didn't help, but when it finally looked like Oregon was looking like themselves, Moore ended up heading towards the sidelines with an unhealthy amount of blood gushing from his face. Fortunately, it sounded like his removal was more of a precautionary thing as the Badgers really hadn't put up much of an offensive threat at that point, with QB1 ceding even more minutes to the walk-on Brock Thomas. Thomas was a perfect 4/4 on the night and tossed his first TD pass as the Ducks were able to keep their opponents at arm's length.

Were it not, perhaps, for an early season loss to Iowa State and a relatively tame schedule, the Hawkeyes would be entering this game with some sort of ranking today. As it is, this team is another defensive stalwart that lost to consensus #2 Indiana by only 5 points, a better showing than Oregon had against the Hoosiers this season. Iowa is led by quarterback Mark Gronowski, who transferred from South Dakota State for his senior season after winning two FCS championships with the Jackrabbits.

Notes and miscellany:

• There's been some weird negative vibes in the Ducks fanbase this year since the Indiana loss, which doesn't make a ton of sense to me. It's true that for most of the first half of the Wisconsin game, I hadn't seen Oregon look that poor in decades, but I kind of prefer a tough loss in the regular season schedule to the team going straight into the playoffs unblemished like last season. There's always a chance this ends up going south on them with some pretty big challenges left in November, but I think it's probably been a good experience for a lot of the younger Ducks (and Moore in particular) to experience some adversity.
• Opponent fun fact: You can pick up a nice slab of Iowa football on vinyl as the 1950s era was documented on a record called "Hooray for the Hawkeyes".
• Opponent history: The Ducks hold a 2-1 edge over Iowa, but they have not met on the football field in 31 years.
• Game time is 12:30 PM PST on CBS in Iowa City. Go Ducks!

Good Luck Ducks, Week 9: No Pests

The Ducks are back on home turf to protect against a pest invasion.

The bitter taste in Oregon's mouth was clearly washed away last week as they crushed Rutgers. The Ducks excelled in all facets of the game, racking up 750 total yards, the most against a Power 4 school this season. Dante Moore threw 4 TDs on the day with his team putting up video game numbers. It was a fun time to say the least. With the B1G title game looking more and more like it will be between Indiana and Ohio State, the Ducks may not get their rematch chance against the Hoosiers. It'll just be up to them to take care of the rest of their opponents to secure the best playoff seeding that they can.

Oregon faces Wisconsin today, another struggling opponent. While I don't expect it to be the cakewalk that the Rutgers game was, I'm hopeful that the Ducks can bring their A game, get the job done early and get some more rest for those starters. Last season's meeting way far too close for comfort, but this seems to be a vastly different Oregon team.

The Badgers offense has been anemic to say the least, but they've continued to field a strong defense that can occasionally give teams fits. If dodgy weather becomes a factor, things could get weird and ugly (or just plain ugly). Of course, it never rains at Autzen Stadium, so what do we have to fear?

Notes and miscellany:

• Oregon always seems to start the season with the nicest uniforms (that classic green and yellow!) only to get really around the midpoint of the season. They're going with a tie dye look today.
• Opponent fun fact: Did you know that there are at least fifteen different types of badgers? That's a lot of badgers! Watch out for those stink badgers.
• Opponent history: Speaking of stinking badgers, Oregon has beaten Wisconsin four straight times to take a 4-3 series lead over their new conference foe.
• Game time is 4:00 PM PDT on FS1 in Eugene. Go Ducks!

Actual Cardinals Content

Sifting through some Cardinals ephemera.

Longtime fellow blogger Adam from Thoughts and Sox contacted me this past spring about some Cardinals stuff he had accumulated over the years. Needless to say, I was intrigued. There have been a number of still-active (or reactivated) blogger types from the baseball card community that I haven't traded with since I moved a couple of years ago, so it's always great to hear from someone who is still around and doing this weird thing.

The package was full of a bunch of very interesting Cardinals items, none of which appears to be cataloged in online databases like TCDB. There always seems to be a bit of fuzzy logic to what can be considered acceptable for TCDB vs. things they won't handle, but in any case I will find some good spots in my binders for these intriguing items.

First up is a stack of cards from the premiere edition of the APBA Major League Baseball Stats & Strategy Game. This looks to be a fully licensed product, with both MLB and Players Association logos on the back. There are no player photos on these, which separates them from other TCG-style baseball card sets that have been produced over the years.

This won't be the first time I'm saying this with this trade package, but these remind me a little bit of the old Strat-o-Matic game I had in the late '80s.

I may not be able to translate those numbers into something meaningful without proper context, but at least I'm learning about player nicknames I had never heard of before, like Ricky "Face" Bottalico.

Based on the numbers, I'm guessing this game had a dice roll mechanism to its game play. I'm thinking two dice are rolled, with each die account for one of the two numbers in black? I see snake eyes at the top! (I could probably just look up the rules online somewhere.)

Each card back looks identical and has some weird fake image of a Texas Rangers player.

These also came with a team logo header card that is of a slightly larger size.

Continuing on with the stat-based board (?) game thing are these stat cards from the 1955 Cardinals. The printing looks far more modern than that, and reminds me even more of a Strat-o-Matic type thing.

Here's a look at the back of Willard Schmidt's card, which includes actual stats from his 1955 season.

1955 was Ken Boyer's rookie season.

There are some differences between the pitcher cards and the batter cards, as you would expect for a game like this.

The next bunch of cards comes from a game with a 1975 copyright from Replay Games Inc. These are also, interestingly enough, based around the Cardinals 1955 season. It was not a good season! They finished 7th in the NL that year out of 8 teams.

The batter cards are significantly shorter than the pitcher cards as they are closer to a standard playing card size.

The backs all seem to have this retro-looking design. I couldn't find much info about these games, but I did find an eBay auction for the 1961 Kansas City Athletics which comes in a paper sleeve similar to how I found these in.

But wait... there's more! One of the coolest thing about this package was the inclusion of a dozen signed postcards and photos. They're mostly of lesser known players, but are very cool nonetheless. The majority of these appear to be photo paper glued to a thicker cardboard backing, but I am just speculating.

The backs mainly look like this, like something a custom card maker might have come up with. I only scanned a few of these, but can show off more in the future if there's interest.

Marty Marion's signature appears on what appears to be regular photo paper.

Big thanks once again to Thoughts and Sox on this very fun and intriguing pack of Cardinals history!

Good Luck Ducks, Week 8: Grrrr

Oregon looks to bounce back on the east coast.

It was a rough one last week as the Ducks saw a number of winning streaks snapped as they fell to the Indiana Hoosiers. I'm probably going to sound like a jerk when I say this, although it's not me who has to worry about giving credit where it's due: I thought Oregon played pretty poorly last week. It's not that I don't think Indiana has a talented team, but I thought that game was more about the Ducks losing focus after a week off than it was about the Hoosiers beating them. Fortunately, we live in a new era where one loss doesn't have to tank your whole season.

Next up on the docket is an appointment with the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. This is just Oregon's second season of having to cross over several time zones to play some of the conference schedule, so it's probably not something they're fully used to yet. Do schools with ridiculously large football budgets fly on commercial jets? Do they fly coach? There's, like, one hundred guys on these rosters. How do they fit them all on the plane? I know that not every player travels to road games, especially those that weren't planning to suit up.

It's a homecoming (already?!) game for Rutgers, who are also planning a light show before kickoff. Spoooooky. The Scarlet Knights have not beaten a ranked team in almost sixteen years, but they'll be led by a ground attack by Antwan Raymond, who has racked up 560 yards at the midpoint of the regular season. The Ducks run the ball quite a bit as well, but they tend to spread the ball around to a lot of different players.

Notes and miscellany: 

• Rutgers joined the Big Ten a little over a decade ago, but if I had to name all eighteen teams in the conference now, I'd probably struggle to fill out the complete list and could see them being left off. Well... maybe not if you asked me today!
• Opponent fun fact: The Scarlet Knights did inspire the naming of a robotic submersible that once crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
• Opponent history: This is the first ever football meeting between these schools. Oregon did beat Rutgers on the basketball court earlier this year in their first matchup in nearly 40 years.
• Game time is 3:30 PM PDT on the B1G Network in Piscataway. Go Ducks!

Free Stuff Friday: Unlicensed Bootleg Realm

More free stuff for you, if you dare!

On offer today are some truly bizarre cards that come from the realm of unlicensed card manufacturers that sell on Amazon/overseas. I honestly couldn't tell you much about these cards other than that they were purchased on the big stupid site and they appear to be Japanese in origin (or at least the "manufacturer" seems to be.) I wrote a little bit about these cards in a previous PWE recap. These will be sent out along with anything else claimed in last month's Free Stuff in the next week or so.

The cards are all trading card shaped (standard sized, rounded borders and very thin) and have various background patterns. The primary theme is gold, GOLD, G-O-L-D.

All of the backs look like this, although I've seen a few listings on eBay with different background patterns but similar player selection.

There are a bunch of bizarre player/team identification issues in the set. I'm offering up the leftovers of stuff I didn't already sneakily insert into trade envelopes over the past year or two. I also recently purchased a similar NBA set which disappointingly only had a couple of egregious errors. If there's any interest there, I could also put some of those up grabs on a future Friday.

CLAIMED: Harper, Arraez, Kluber, Swanson, Glasnow

As always, click to embiggen. Dansby Swanson gets the full name treatment here.

CLAIMED: Stargell, Melky, Bryant, Kiermaier

Here's a good example of some of the strange player selection. Stars, HOFers and journeyman relievers.

CLAIMED: Acuña, Horner, Chisholm

Here's the first two two Acuña cards along with a reverse Bob Horner.

CLAIMED: Swanson, Acuña

Dansby reappears without his legal first name and in a different uniform. We also get everyone's favorite "Alexander Emmanuel" and Acuña #2.

Good Luck Ducks, Week 7: Indy Vibes

Oregon is back on their home turf in another Top Ten battle.

The Ducks are coming off of a much needed bye week today, but the goal ahead of them isn't much different from the huge Penn State obstacle that they overcame a couple of weeks ago. Yes, it's another meeting of Top Ten Teams (TTT!) The Big Ten schedule does not offer much in the way of a reprieve, but at least Oregon will be on their familiar home turf in the Willamette Valley today. We're already nearing the midpoint of the college football schedule and yet it still feels like we're in the learning process of what this year's Ducks squad is all about.

The Fighting Ducks acquitted themselves well against Penn State, despite losing their lead and having to squeak out an epic win in overtime. I think it was an excellent experience for Dante Moore, who had never been elevated to that kind of stage in his career previously. The big win was somewhat tempered by last week's debacle where Penn State ended up losing again to UCLA in shocking fashion. (These days, it's shocking when UCLA beats anyone!) However, nothing can really take away from a big road win against a top tier program.

So what's up with Indiana? They're... really good? Are they a football school now? After rolling through the B1G gauntlet with an 11-2 record and a College Football Playoff berth (wow!) last year, they've mostly steamrolled their way through their early schedule this season, aside from squeaking by Iowa on the road a couple of weeks back. They're also coming off of a bye week themselves, neutralizing the advantage Oregon might have had. It's shaping up to be another huge challenge, but fortunately it'll be on friendly turf.

Notes and miscellany:

• At one point, I could have sworn that Oregon played Indiana last season, but it appears that I confused my I-states when I realized that they actually played Illinois. At some point I'm going to get a handle on this Big Ten thing, but with eighteen teams in the conference, it's going to take awhile to breed familiarity. (You know, familiarity breeds contempt, but... well, anyway.)
• Opponent fun fact: The most familiar Hoosier football alum names to me are Antwaan Randle El and Trent Green. The former was a big deal during a pocket of time where I was paying a lot of attention to the NFL (the early Andy Reid Eagles years) and the latter was a bit of a journeyman QB who was famously tossed aside in St. Louis for a former Arena League and NFL Europe vet named Kurt Warner after going down with an ACL tear in the preseason.
• Opponent history: Oregon is 2-1 all-time against Indiana, but they haven't faced each other since 2004 when the Hoosiers topped the Ducks to start a rough season for the green and yellow.
• Game time is 12:30 PM PDT on CBS in Eugene. Go Ducks!

Good Luck Ducks, Week 5: White on White

Oregon faces their biggest road test in years.

It's back to conference play for the rest of the season as the Ducks head to Beaver Stadium to take on the Penn State Nittany Lions. Oregon played very well in the B1G Championship Game last season when they took down Penn State at a neutral site that was pretty tilted towards the team in white. That was last year's Ducks, however. I'm not sure that any of the games they have played so far this season have done much to prepare them for tonight's battle, as Oregon State served no purpose other than as a punching bag after their opening touchdown. The Northwestern crowd was certainly hostile, but small. Very small, in fact. There will something like nine times the number of people in attendance tonight.

Oregon may be getting their starting running back Noah Whittington back tonight after he missed the past two games with an injury. The Ducks have had carries from 7 different running backs (and a number of non-running backs, of course), but I'd expect them to pair their rotation down to just a few key players in such a huge game. Dante Moore has been excellent, throwing darts all over the field, but we'll see how he reacts to a wild "white out" megacrowd tonight. The odd thing about the whole "white out" concept is that it's generally the opponent that is wearing white.

Penn State has an experienced senior quarterback in Drew Allar, who threw 3 TDs (and two picks) against the Ducks last December. I imagine Allar has had this game circled on his calendar for quite awhile now. (To be fair, do any college students have paper calendars on their walls? Maybe he set a calendar reminder on his phone: "Beat the Ducks today.") While the current college football playoff format affords strong teams a loss or two against another strong team without completely removing said team from consideration, I doubt anyone on either side is thinking about anything other than winning this big game tonight. Well, and maybe the party tonight. Oh, the college parties.

Notes and miscellany:

• There's a good chance I'll be missing a large chunk of the second half of the game as I'm heading down to Providence Park later to watch the Portland Timbers play FC Dallas. I'll try to keep up with things on my phone, but you know how that goes.
• Opponent fun fact: A "nittany lion" isn't a real thing. Penn State's mascot was named after nearby Mount Nittany and the idea that mountain lions once roamed the area, supposedly. Of course, "seahawks" also aren't really a thing. Ducks, though? VERY REAL (and ferocious.)
• Opponent history: Penn State holds a 3-2 edge after their loss in the conference championship last season. The only other meeting in my lifetime happened in the Rose Bowl in 1995, where Gang Green was stymied by Ki-Jana Carter.
• Game time is 4:30 PM PDT on NBC in University Park. Go Ducks!