Even More Bird Team Cards

 

Ducks, Eagles and Cardinals battle it out. 

 

I'm showing off again. This time it's a package from Dennis of Too Many Verlanders, which means a healthy helping of cards from my favorite bird teams. With the majority of my card activity getting pushed towards TCDB, it's always nice to get a surprise blind mailer in the mail with lots of goodies from an old blogging friend.

Jeremiah Trotter is one of those rare players who had three separate stints with my team. He also played during the Donovan McNabb era, one of the rare points in Eagles history where I was more or less locked in with what they were doing as a fan. (The other times I really followed the team was in the early '90s after discovering Tecmo Super Bowl, the championship year and since Jalen Hurts became the starter.)

John Hightower has a great name for a wide receiver, but he hasn't been able to do much in the league so far.

Because of the gigantic preseason rosters but the relatively restrictive active rosters during the season, Donnel Pumphrey is one of many NFL players who has appeared on a bunch of pro football cards but has never made an official appearance in a counting game. Of course, it's hard to look like a real player when they don't let you wear full pads on your card to begin with.

DeMarco Murray bombed in his one season as an Eagle after a massive season with the rival Cowboys. It was said that he was truly a product of his offensive line, and the Eagles couldn't protect him, I guess. It's either that or he was a secret spy for the bad guys.

Here's another great football name, especially for such a large guy who played on the line.

Todd Pinkston caught a ton of flak for being one of the best of an extremely untalented receiving corps early in Donovan McNabb's career, but he was always solid in 2K for me!

A red bird team slipped in here. Matt Adams certainly looks like he could play a little football.

FredEx basically had just one memorable play in his Eagles career, but boy was it memorable! He caught the 28 yard pass on 4th-and-26 that eventually sunk the Green Bay Packers in the 2003 playoffs. He was a big star at UCLA in the old Pac-10, but he was otherwise best known for being very quotable and thinking very highly of himself.

I was certainly a big fan of Correll Buckhalter, part of the three-headed monster in the backfield that included Duce Staley and Brian Westbrook. It was a shame that he couldn't seem to stay healthy.

We end things with another Cardinal and one of those rubber hockey puck looking manupatch cards. I always like tracking these retail exclusives down because they're usually pretty affordable since they're not taken too seriously by the card bros. (You know who you are, card bros.)

Football Upstages Everything

Baseball cards take a back seat in this @forgotaboutblay hobby delivery. 

 

As jokes continue to swirl around the internet about the length of a certain professional football quarterback's retirement (it wasn't long), I thought I'd show off some stuff from another stellar batch of cards from Dennis of Too Many Verlanders fame. A good chunk of my football (Ducks, mostly) collection has been supplied by Dennis, so like how the long awaited opening of Spring Training ended up taking a backseat to the news of a certain former Michigan QB deciding to... whatever the opposite of hanging up your cleats is... the football cards are going to throw themselves fully in front of the baseball stuff for now.

First up, the Arik Armstead card from Panini National Treasures is an instant favorite. The design is pretty nice, but it's the throwback uniforms that really seal it for me.

This color parallel ends up clashing a bit with the Oregon uniforms, but there are a lot of colors that clash with their uniforms. (At times, their own uniforms have clashed with themselves.)

Speaking of Ducks uniforms, I actually really liked their jerseys from the Dennis Dixon era. It was easy to call out the crosshair pattern on the shoulders, but I kind of liked it!

Here's another look. This is from a Press Pass jersey card. Is Press Pass still a thing? I haven't a lot of college draft cards since Marcus Mariota turned pro, aside from the odd Panini Prizm thing.

DeMarco Murray won't be the most fondly remembered Philadelphia Eagles player, but the Donruss Dominator inserts look pretty nice.

Flipping over to basketball for a bit, this Panini Totally Certified design always annoyed me. It's great to have a large place for the player to sign, but they've cropped so much of the photo that it makes for a bit of an ugly card. The reason they did this, I imagine, is because they're using college photos due to the longer lead time needed to have these signed on-card. Totally Certified seems to have been banished to the Panini attic for now (it doesn't even appear in Chronicles), while the regular Certified brand lives on.

It's back to football here with an extra shiny Prizm Draft auto.

Here's one last football card before we let the baseball guys have a bit of fun. I did hold back a few of the huge stack of signed cards for a future Ducks post, as I tend to do.

If you're strictly a baseball fan and are still reading this-- thank you! Mid-'90s Score parallels/inserts are a favorite of mine, as they don't seem to be too expensive and yet I still seem to need a ton of them.

Dennis sent a healthy stack of 1996 Flair cards, which offer a high end look in an era of overproduction. They are fancy, but not all that expensive anymore.

Imagine returning to collecting baseball cards after more than a decade off and finding out that someone really made baseball cards like this. Well, that's exactly what happened to me. I found a lot of things  about card collecting (Chrome, in particular) to be really eye-rolling when I first got back into it, but this is the right kind of silliness.

This pair of Press Proof parallels from 1997 Donruss claim a print run of just 2000. That doesn't seem like a lot by today's standards, but I bet it would be a huge ordeal to put together a whole set of these.

Lastly, Topps Finest cards are always appreciated here. Two of these gems from 1994 are refractors. I bet you can guess which ones.