5+1 Q&A With Dave @PaperStreetSportsCards
With the NFL season finally hitting its stride, I wanted to talk to a hard-core football collector. Dave (@PaperStreetSportsCards) collects Tom Brady, but he also collects Cincinnati Bengals like Tee Higgins and Joe Burrow. In other words, Dave is a little mainstream and a little niche. He’s one of the most thoughtful collectors in the hobby — and he’s also one of those low-key, sneaky collectors who surprises you with the high quality of his collection, someone who will just casually drop a card that makes you say “holy ^%@!” when you least expect it. We talked about why he and his family appreciate Tee Higgins, how he’s managed to avoid FOMO this season, and the value in learning hard lessons. Enjoy.
On IG: Dave @PaperStreetSportsCards
Q1: NFL season is here, finally. I find that when a new season begins, whether it's NFL, NBA or anything else, my interest in that league spikes, which means I start looking at cards more, too. But common wisdom tells us that's a terrible time to buy because prices spike. As someone who collects a lot of football, do you find yourself wanting to collect more at the start of a season? How do you decide when and when not to buy?
@PaperStreetSportsCards: There is definitely an excitement level that percolates around this time of year. We have been starved of our football fix for over six months, and every year I feel like the anticipation is even more intense. The last number of seasons, this has lead to buying-into-the-craze, and this year is no different, but with one caveat: The player I’ve been picking up is retired. Tom Brady has been far-and-away the player I have been accumulating since the Super Bowl, and it really hasn’t even been close. Brady’s market the last number of months has moved a little counterintuitive to what I had anticipated following his retirement, but it seems as though his stepping away from the game has resulted in not only his card prices falling a bit, but collectors willing to part with some super cool, relatively rare cards as well. There appears to be a number of collectors who maybe prefer to hold more current/active players, and once he is no longer able to be watched on Sundays, they send the cards to auction. Or, with the declining Brady market, some consolidation happened and collectors transitioned smaller cards into bigger ones that were lower-priced than they had been in a while. Whatever the cause, the more Brady’s market dropped following his retirement, the more I sold younger/active players to move into scarce Brady cards I knew I may never have an opportunity to obtain again down the road.
I’m thankful this Brady focus has allowed me to stiff-arm the FOMO that captures so much of us at the beginning of every new season. Previous years, I scoured eBay and auction houses for deals on players I felt would get off to a good start of the season, and it rarely worked out. Fortunately, these were usually smaller pickups. Unfortunately, the majority of them remain as painful receipts of hard hobby lessons, learned with dollars, resulting in a shoebox full of cards that will never recover.
Q2: You're building quite the Tee Higgins collection. What's the story behind that PC?
@PaperStreetSportsCards: I’m a common story in the middle-aged-collector segment of the hobby: Collected as a kid, junk wax, took a big break from collecting, came back during the pandemic. The first big product I got into upon my return was nothing more than the result of release-timing: 2020 Panini Playoff Football. Being “new again” in the hobby, I resumed collecting in the same manner as I had collected decades before, and picked up a fat pack, hanger, and blaster from a shelf at Meijer during lunch one day.
That night, while opening them in the basement, I fell in love with the shiny optichrome color of the few Behind the Numbers and Call to Arms inserts that were included with the paper cards in each package. One of those shiny cards was of rookie Bengals receiver Tee Higgins. As a second-round pick, he wasn’t getting the publicity of some of the other receivers from that loaded 2020 draft class (Justin Jefferson, CeeDee Lamb, Jerry Jeudy), but when my boys saw the Tee Higgins card, they commented that aside from Justin Jefferson, they thought Tee Higgins would end up being the best receiver of that draft. As we continued to watch that NFL season, Tee became our guy.
So, as opportunities arose (after I had acclimated to more of an eBay “singles” collector from my initial mostly-fruitless breaking wax re-entry into the hobby) I picked up a Higgins card every now and then. It was fun to pick up and collect with my boys. But then came Jan. 3, 2023, the Damar Hamlin game. Watching as a family, as football fans, and as a country, we all hung on every bit of news following the events of that night, as Damar fought for his life. That entire week was bigger than football. Hamlin was the subject everywhere you went, regardless of whether people were football fans, or even sports fans.
So where does Tee Higgins fit in? On the field that night, I was amazed at how quickly everyone pulled together, both Bills and Bengals players, to shield the medical heroes as they saved Hamlin’s life, and I was equally impressed with the comfort players were trying to provide Higgins, the offensive player involved in the collision, as he was distraught over what had just occurred and what was playing out before them all. True human compassion was on full display, in every corner of Paycor Stadium, Cincinnati, and the country. For the rest of that night, and the following days at the UC Medical Center, Tee was a visitor at the hospital, his purpose being nothing more than supporting Damar Hamlin in his fight and recovery. Higgins’ true self was revealed in that situation – the person he is – and it shined above and beyond anything he could possibly ever accomplish on a football field. And, as my collecting projects seem to go, the character reveal of No. 85 in stripes further accelerated my desire to collect him, and I picked up any and every Tee Higgins card I could find.
Q3: There are so many football cards out there. What triggers you to buy something? I mean, beyond just that a player happens to part of your PC. In looking at your IG page, you've got Panini and Topps cards, Finest, Prizm, Chrome, etc. What types of cards are really in your wheelhouse, and why?
@PaperStreetSportsCards: In the beginning of my return to collecting, I picked up a lot of the new guys, just like so many of us have. It was a lot of … well … complete junk. But it was an important period for me to once again discover what I liked – and just as importantly, didn’t like. Fortunately, the 2020 football class of quarterbacks and wide receivers made the situation ultimately just slightly less painful than it could have been. Once I really started paying attention to what I wanted to collect, I began to narrow my focus. A little, then more, until finally, I had something I could actually call a PC. Aside from Higgins, in football, I mainly PC Joe Burrow and Tom Brady.
Brady’s selection of cards has the most diversity, as you would expect from a 23-year career. My affinity for his 2002 cards is the result of how his career started, and we all know the story. Those 2002 cards all released following his first Super Bowl, and as a result, he was prominent, for the first time, in all the football sets. So in many ways, 2002 is an extended rookie year of cards for Brady. In addition to 2002 as a whole, my favorite sets ever created are 2005 and 2006 Finest. The art, color, full photography – there is nothing to improve. If I could go back and collect any two years, ‘05/06 would be it, and I would grab any-and-all of the Finest I could find.
Burrow’s options are Panini only, and since I returned to the hobby during the heart of the Panini era, my PC is full of Panini cards. Although I will always have a special place in my heart for Panini Playoff and that first night opening packs again, I have moved to keeping mostly within the Prizm/Select guardrails. National Treasures and Flawless are super cool sets, but the prices tend to be a little beyond my comfort zone.
Against the hobby grain, I adore non-serial-numbered shiny short-print cards as much as numbered cards. There’s something oddly nostalgic about cards without numbers that takes me back to my 13-year-old self, studying the intricacies of the pictures, then flipping them over to read the information on the back as I rifled through them, one by one. There were no serial numbers to distract me purely from the art of the card, and that’s what I like about collecting SP/SSP cards. For me, it’s more about the card and color, versus the serial number. Although I know this may not be the top financial way to collect, the beauty of the hobby is that we all get to collect however we want. (That being said, as we will see very quickly in the next paragraph, I have an insane affinity for serial numbers, specifically, certain serial numbers.)
The full story on my collecting is that I seriously adore serial-numbered cards as well. This taps into my life-long love of numbers, and when collecting, I will give extra attention to the bookend first/last of a run. But nothing is more appealing to me when collecting serial numbered cards than the jersey number. While my kids were playing sports, we spent a lot of time talking about jersey numbers and the meanings behind them. Having put some thought/intention into the number they wanted to represent them only added to their excitement to play on game day, every single time they put on their uniform. It was part of their identity, an extension of them and name on their back. Collecting jersey numbered cards, in some way, bridges me back to the days when my kids played, coaching them on the sidelines, and being a part of something they loved.
Q4: I really love your term – "painful receipts" – about purchases we've all made that hopefully teach us lessons moving forward. On one hand, those memories make us cringe because of the choices we could have made instead. On the other hand, I feel like we need those lessons to get better. What would you say to someone newer to the hobby who's worried about making collecting mistakes?
@PaperStreetSportsCards: 100 percent of those mistakes have made me a better collector. I am a big believer in the adage that we learn more from our mistakes than our successes. Shortly after returning to the hobby, I allowed a lot of voices to enter my collecting world, and unfortunately, started listening to them – I remember a conversation I had in early 2021 with a Detroit hobby shop owner and a customer in a store I had stopped into over lunch. We were talking about the craziness of the hobby, and how much it had changed since the late-80s/early-90s when I had collected. When I mentioned different parallels I was collecting of certain players, they both said I was missing the boat – that graded base cards just continued to appreciate, and specifically brought up the 2018 Luka PSA 10 as the example. This sounded absurd to me, but being “new again” to the hobby, I thought maybe it was something to investigate further. So, on the long drive home that afternoon, I downloaded a few hobby podcasts, and they were full of nothing but PSA 10 base-card madness. And, as a result, mistakes were made.
So, what would I say to someone newer to the hobby? Trust your instincts. And your passions. And what you care about. Because my instincts were not to collect super high-pop base cards. My passions were not to collect multiple copies of these non-shiny, over-produced commons. And I certainly didn’t care about many of the players I picked up as a result of this poor advice I allowed to affect my collecting. Full responsibility for listening to these voices, and certainly for acting on the advice, lies with me and only me. But the cool thing about the hobby is that we don’t have to be locked into anything forever. Although I still hold a select number of these mistakes as a reminder to simply trust my instincts, much of the carnage has been moved (insert the term “pennies on the dollar” here) in favor of cards I actually care about. And as for podcasts: Those have been pared down to 4-5 trusted collectors who make content about collecting. Novel concept: listening to voices that align with what I enjoy.
Q5: You really caught my attention when you said that you sometimes target non-serial-numbered cards. You clearly understand the value of serial-numbered cards, but how did you become comfortable with adding some non-serial-numbered cards to your collection? Were you always that way, or did you have to come around to the idea?
@PaperStreetSportsCards: I enjoy the art of a card, regardless of the numbering. Of course, if given the choice, I would prefer a card to be serial-numbered. It would be ridiculous not to go that route if it were available (insert “Topps Chrome Gold /50 vs Gold Wave” as an example here). But if a manufacturer, for whatever unknown reason, decided an awesomely designed card was going to be an SSP instead of #/whatever, I would rather own a card I love vs choosing not to collect that card, simply because there isn’t a number stamped on the back. Serial-numbered cards are certainly the preference, but there is an “if-you-know-you-know” element to SSP collecting that appeals to me on unique cards. It’s not for everyone, and that’s fine. It’s my collection.
+1 Question: When you're scrolling IG, what kind of card or post makes you stop and say, "whoa?" What are some things that might impress you about someone else's collection?
@PaperStreetSportsCards: I am always impressed by collectors who stayed active in the hobby, those who didn’t take the “break” that so many of us did between our young collecting days and whatever led to our eventual return. What I’ve noticed is that many of these collectors are the ones with the super rare, unique cards, because they were in the hobby when these cards originally surfaced, for fractions of where they are valued today. My return to the hobby was in the heart of the Panini era, and I love these cards. I could open packs, feel the cards, and relate to what I saw posted on IG or for sale on eBay. But working backwards in the hobby, through the years when I wasn’t paying as much attention to cards – back through the Topps Chrome and Finest days of Football/Basketball – I am constantly in awe of collectors with Superfractors. The design is so incredible, always eye-catching. You immediately know when you’re looking at a Superfractor. In many cases, these were acquired prior to the pandemic explosion in the hobby, so the acquisition most-likely occurred in the full spirit of simply … collecting. They reside with collectors who will never move them, collectors who are into the card for so much less than today’s value. And although, in many cases, they hold a lottery ticket to a phenomenal payday should they choose to cash out, most would rather have the card than the money. And that hits all the right notes for me.