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NFL player cards we're buying and avoiding with the season finally here

Football season is here. Hooray. And before you email me telling me you crushed it in your fantasy football draft, let’s take a look at the NFL collector space and make some wild, speculative claims.

But, like, in a good, helpful way!

Don’t Throw Your Money at Dart (yet): If you’re a card seller and looking for a bullseye, look no further than Jaxson Dart. Hey, wink emoji for that one, right? As a buyer, though, beware.

His cards are up 21% over the last 30 days, according to ALT’s Market Trends, and really he doesn’t have any massive cards on the market so people are buying up for his NIL cards. And you know what that means, when those NFL cards start to get pulled, his college cards will absolutely start to tank. It literally happens to everyone, across every sport.

Hold out until his NFL cards hit the market, please.

Go Scoreless: Score NFL 2025 is just a brutally awful product. So unnecessary. We don’t need a Shedeur Sanders rookie card where he’s wearing his college jersey. I hate it so much.

Shilo Sanders is Basically Bronny James: So don’t do it. He’s had a disastrous preseason, and he was only on a roster because of his dad. Even if he ends up getting signed elsewhere, don’t pay up for the name, please.

Tight Ends Are Back, Baby: Of course everyone is already buzzing about Brock Bowers, but don’t sleep on Trey McBride. His market is actually reasonable and by all prognostication, he’s trending toward potentially finishing as TE1 in fantasy and a top 10-20 overall player.

You also have a potential big time TE rookie in Colston Loveland, Sam LaPorta coming off a year-2 slump and on a crazy good offense, and maybe don’t sleep on Dalton Kincaid who has the reigning MVP running the offense.

Future Hall of Famers Travis Kelce and George Kittle might lead their respective teams in TD receptions, and I wouldn’t bet against David Njoku leading his team in targets.

My Crazy Prediction: Trevor Lawrence is going to have a massive year and his card market will rebound in a big way. He has a new head coach and two dynamic, young receivers to throw the ball to.

Don’t Read Into Predictions: Especially not mine.

With the 2025 football season nearly here it’s a very confusing time for collectors. Take for example the fact that Panini released 2024 NFL Panini One on Monday and then released 2025 NFL Origins on Tuesday.

Yeah, I think we have too many products.

A seller listed a reprint of a rare Shohei Ohtani card on eBay.

Speaking of stock being absolutely the ‘F’ down, this weekend there was a seller selling a REPRINT of the Shohei Ohtani 2018 Bowman Chrome Superfractor 1/1 Rookie Auto and doing so in a super deceptive way - in my humble, angry opinion.

This is the headline on the listing: “2018 Bowman Chrome Shohei Ohtani rp Auto 1/1.”

This is the description: “2018 Bowman chrome Shohei Ohtani Superfractor Auto 1/1 rp.”

So, where’s the deception, J.R.?

A few places. First, not everyone is clear on what the acronym “rp” means - if you were not trying to be deceptive you would have written out “REPRINT” in the headline and/or within the description. It’s also loosely written, in lowercase, where you typically would put “RC” for “rookie card.”

You could also put the word “READ” in the headline to drive people to the description where you can ensure that people know it’s a “reprint.”

The seller also chose the “Item Specifics” descriptor to read “Hard Signed” to indicate that the card is, in fact, signed.

Am I overreacting? Am I not giving the seller and the people the benefit of the doubt here?

Eventually, eBay took the listing down but not before it got over 75 total bids and had an active bid for over $50,000 - for a fake card!!!

Quite possibly the worst part of this is that eBay had given the “Authenticity Guaranteed” promise on this card. Which means that the seller would ultimately send it to the eBay authenticator where they will authenticate the fakeness of this card. “Yup, this card is fake!”

Cool, thanks eBay.

We have another record breaker in the card market as the dual autograph Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant logoman 1/1 2007 Upper Deck card was sold on Heritage for over $12 million (when you factor in the Buyer’s Premium).

That’s wild. This is the most expensive card ever sold. Ever.

Remember last month when I said “Bobbleheads are back!”? Bobbleheads are back. Although, honestly, I may have posed it as a question: i.e. are bobbleheads back? I’m too lazy to check, though.

I’ll take a victory lap though.

And in my monthly installment of “what will they put in cards next?”, we have a brand new entry: a guitar string. That rocks.

As you know, each week I make a suggestion of what should be the next hot sports industry collectible (Editor note: no he doesn’t, this is the first time he’s ever done this) and I was thinking that with the charms collectible craze, brought on by Labubu, the New York Liberty should immediately release an Ellie the Elephant mini bag charm.

Like, talk about printing money! In fact, I’m surprised we haven’t seen more “charms” collectibles in the market yet.

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