Can PSA Keep Up? + Is Grading Breaking Down? + GCC Enters the Conversation

I wrote a little song to remind you. Choice hotels get you more of the experiences you value. The Cambria Hotel's got it all. A rooftop bar. Have a ball. Cocktails up here feel just right. It's Cambria. Amazing. All right. Bring a date, your teen, or even your mom. Book direct@ChoiceHotels.com See you on the roof. This episode is brought to you by Fox 1. Watch all 104 matches of the FIFA World cup live in 4K for just $19.99 a month with three days free. Build your own multiview. Choose up to three streams and follow player spotlights. Stay on top of every moment with live stats, highlights and instant replays. The FIFA World cup streaming live on Fox One, offers a subject to change. See fox.com for complete terms and conditions. And we're live from the living room as Doug eyes up the match. Say spread. He's reaching for the buffalo wing. Perfect. Hang on. What's this? Oh, he's gone for a can of Pepsi too. Incredible. What a finish. Sensational combination. Look at the delight on his face. There's no doubt about it. It just tastes better. Match days deserve Pepsi Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a pack of Pepsi Zero sugar for today's match it's poetry in motion. Michael Jordan. Sports cards is a lifestyle Sports cards and we live now Jeremy Lee in the building and every guess that you ever needed Sports cards after hours keep the hobby heated Updates, homie Talk like you never seen it Sports cards live and I could ever beat it Sports cards is a lifestyle Sports cards and we live now. Welcome to another episode of Sports cards Live with your host, Jeremy Lee. So, Jeremy, that's who you have this week. You said you have two weeks of superstars that you're doing this thing too. Should we get into number two? We could. I guess we could. We could. Yeah. The. The other one I did. I. We recorded yesterday. Okay, Chad, I can see you. Can you. I just want to. Guys, just give me one sec here. I want to know if. Chad, give me a wave or a thumbs up if you can just hear me right now. Even I think he's still testing. He's test. He's giving me a nod. Okay, good. So the other one I did was yesterday. And this has been like years in the making. We just never got around to doing it. But we did about an hour and 20 minute conversation yesterday with a gentleman by the name of Steve Taft. T, A, F T. Does that sound familiar to you? David Chase. Sounds familiar. Remind me who that is, please. Who is that? Steve Taft is sort of like I believe he's considered to be the ex. The foremost expert in, in star basketball cards. 80s star cards. Yeah. He's you know, he's a generation ahead of us sort of thing. He's an, he's an OG in the hobby. He was around in the 70s, the 80s. And he's, he's got some things that, that he actually announces that have never been announced before. Coming to sports, coming to the, to the video with him. That's going to drop two Mondays from now. And I'll just one more thing. At the end of the, the discussion I had with Joe Hollywood he said to me, he goes, you know, I've, I've disclosed a whole bunch of things here that I've never said elsewhere. So we got some, we got some, some good exclusive kind of information coming from both of these guys. And, and they were there. I had great discussions with, with both Joe and Steve Taft. So we get into star cards. The which is the real rookie. We get into counterfeits. We get into PSA grading the star cards. Beckett grading the star cards. Lot of information that I just didn't even know about before. So cool. Look forward to Ryan. Ryan McClanahan says Jeremy, any plans for the national are too early to tell. Was nice meeting you last year, Ryan. Yeah, I mean the plans are forming. The plans are forming but you know, few extracurriculars. We'll see you there for sure with Michael, I bet. So looking forward to it. What's up? Found treasures? Skeppy says Steve Taft is the authority of Star Cards. Really nice guy. Talked to him on the phone. Very nice man. Absolutely. Yankees says Steve has been a basketball guru for a long time. Time. Jesse says Jack Frost is polarizing. Fair enough, fair enough. All right, I think, I think our guest Chad Hawk is ready to go in the back room. David, anything on your mind before we switch up the, the topic? And, and, and by the way, I have a couple of videos I'm gonna share with all of us that are going to be a part of the show and a part of the discussion with Chad. So make sure you stick around for that. Everybody. Well over 200 people with us right now, which is great. A couple people on Instagram come. I see Splenda there on Instagram. Coming over to YouTube guys. That is where the action is. As you well know by now. Red heart, dog food, baseball cards. David Chase. We're missing Joe Perot. Josh Adams is a maybe for later on. He had a last minute wedding to go to the Guy, his social media. Media. His. His social act. His director of social events kind of came in at the middle of the day today and said, hey, you. You might need to go to a wedding tonight. And I said, it might be time to find a new director of social activity there, Josh. A wedding that comes out of nowhere, that's the worst excuse of all time. Weddings are planned in advance. Josh, Come on, Get it together, buddy. Mookie says Josh Adams is doing the Electric Slide right now. Oh, I'd love to see a video of that. Yeah, yeah, that'd be great. That'd be great. All right, guys, Chad, you're good to go. Chad is good to go. All right, guys, we're gonna bring Chad Hawk onto the show right about now. Let me just change up the streamer on the bottom there. We're gonna change up the marquee as well. Give equal visual rights to everybody. That didn't make sense, but that's okay. All right, guys. Please welcome Chad Hawk from gcc. Chad, welcome to Sports Cards Live. How are you doing tonight? Welcome. Great. How's it going, guys? How you doing? Doing good, Doing good. I love the no echo. This is excellent. It is good to have you. David, say hi to Chad. Do you know David? Have you ever seen Chad? Have you heard of. Have you heard about Chad yet? I read about Chad when I knew he was coming on the show. So I tried to learn a little bit about you, Chad. But it's nice to meet you in person. Absolutely. Absolutely. Great to meet you too, David. All right, guys, well, first, why don't we learn. Okay, what is gcc? Who's Chad? What is he doing here on Sports Cards Live? Well, I met with Chad the other day, and he really educated me on sort of the structure of some of these grading and authentication companies in our space, and not just in sports cards, but in collectible grading and authentication. CCG is a parent company to other grading companies, similar to how Collectors is a parent company to PSA back in sgc. But, Chad, why don't you first just let us know a little bit about your history in the hobby where you've worked, and we'll talk about GCC after. But give us a bit of your hobby history so people have an understanding of who you are and what your. What. What your level of involvement is and has been. Sure, sure. Sounds good. Back in early 2000s, I joined CCG as part of a small handful of graders, worked with PMG and the banknote division, and they primarily were working with coins, banknotes, and comics. At that time. So we were working there and grew immensely. And over that course of time, I worked with many people, wrote was become vice president of pmg and then worked with the other developments going on within CCG and that umbrella, one of them being sports cards. So being a collector, that was the original thing that got me into collecting as a kid. I've always loved sports cars. My dad got me into that and everything. So grading started with sports cards, ironically, and then I kind of moved into banknotes and was able to just have such a great experience there, not only building the grading companies and working with teams, doing all those things, but being able to travel, meet with people on both sides of collecting and dealing so that you can really understand all the dynamics that, that are involved. So worked with them for 20 years, a little over 20 years, had a great career. And you know, while that was moving, we were growing, obviously. So you have private equity, things like that come in and it changes a little bit with ownership, of course, and then that connection that you have from the top down with collectors being the ones involved all the way through. So one thing I noticed was there were some solutions that were missing. I felt like in a couple areas in collectibles, banknotes and sports cards. So with that, in 2025, decided to, to make that transition. And here we are. Okay, so. So ccg, the parent company, Certified Collectibles Group, something like that. Is that what that stands for? That's correct. You mentioned pmg. What does that mean? Paper Money Guarantee. So that's like the, the, the PSA or the. It's a grading company for paper money. CCG also owns ngc, which means Numismatic Guarantee Corporation. So that's for coins. Correct. And then they also own cgc, which is I think Comic Guarantee Corporation, but they're also now Sports cards. That's also the sports card division, is it not correct? Correct. So the, there's kind of a, A soup of acronyms within. That's another reason we went with GCC to kind of COVID all of them little blankets there. That is your. That is the, the new company that you are representing, which we'll talk about in a couple of minutes. But what I found interesting was when CCG decided to get into the sports card and well, I guess the sports card grading business. Because up until then were they already grading like Pokemon and that sort of stuff? Or was that. Or did that. Because here's, here's my recollection. David, do you remember this? This goes back a few years ago when Andy Broome and Weston Reeves left, Beckett Gray. These were both senior graders at Becca Grading. They left. They were basically like, like plucked from Beckett to go start up CGC or whatever they were calling the sports card grading business under the CCG umbrella. And that gave them instant credibility with having two well respected graders. When that happened, Chad, you were already working in the CCG group. And when they decided, when, when that group decided to go into sports card grading, whether or not there was Pokemon 2, we don't need to figure that out right now. But, but when they started doing that, were you a part of launching the CGC sports card grading division? Not directly, no. So there were things where, because I was working in leading pmg, I worked with Andy and Weston on certain things regarding operations and dynamics there and then we discussed certain things around strategy on the background. Did not necessarily with Andy or Weston, but things that you encounter with grading and building the grading teams, the guides, the things that you want to use to, to build those structures. So they were more or less working with the development and other ends there. But you would see me on grading, maintenance and operations a lot of times with how to make those function on an efficient level. So you have so to, to kind of put a bow on, on that, you know, part of your life, 20 years working in the CCG group of corporations, you saw a lot of different things when it comes to authenticating and grading collectibles, whether that is sports cards, paper money, coins, TCG. You were in and around all these things for 20 years. That's, that must give you some incredible insight. Do you feel like you have inside information, tricks of the trade, anything like, do you feel like you have insights that the general public doesn't into sports card grading and authenticating? No, I do not. I think you may, you may know like as certain things are going to start to happen, for example, like vintage video games, one thing you can use as I wouldn't call it inside, but if video games are going to become something that's going to be graded or certified, you know that that market's about to change. So you may want to move into that. So anybody who's working closely like we are, you hear things like that. And I think that's more of your collector mind rather than oh, I've got an inside tip, here's where you want to go. As we know, you never know who's going to be injured, who's going to move with the hype train in these sports. So if we all knew, we'd all be jumping on. So it's what you have is you're able to see some really great things. For example, I was able to see things that went to the moon. Some of the top comics that would go to auction, some amazing things. I saw Kobe Bryant, Sports Illustrated that had Michael Jordan on it, that went straight to him. So it had the name tag of Kobe. So just really amazing things like that. And then meeting people who are very influential. So it was more of an exposure to give me the background that I need now by being able to just be in different environments around collectibles. So inside tip, maybe not, but it's certainly fascinating. Right on. Okay, well, now that we have a bit of history of like where you've been and you. Do you collect sports cards today? Yes, sir. Yes, I do. David Chase really wants to hear, what is it that you collect, Chad? Oh, man, I collect a lot of different things right now. I love the World cup, so I've gotten deep into these soccer cards. I never thought I would, but I love those. Grew up playing baseball and basketball, so I love Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, of course. So who doesn't? And Derek Jeter, a big fan of playing shortstop. So Cal Ripken, Derek Jeter, nie Smith are three of my big favorites. Grew up a St. Louis Cardinal fan, so I'm a die hard. I collect all those guys. It really doesn't matter. I, I love just collecting, basically. I could talk. I better be quiet. I could just talk forever on that topic. I don't know. I know that we were having some, some audio issues earlier. Chad, there was a question if there's any way to increase your volume, the pickup on your mic. I don't know if you can work on, if you can figure that out quick or get it closer to your, to your face or something like that. But you are a little bit quiet. But, but we, we, we'll make out. We'll make out just fine if you can. So. But appreciate the chat, the audience, the listeners, viewers, everybody. If you need to turn it up a little bit, please do so. But hey, that's, this is, this is live streaming. That's what happens sometimes. But hope you guys are able to hear. Chad. Okay, Chad, you collect. You got all this experience working in certification and authentication recently. PSA was. They decided to. They were forced to. They had to shut off the intake valve on a couple of their bulk submission tiers. The, the value, the bulk and it's caused quite the uproar in the hobby. It's. It's caused certain businesses to have to rethink how they're doing things. And I want to talk a bit about that with you because I think that you have some thoughts on sort of what that is going to do sort of industry wide. Before we get to that, I want to go to David, my co host for this segment and ask David, do you have any sort of opening questions or comments based on anything you heard from Chad thus far? I mean it's cool that what's gone through your hands and what you've seen so far, any like sports cards that were epic that, that you came across that, that made you smile? Yeah, the 86 FLIR Jordan. I got to hold some really high grade examples of those. That was the cream of the crop for me and then Jeter of course. But then the mantle 52 that came through was a very, very top, top end sale that was, it's just cool. You know when you're around it and you're, you're close to it. To me that's the biggest thing you, you see it online and those types of things but when you're able to see it in hand that's, that's the real, the real treat. So I would say those three obviously stick out nice. Oh yeah, that, that's always exciting to. Anytime you can hold the 52 tops mantle in your hand, never mind a, a highly graded one is, is always come somewhat of a thrill. People you know, take selfies with cards nowadays and that's certainly one that, that is worthy. So okay, PSA temporarily, who knows how long pauses a couple of these submission tiers. And what are your thoughts Chad, on what that impact, what will be sort of long term on the industry overall and feel free to take it from any angle you want. Collector investor, Flipper and LCS auction company card show, great. Other grading companies, all that. What are your kind of, what are your high level thoughts on this right now? Yeah, psa. It's amazing how we have such tremendous growth that you know the grading company, a grading company like this could stop grading for a period of time. And I think that that that stone that falls in our pond, it's going to cause a lot of ripples where people are going to want to come back. So the bottleneck that we are think is dwindling down is you know that may be getting larger on the outside of those doors. So when they open up, you know, what does that mean? We've had companies start with this type of thing before that's generated an offset where people have another option to go to with their cards. And I Think that's great. The, the different, the one common thing for me is the value that PSA brings to where it doesn't matter with the other companies necessarily. If you're able to put your cards in another holder, you still are getting secondary value. So I think that's the conundrum we face. So on top level cards, you're gonna wait, you're gonna move them into those markets and if it's the right card time is on your side, it should be. It may work against your model because you need to flip and turn quicker. So as we look at flippers or dealers, collectors are different. So collectors, we always respect them with where they want to go with their cards, how they want to collect. It's, it's a little bit different when you're looking at, I have turnaround time, I need to sell this card within a certain amount of time and I don't want to spend as much or that kind of costs effectiveness. So I think what PSA has encountered is you have TCG with Pokemon that are taking up a lot and then you have a lot of cards that people are grading that are in a price bracket that might hurt the grading companies because they have to churn those two. And then those cards, where we get to GCC is if they're not a 10, they don't achieve what they're looking to achieve and then they start to lose their cost effectiveness. So that was one I, you know, moving into that, what's the solution for that? When you have companies like we talked about, Jeremy, that have to pay for materials to encapsulate, that fee trickles down to the collector, to the customer, to the dealer. So there needs to be an option where you can move cards that are in a lower price bracket that don't make Sense to pay $30 or more or around that area to grade. And then, you know, moving, we can touch on this later, but moving into the, the grade subjectivity of 10 and then 9, 8 and into 7 where you see some inconsistencies that get created. And I've seen it happen because you have to grade so many cards so fast. You have people at different experience levels grading at different speeds, trying to get them out the door. So you achieve that. And even at this, you see they're, they're not able to keep up. And then a small percentage of mistakes can, can relate to a high rate of inconsistency. So personally I don't think you don't want mistakes at all. Zero mistakes. You want zero percent on that. So you have to figure out how to, how to maintain that. And these grading companies are up against a mountain with how many cards they're having to grade. So there needs to be new solutions. But that's my overall take right now as this, this occurs. We have places that cards need to go and we may not have those existing yet until now. Right on. Yeah, there's a whole lot of threads we can pull on right there. David, if you, after listening to all that, and one is new solutions, which I think Chad might have, might be onto something with gcc. We'll get into that in a minute. And then there's the, what you talk about consistency and the error rate that we see with grading companies right now. We'd like there to be zero mistakes. Any, any company is going to have an error rate. You know a man, whether it's manufacturing defect, a manufacturing defect rate, an error rate for, for whatever it is. It, it happens all the time. Even, even tops upper deck, panini leaf. I mean not every card comes out of the pack in perfect conditions. You, you have crimper, you have crimper marks, you have print lines, you have all sorts of problems. The question is that. Not the question, but the issue is like in our hobby we don't like, we don't want to be the victim of an error or a manufacturing defect when it's our product or service that we're purchasing. But, but we also want there to be perfect, a perfect record. Right? We don't want there to be. We don't want PSA to make any mistakes. We don't want any car to come out of the pack in less than gem mint condition. Especially nowadays when GEM mint means PSA10 which means more money than, than other grades in, in many cases. So yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's an interesting. Anyway lot several threads there to talk about. So let's talk about, let's, let's talk about. There's so many ways to go here. Chad and I got a couple of these videos I want to play. Let's talk about error rate. But before we do, before we, we go to error rate, I'm going to share a video with everybody that I just may have to make sure that the audio is also going to be shared. So just bear with me one moment. I wanna. Okay, here we go. So you know, for better or for worse, this is about a Pokemon card, but this is a, a video that about a PSA card. So I'm gonna put on the screen, I'm gonna hit play, guys. It's short. This is not. This is like, not even a minute. So here. Here we go. Watch this, everybody, please. This is a huge problem. As you can see, this is a legendary collection reverse PSA 10 manky. That's listed on ebay by PSA themselves. But if this card is a PSA 10, then why does the back look like this? I actually think that we need a statement from PSA about this because how are they listing a card that looks like this as a PSA 10 on eBay? Through the PSA ebay account. This is insane. Let me know what your thoughts are. I told you, it's a big red flag when the same company that gets to grade the cards is the same company that can now sell their own graded cards, meaning they can just make any card they want attend and make the profit. And now the grading system has no validity and no integrity, and it means nothing. Your standards are zero. It's biased, and now it's a gamble for the people who want tens when you're not going to give it. You just destroyed your entire business. Well done. This. All right, so one thing I will tell you is yesterday I did check the cert on that card against the PSA database. Delisted. So PSA caught wind of this and unlisted it. Now we talk about inconsistency. We talk about error rate. If you. I don't know how well you guys could see the back of this card, but it was tattered. It is not a 10 by any grader in the world would not see that as a 10. I actually don't think the PSA put it as a 10 just to give out a 10 or to sell it themselves. I think that's. I think that's kind of ridiculous. I don't think the PSA is doing that, especially because I don't think they're selling their own cards. But there's still an error here. The card ended up in the wrong. I believe the card ended up in the wrong holder. That's kind of what I think happened here. It's. Now I'm speculating. I don't know for sure, but I mean, it's. I'm looking at it on my screen again. I don't know how you could see it, but that top edge was like rough cut, not rough cut. It had chipping all across that top edge. There's no way any graders giving that a 10 unless they're literally in cahoots with a customer or they just want to screw over PSA by making them look bad from the inside. That's all I can think of. So the guy who says we need a statement from psa, I think they delisted. I think it was, I think it was literally just an error. So the question becomes, what is an acceptable rate of these types of errors when the money is so large that if this card gets out there into the public and is being sold, which it was by PSA on ebay, to their chagrin, I'm sure, what does that mean as we move forward? Like, what is acceptable here? Is there not an. As they grow in scale, do they not need more sets of eyeballs to, to, to just approve these things? So, Chad, let's get your thoughts on this. What do you think went wrong here and what do you think they could have done better? Yeah, I think it's probably a mistake. Probably got in the wrong holder that that can happen. And so you don't want to discount that, but that can happen. The problem becomes there's a conflict of interest bridge that gets crossed because PSA is selling the card. If they're not selling the card and they just back it up with a guarantee and maintain that, okay, we'll make up the difference there. We'll either correct the mistake with a refund, grading, credit, difference in price if a transaction took place. That's the way you go with that. You know, PSA has a vault. They're trying to have people store these things here, sell them. They're trying to do this. It, it seems like a good flavor. It does. But when stuff like this happens, it, it, it doesn't go over well. And it's hard to really back, back it up to a good place without everybody thinking that you are taking a card that's low grade and putting it into a higher grade and selling it for profit. That's, that's the worst translation. And that's what you're going to get. So you have to avoid the conflict of interest. And you know, I think that they can, I think that they can avoid by focusing on grading. And what this does is it highlights a little bit where, you know, what's the focus. We've got a lot of things going on there where your biggest added value is to encapsulate cards. So if we focus on that, not selling them, I think the, the public has a better reaction and this probably doesn't happen, but, you know, they're evolving and doing things. Yeah, fair. I mean, I, I think there was a comment, I don't know where it Went in the chat, somebody, I would love to find it again though. But there was a comment, someone said, you know, that the, the, the comments being made in this video were irresponsible because it is likely just putting the wrong card in the wrong holder. Now regardless of that, the fact is it got out the door. It got out the door and into the public domain and that's just, that, that's just not great. Obviously. That's just not good. But I don't, I don't think that this is a case of, I think it's a case of like what you said, Chad. I think, I think I'm speculating. I don't know for sure. I don't know. I don't, I don't know what goes on beyond behind closed doors at all. Vintage card collector does know what goes on behind closed doors. He says right here they don't own the cards being sold. Come on, man. It's not hard to figure out. I think what vintage card collector is saying is that PSA does own the cards that are being sold. That's some, that's a great level of intelligence. And if I were vintage card collector, I would probably start up a YouTube channel and, and put out a video breaking this news because that is, that would be amaz. That would be very, a great story in the hobby to, to have evidence that they are selling cards that they own. What do you think, David? We'll get to you in a second. I want you to think about all this and have your thoughts. Chad, what do you think? Does PSA own the cards that they are selling on ebay or are they other, other third parties cards? I mean, to my understanding that they're not their cards, it's the customer's cards. And if they want to store them there and they would sell them, you know, of course they may get a fee and things like that. So I think the association and maybe the gray area would be good for them to define for people to understand, okay, this is who the card is. You know, it could cover a lot of ground there. It could for sure. And then here Wesley says it's quite rare for a card to get in the wrong holder. And it's very common for the grades to be simply wrong. David is nodding in agreement. I'm, I mean, do we really know how rare it is to get a card in the wrong holder? Remember guys, they went from grading, well, I don't know, I'm going to guess 50,000 cards a month to one and a half million. Do we really Know what is rare and what is common for an error in that assembly line. Do we really know which is which? I don't know. I mean, it's always fun to think we do and to put out publicly that we know that we know what's going on. But most of us, myself included, we're all, we are all very often projecting Vintage says wrong Jeremy, PSA does not own the cards being sold on ebay. Well, that, that's what I thought was the case as well. Vintage collector. I thought you were saying that they do own the cards being put on. On. Well, you should go, go revisit your comment vintage and maybe just make sure you're being very clear with me in your comments so that I don't misinterpret them because that's what happened there, obviously. David Chase, over to you. All right, so I think this is a mistake, all right, which is not a surprise. We all know PSA has a lot of mistakes. Everyone who has ever heard me, I do not defend psa and I complain about them very often. But since they've started to give PSA offers which are from other dealers or list on things, I mean, over the last couple years, PSA's grades have been so much harder since they've been doing this right. Ask any vintage collector that submitted eight years ago compared to now. I don't know if they're giving higher grades since they started selling cards, at least in the cards that I'm looking at. I'm not into the ultra modern where it's all tens, but at least the versions that I'm looking at. What I really think is that the mistakes really cannot happen, especially when there's a difference where it can be six figures between eight or a nine or things like that. And I'm just really ready for AI to be able to grade a card. And I think that a lot of the world is going to be ready to. Chad, I'd love to hear your opinion on Are we going to get to the point where we don't have to have human mistakes and can use AI for grading eventually soon? What's your thought on that? Yeah, I think the one big thing I noticed was the grading scale with sports cards, when you compare it to banknotes, banknotes and coins are graded on a 70 point scale so you have more room to separate the looks that you see and you can differentiate it. And of course things get up to that near perfect grade where it gets difficult. But with sports cards, the 10 and the 9, and even with the 9.5 and the 0.5s, it gets really difficult to differentiate top level grades, so it becomes a matter of ratios. And I think that's what people are doing now with grading is, well, if we give out all these tens and there's more tens than nines, what happens to the value? So to your point, with AI being able to zero in and grade these things and get down to a level like that, it's hard to say how that's going to be accepted. And I've worked with that concept actually in development and seen some big failures. But it doesn't mean that it can't, can't work not to shift to. Go ahead, go ahead. David, I was just going to say that point that you just made where I can barely tell the difference between a nine and a half and a ten or nine out of ten, we can't figure that out either, right? So all of us that are paying these crazy prices from a 9 to a 10, look it, I can barely figure it out. We can barely figure it out. Maybe we shouldn't be paying 20 times the price for it. And compared to a 9, I don't know. Just makes you kind of think, right? Thanks for tuning in and being a part of the sports cards live community. Don't forget to like subscribe and most of all, keep collecting more great content to come. Sports cards is a lifestyle.