NFL Players That Have Popped or Flopped

Hello, hello, hello. It is another episode of the Ball Card Show, the eSports podcast. For the eSports Collector. I'm Jason Otero. I'm Gary LeMaster. And we're going to jump right into it. How are you, my buddy? I'm doing all right. It's been a bit of a week, but we'll get there. You guys, we told you last week my father-in-law died and had the funeral Monday, and it's just been a little bit of a blur since then. But we're here. We're going to talk sports. We're going to talk sports cards. We might make fun of each other a little bit. Good chance. Yeah. Pretty good chance on that front. And hopefully, by the end of it, you've gotten something out of it that is either going to tickle your ears or make you chuckle or give you some information that makes you some money, doesn't it? All right. Time will tell. We'll see. We've got a whole segment on that. All right. We were down at Xenia last week. I don't know if you want to talk through a whole lot of pickups. I grabbed probably about 400 or 500 cards out of some lower-end stuff there. Your normal move? Yeah. I did pretty well. I averaged out at like 15 cents a card, and there were several cards that were like the early 2000s, like Bowman Chrome refractors, Top Scrum refractors, just cool footballs. I went heavy on football, a little bit of basketball. Most of that stuff's listed. I'm trying to think if I picked up anything else. Oh, I picked up a couple of Big Poppy low-numbered relics. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So those are pretty cool. Those are on the bay, too. It's weird now. I have to decide, am I going to maybe buy something myself or am I working? Because it's like the stuff I buy for inventory is not the stuff that I would look for at all, which usually means I'm at tables that I typically wouldn't hang out at that much. And then the challenge with the low-end bulk is to do it right, I've got to spend like an hour or two at a table going through boxes, and then your brain's kind of like, ugh. Well, you did buy something for yourself at Zeni. You didn't mean to, but you did. So I had a kid walk up to my table, and we did a little cash trade. I had a Lawrence Butler light board rookie card, and he had this, it was just a cool card, not a valuable card, just a cool card. It was a Ryan Tannehill rookie numbered to 50. It was a BGS85. Tops prime. Tops prime, auto, RPA. Nice patch, nice chunk of football, nice auto. And after the deal was done, I just said, hey, I got one that's cool, because Jason's a Dolphins fan. And I said, hey, you've got a cool one here for you, man. And I go to hand it to him to look at, and dude just like, icky wood spikes that thing. And I said, hey, I got one that's cool, because Jason's a Dolphins fan. And I said, hey, you've got a cool one here for you, man. And I go to hand it to him to look at, and dude just like, icky wood spikes that thing right into the ground. And accidentally, he goes to take it from me, and it starts to move, and so he's trying to get you. And literally just, I've never seen somebody throw a slab unintentionally into concrete with more force. It was a Beckett slab, and it didn't crack, it just smashed the corner. Just destroyed it. So if you've ever dropped something, and then you're trying to catch it, but you're dropping it upwards, and then my hand got over top of it to grab it, and basically that's when I Hulk smashed it. But here's- The best part about it was he didn't know what it was at this point. He hadn't even been able to see it. Here's what I didn't know, Dolphins, it looked like an RPA, and it also looked like either Immaculate or NT. So it is my- And I'm watching it hurl towards the concrete, because I thought, here's what usually that is. Hey, you want to check this out? Usually it's show and tell, right? Like, I thought he got some filthy, like, Marino, Zach Thomas, some iconic, you know, Dolphins- I see the math happening behind his eyes. How much money do I owe him right now? No, my question, as soon as it happened, I said, what was the comp? I didn't even want to know what the card was. Luckily it was Tannehill. It was a $20 card. It wasn't a big deal. Which I would have given him $20 for anyways, but- It was pretty funny moment. Forgot about that. It was good times. Just like Hulk smashed directly into the concrete. I was like, oh, well, I guess you're going to have to crack it out of that slab to display it. Yeah. You had a couple of buyers come through. The show's a little slurred. Now, I will say this. I have not been a consistent Xenia guy. I haven't sat up there in probably over a year now, but I've probably been to three or four shows. It's definitely getting lighter traffic. Half of the second room, nobody was even at the tables by like 10 o'clock. So it was like 11 people were setting up. Buckeyes had a noon game. Then there was another really big show within about four hours. Where was that one? The Fort. It's one of the Brad Beeman shows. That's a bit of a hike, but yes. Some serious collectors. Well, and a lot of the bigger name guys that are normally at Xenia, like Logan wasn't there. Ryan was ... Car Collector 2 wasn't at Xenia. Great Sports Cars wasn't at Xenia. Four Bagger wasn't at Xenia. A lot of these guys that are bigger name dealers that are either at Xenia to sell or to buy were at the Fort for that show. And that show was banging. So I would say that probably a good 30% of the traffic that would normally be at Xenia was up there. What town is that? Fort Wayne. Okay. That makes sense. So it was a good ... They had a good show up there. Xenia ended up being okay. I had a really fun pickup. I had talked to a guy about a card the night before on Facebook, and he happened to be in the same town as me and said he was going to be at Xenia. So I went ahead and got it. When he got there, I picked up the Joe Mixon Prism Black Finite 1 of 1 Rookie, which was kind of cool. You already sold it, right? No, no, no. It's still there. You had somebody pretty close to making that. I had a couple guys look at it, but it's still sitting there. And then I picked up the gold PSA 10 Rookie Prism Auto, number to 10, to go with it this week. So pickups-wise, it's just been normal stuff for me, the normal stuff I like to buy. You were looking at some of the heavy lumber, Ken Griffey Jr. Not a huge card, but it's an SSP. It's a Griffey. It'll sell. The Meguiar on card. Yeah, I've noticed that. So it's the top scrum black. Any of those like vet slash guys that could be in the Hall of Fame, which obviously that's a unique scenario, but they're good looking cards. They have nice autos on them. They're on card. There's a little bit more of a premium licensed product, but not insane. I don't know if I'd use the word premium, but it's just, it's nice. It doesn't look cheap. So let me prove it. I had a couple of nice cards sell over the weekend. I did go ahead and sell the Yoshi Red to five. I got 640 out of it. And when we had it at Xena, you were like, I told you I thought it would probably end up around six, and you were like, I'd even take a little less than that. So it was a win for you. Yeah, five to seven was the goal. So netting right in the middle of what you were hoping for. Yeah. Yeah. The red auto out of the silver pack just moved at 900. So I knew I didn't have a $900 card, right? So I probably could have held out, maybe got another 50 bucks, but honestly, I'd rather have that money and reinvest it, especially because you were in it. You hit in a break. So the other one that sold for me was the PSA 987 Panini Mike Tyson. It was starting to get more traction. I know that fight's coming up. I was surprised it didn't get a little more love. This year, that exact card in a nine had a couple of lower comps. So I was getting nervous that I was going to get beat out of that. But I just got, I got a little bit over, was it just a little over 400 bucks on it? So there's comps around 350 and some closer to five. So again, happy to, happy to see that go to a new home. What sucks about a low end store is you sell a few nice cards and you start looking around your stuff. You're like, oh, I got a bunch of junk, man. That's why you do what I do. You just focus on the interesting stuff. That was the, the two cards that came in this week that were my favorites. They're not big, big cards, but the old school certified leaf certified game use stuff. I got a really nice Mike Allstat, a four color patch number to 25 and then a Steve McNair number to nine, all game used. That stuff sells really well for me. So yeah, overall pickups good this week. Hopefully this weekend we'll be really good to him in Cincinnati at Eastgate on Saturday. So if you're in the Cincinnati area, come out to Eastgate mall, it'd be a good show. I think it's like 150 table show. So that's this weekend. Yeah. Okay. That is the Saturday of the ninth. So should be good. Oh, did I talk about opening up Allen and Ginter last week? You did. Okay. There's a subset. I'm going to take a look at this. I don't know why we're wondering. I'm just going to see if these interesting Allen and Ginter is known for weird cards. Like there's kind of a non sport slash celebrity part to this. The weird one they did this year, the cards feel really nice. Like it looks so good in SGC slab. They're kind of cool. It looks like they don't have much value at all. They're a Chrome card. They're just cool. Yeah. Chrome x-rays of different animals. Like I'm looking at one, a bearded dragon, you know? But the whole set looks kind of weird. Very weird. Look at that. That's a little bit terrifying. Yeah. Painted dog. African painted dog. Anyway. Look at that. Oh. There's some weird stuff. That one's twerking. Or pooping. One of the two. I can't tell. But yeah. Open that product up. That is one that, it cracks me up if you watch breaks or follow or even get involved in them. How excited these breakers get over products that clearly are not that exciting. Yeah. Like you know it has to be a chore to do a case break of Alan and Ginter with all those minis. I get messages from my buddy who works at Backyard every night. So Stadium Club came out this week. Don't get your boy in trouble. I'm not. That's why I'm not mentioning names. Do they have a lot of employees? Yeah. They've got like 30 dudes that break there. I got a message. Definitely not the one you're thinking. I got a message and he goes, I feel so bad for the buyers. We just opened two cases of this dog shit Stadium Club. Stadium Club came out this week in case you were wondering. Is there a guaranteed auto in each box? I believe so. Yes. But they're usually rough. Series 1, 2 and update I think are, the cards are in better condition. I've never seen a product, well that's not true. I've seen some like hanger packs. I've never seen a product out of a box have more busted corners than Stadium Club because of the way that they try to do a nice all over print photo. Yeah. The photography in Stadium Club is awesome. And the paper they use. Yeah. Now one of the cool things in Stadium Club this year that I really like, well they also did the 92-93 basketball beam team design and it's really cool looking. It looks really good. The Ellie looks awesome. It's one I'm going to try to pick up for myself, especially if I can find the number. Have you seen that comp at all? I haven't. Let me pull one up. I haven't looked. But yeah, Stadium Club came out this week and it was interesting to say the least. So yeah. Oh wow. It looks awesome. It was an awesome looking card. So it looks like it's going to be about a $100 card. There's one on auction right now that's at $77. That will be the most expensive one though, right? I would think probably. Okay. Oh, there's buy it now. Is it $199? $299? $229? Well yeah. These are just the first three to it. You know how that works. Yeah. But $229, $199, $179. I think it ends up being about $100 to $125. So how many are in that set? I don't know. Hopefully it's not a bunch. I mean, Beam Team used to be a 20 card set when it was just basketball. So I don't know. I mean, they've always put them in Stadium Club, but this year they actually look really nice. It just says BT1. Okay. So here's one thing I have a gripe about. See, there's the corner. Yeah. You can't buy this without- It's full bleed in the back. Yeah. All right. So I like that back in the day when they did inserts, they let you know how many there were. Yeah. Two of 12. Two of 12. One of three. The only bad thing about that is new guys come into the hobby now and they think they have some super valuable numbered cards. It's one of 10! There's only 10 of these? Well, nobody. There's 10 in that set. There's millions of those in the world. Son, that's a Leaf Studio Dream Team card. Yeah. There's a few of those out there. But I think that would be a cool subset to do. I might do that because I haven't really purchased a nice Ellie. Now, what I also like about this is by doing that design for multiple reasons, these are tough grades. Don't expect a lot of 10s on these. No. They'll be very low, low pop. Be ready for everybody to lose their mind because they can't believe it, but they didn't look at the back. And the edges on the back. Well, it's full bleed black on the back. It's kind of like- You end up with a real weird situation. All right. So you can't cheat this card on centering on the front because of the angled borders. Secondly, the surface is going to be an issue because you have bright chrome on foil. It's a foil on paper. So good chance it's already going to be chipped. Then you flip around the back and three of the four borders are blacked out. So you basically get to do the 1971 thing. And one of the three is half blacked out, more than half blacked out. Yeah. So it's going to be a tough grade, but it would be a sweet set to do. I think they could get more than one year of mileage out of this. I wish they would just be sticking with more of the retro beam team stuff, which maybe they do and I'm unaware, but if I find that around 100 bucks, I might buy it at it. Absolutely. That's a cool one to have. And do you know how short printed that is? No clue. There's no- It's short printed. On eBay it says SSP, so it has to be. You can put that on anything. Stadium Club, back in the day, Stadium Club, the foil beam teams were one every three or four boxes. They're pretty low printed. So I don't know if it's a case hit. The way it's priced there leads me to believe it's a case hit. We'll see. Yeah. Hopefully one walks up to me at Eastgate tomorrow and I'll buy it. For me. Right? I mean, I'll buy it. You can buy it from me. Now it's sounding expensive. Another release, Donner's Football came out. Yep. Donner's Football retail outside of the Costco bundle hasn't dropped yet, but it is out. Everybody buy downtowns. Don't overpay for the rookies right now. Just don't. Don't do it. Don't fall into that trap. The red Pandoras look nice. There's a lot of them. Don't fall into that. I'm going to say it. What's that? I don't think downtowns hold their value five years from now. I think that I disagree. And here's why people are going to continue to prop the market up. I don't think it I don't think it holds. I mean you may be right. Why are they that. Why are they so desired. It just became the thing to have. Yes. Why does anything become I mean it's short printed. Yeah. Fair enough. But there's other products that have SSP sets that just never had that kind of excitement. So obviously the kabooms there but those have a little bit longer. Those have been around for 11 years now. So with the thing with case hits this is something that's really interesting to me. And I have this conversation with people as somebody who's been a longtime baseball collector and collects other stuff too but baseball I try to explain to people people like why do you like hometown advantages which are like tops is version of a downtown for baseball. You can buy those for nothing. Why. Because baseball collectors don't tend to care about case hits. They care about numbered rarity and they care about vintage rarity and they care about you know certain sets and versions of cards. But just the fact that something is a case hit in and of itself doesn't mean anything to most baseball card collectors. A common downtown of a nobody. You go find yourself a Desmond Ritter rookie downtown you'll still get a hundred hundred fifty bucks for that card. That's what's weird to me about it. But yeah you you can go buy an L.A. Dela Cruz rookie home field advantage for 80 bucks. Like if that was football it'd be a C.J. Shreds thousand dollar card. So it's all everything about every market but in the sports car world even more so hype drives everything and hype based on player or product drives everything. We talked about it with this Wimby stuff with the mercury hype drove that. Now here's here's where I'll give them their flowers over at Don Russ and optic. The fact that you can pull that card out of a blaster that you bought at a reasonable price that is something that is going to be going by the wayside. The days of that I mean there's not that many products left where you can do that. Well and I've reached the point. So today this happened to me. We're a little slow work today. So I stopped at a target and they had just stopped and there were 10 NFL select megas on the shelf. You know how many I bought 0 0. Yeah. I picked up three or four and I thought about it for a minute I thought about from when I went. Why am I going to spend 240 bucks on these when I'll just keep that 240 bucks in my pocket and Saturday at the show people are going to walk up to my table with actual cards that I want and I'll they're going to bring you the hits and you'll buy 60 percent. Yeah. Yeah. So I didn't buy any of it. Yeah. We showed them. Wow. All right. Let's talk a little bit of football. So we're going to do we're going to kind of run through a list. We're kind of midseason this year and we're going to run through a few names we talked about the beginning of the season and we're going to just say were we right or were we wrong. Sounds fun. Let's do it. I know you like at least half of that. First Caleb Williams. Oh we were right. We were right. We thought we might not be right for like one week and then the next week we're like OK we were right. Now Caleb Williams had about a two and a half game stretch against three of the worst teams in the league where he looked like a pretty good quarterback and then he got right back to playing functional NFL defenses and looks like trash because his skill set at its current price at its current point does not translate well to the NFL. He's pulling up these per game stats. I mean dude's got a forty one point nine QB or was it twenty seven to twenty eighth in the league. Nine touchdowns five interceptions. Yeah. What's his completion percentage. He's tied for 61st. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's not it's not great. He's a 60 percent. He's drastic. That's a little better than I thought it was. Yeah. But that's what that was propped up with to those two three games week three week three four and five. He was pretty good. And then all of a sudden he's back to playing against functional that was against Jacksonville Carolina and the Rams and the Rams. If he didn't come across as so arrogant I'd probably have a little more room for him. But he is that guy. Yeah. Look at it. Look at the numbers this last week. I mean his his yards per attempt is horrendous. He's under 50 percent in three games this year and under 60 percent in multiple games this year. It's just not good. He's had two three hundred yard games and four hundred yard games one sub hundred yard game. Like it's just not good. Sub hundred. Yeah. Against Tennessee. Yeah. I mean I felt a little pressure but it is what it is but he ain't the guy. So Caleb Williams are we right or wrong. We are right. All right. Let's talk about one might go differently. There's a young man in Baltimore that seems to have caught a second wind. The thing is is he's not young. Hence why Eric Henry is a man. He is not done. And we were very wrong. Yeah we both we were very just didn't have any gas left in the tank and Tennessee had gotten out at the right time and he just found the right scheme. It was a perfect fit. Evidently the threat of Lamar Jackson keeping the ball keeps teams honest. How would you like. So here's the thing. Like that's a really tough team to have a defensive plan for. Yeah. What's your poison. And the thing with Derek Henry is is even now he's stronger in the fourth quarter than he is still four yards after contact. Yeah. And nobody wants to tackle him. You try to tackle him high. He's going to make you look stupid if you try to tackle though you're going to take a knee to the face. It's just not it's not fun for anybody. And if you commit linebackers to clog up the middle they run a lot of that read option stuff and the moral just pull the ball and go for 15 on you. Yeah. Because you don't have anybody that can catch him. It's I mean he is his numbers this year are just insane. He's over a thousand yards at the halfway point of the season. Like one hundred and seventy. So he's already at one hundred and sixty eight carries. Oh my gosh. Two years ago he had three hundred and fifty. No wonder he was down one year and two years before that he had three seventy eight and three oh three. So he's a one sixty eight six yards a carry. He's already got eleven touchdowns. Eighty seven is his longest. Yeah. And hey guys this is really disgusting. His rookie stuff is still pretty cheap. Yeah it's still pretty cheap. I know running backs don't tend to move the needle but you can go buy really nice Derrick Henry rookie stuff for less than you can buy Jameer Gibbs rookie stuff for. And honestly he's terrifying when they do the all black unis and he's got the visor on. Have you seen some of the field level shots of him running like how would you try to tackle this. He doesn't look like he has the same genetics as the rest of us and he's trucking. Yes he's so big that he doesn't look like he's moving that fast until you can see everyone trying to catch him. Yeah. Yeah. So what Derrick can we rewrite it wrong. We were wrong. We were wrong. After week two we thought we were right but we weren't. Not at all. No. Jane Daniels. Right. We were right. I was special right on that. You were too. I still think panics is going to be really good. But Daniels has really shown something. It's his leadership. The poise in the pocket that that kid has is otherworldly. Like it's Joe Burrow level pocket poise. Let's talk about Saquon over in Philadelphia. Right. He's doing special things. Yeah he is. He's. We were talking about pre episode the backwards hurdle in the throwback uni that creativity. I'm going to do something nobody's done yet. Have you ever seen that backwards. Oh yeah. No no. I thought you were saying you were getting ready to do something nobody's ever done before. Oh really. What's that. You're just on Google right now. I'm interested to see what you're going to have to type without having to use the backspace that nobody has done. Yeah. Am I making you crazy. I'm switching between different. It doesn't make sense to me at all. When you get a job done on the site. But that's OK. He's got 100. How many. Oh it doesn't have total carries here. Yeah I go I use pro football reference. That's cool man. I'm just Googling their names seeing what it'll give me. But this is an interesting stat line that doesn't give totals. Yeah that's right there for 24 there's the season. So he's already at nine hundred twenty five yards. He's almost six yards a carry. He's at six yards a carry. Now he has a lot less touchdowns. Yeah. Look at his receiving touchdowns. So he has eight. He's three behind total touchdown. Yep. That's another team that seems to be figuring it out a little bit. And I mean they also you know speaking to him we talked about it hurts too. We talked about Jalen hurts and then it was looking like he was he was he was cold and what's going on with coaching and this and that. They've been looking a little bit better. Yeah. The last two three weeks things have started to click. I think he had four or five total touchdowns a couple weeks ago. Three rushing touchdowns. I think that lost the Buccaneers a little bit of a wake up call. Yeah. It was pretty bad. Speaking of Baker still slinging it though I know he wasn't on our list but I was right about Baker too. He's slinging it. Yeah. We can't get past. You can't get past if you are not putting away Kansas City in the fourth quarter you have a good chance of losing. And Patrick Mahomes does things that don't look fancy. It doesn't look like anything. And you know the officials all that stuff too. But it's it's legit. It's just so hard to beat that team if you let them stick around. Yeah. And you look at Mahomes stat line this year. It's not good. I mean it's it's not horrific but it's not good. If up until this week he had only he had thrown more interceptions and touchdowns up until this week and this last week he finally went over but it's like eleven to nine. He's not in the top five of really any stat other than completion percentage and of course wins where there ain't no he's got nineteen hundred yards already. Pull up Joe Burrow real quick because Joe Burrow is playing foot playing the quarterback position right now better than anybody in the league. Now here's what's interesting hobby related. Joe Burrow 20 touchdowns four picks. Hobby related. He is and we live in an area where he moves more. He's down. It's way down. Way less demand. And it's I mean I think that's where you have a little bit of the fanboy stuff when the team isn't dominating and they're not like at the top of the news cycle because you have insane things happening with with the commanders the you know Saquon what he's doing. There's some way bigger storylines and then Cincinnati is kind of looks a little more meh. Yeah I test this year but you're right the numbers that he's put not offensively they don't. He's already at twenty two hundred and forty yards 20 touchdowns to four picks. Yeah. Twenty to four. Not bad. Dudes on pace for like a forty and eight season. Like that's not seven over seven yards and attempt. He I mean he's playing like. All right. That's all you get to talk about. You know I agree he's playing really well. OK. Will we right or wrong about this. Daniel Jones just give him a little more time. Yeah he's not. I think we're wrong. Yeah he's not good. It's I'm afraid to pull up his stats because. Well so what you're going to see is it's not going to be as. What did you just I just had been the boy. Oh my goodness. That's good. By the way this Web site this Web site just so you know is definitely was designed on Windows 95. So his stat line isn't horrifying. Eight touchdowns to five picks. Eight touchdowns rough. Well I mean up until Monday night. That's how many touchdowns Patrick Mahomes has. That's rough too. And he's thrown fewer interceptions. He has only 80 yards less passing than Patrick Mahomes. Eight touchdowns five interceptions. Yeah. He's a bomb Gary. Well I'm not saying he's good. I agree. My point is is that the. This guy's gonna action. Did you know that also his. Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. And I. So pro football reference I know that I had not heard vanilla. I heard vanilla Vic. Where did they come up with that. Do you not remember the early in his career. He had multiple 60 yard runs. Do you not remember. They were ugly though right. Well you do not remember when he fell down 10 yards from the end zone after he had run away from everybody and his upper body was just going faster than his legs could keep up with. He just fell down. I don't know that stuck. That's right. His neck just looks like there's a face pasted to a cylinder. Your boy Davis Mills might have a bigger neck. Well you have this. It's not the it's not the length of the neck that's the issue. It's that the head goes straight down. There is no like separation of roundness from the head to the neck. You got issues of girth going from the head. It's just one cylinder with a face pasted like Beaker from the Muppets. OK. Yeah. There's that. So Daniel Jones right or wrong. We were wrong. That's it. Two of them that we were correct about. Well one of them we were split on. I was wrong about Anthony Richardson. I thought he was showing some flashes early on in the season. He was a little more disciplined. I mean at this point we have him like sitting out because he's tired. Have you ever seen that. No. Is that what happened. That actually happened. He even admitted he tapped out. I know he said it. He had two scrambles in a row and he was tired. I've never seen that. I've never seen that at any level of football from a quarterback. You can literally throw a ball away on the next play and catch your breath. Yeah. You can which is wrong but you can literally just hand the ball off on the next play. You're going to get two plays in the huddle. Ninety nine out of 100 times and you just check to the run. Yeah. I was wrong about that. You were right. There was no scenario where they couldn't bench him after that. There would have been a revolt within the team. Now he started or he didn't start but he played again that game. Yeah. He went back in like two plays later but you just can't do that as a quarterback. You also can't have a 44 percent completion percentage. No. You just can't. It's just speaking of bad. We were correct about Bryce Young. Oh is he starting again. Yeah cause Andy Dalton broke his thumb in a car wreck. So he'll he'll keep starting until that comes back. What a blow to the ego that had to be to the front office there like hey guys. So with with Bryce Young, I will say this since he came back to starting after Andy Dalton got hurt, it still hasn't been good, but it's been slightly better. 60 percent completion. Slightly better. Go to the per game. Go to game logs straight down from where you are. Boom. 2024. If you look at the last two weeks, it's been markedly better than it was early in the season. 24 for 37, 16 for 26. He's thrown three touchdowns, three picks. It's been markedly better. It's still not good enough to be a starter long term in the league, but it's been better. Again, it all comes down to sometimes we blame these guys. Bryce Young is the same quarterback he was at Alabama. Yes, this is a great point, and I think it specifically relates to the hobby. Current collectors are conditioned off of that 2019 or 2020 that was loaded. 2020. 2020. 18 was loaded. Obviously, 17 was insane at the time. We had in the last 10 years two or three rookie classes that were so stacked that people began to expect that there should be three to five good quarterbacks. So, for example, the ongoing debate Gary and I have, I keep retreating a little bit more each time. Obviously, injuries I do believe have affected that, but you cannot convince me that Tua is above or better than a top 15 quarterback. He's probably pushing more of that 15 to 20. Now, here's what was very evident last week. That Dolphins offense needs him. It's way better with him. He's not terrible, but he is not that level of elite. He's not $330 million elite. He can't carry a team by himself. He's not Joe Burrow. He's not Patrick Mahomes. He's not Josh Allen. He's not those guys. Herbert is pretty damn good. I don't think Herbert gets the respect that he deserves. Part of it's because they're West Coast teams and people don't see them as much. Herbert's really good, man. He can spin it. He can make every throw on the field. He's a good leader. That's a pretty good team. I think that your point there is a valid one. It's not exactly where I was going to go. I think that part of it is that in the hobby, there's an example that happened this week that should prove to you what I'm getting ready to say. If you're a football fan, an actual avid football fan who understands the game, maybe played at a relatively high level, you are not that much behind several front office GMs. This week that was made very apparent. Now, yes, he was the Jets GM, but he was the Jets GM for like four years. Mike Tannenbaum, who's now on ESPN, came up with a trade proposal for Miles Garrett and proposed it as if it was a legitimate trade offer and was offended when every other person on that stage laughed in his face. It was their who says no segment. The trade he proposed was for the Lions to get Miles Garrett. I like that idea. They lost Aiden Hutchinson. That's a great idea. The price that he thought was appropriate was three first rounders, a second rounder and Jameer Gibbs. Whoa, exactly. But he got laughed at in his face by by former players. So it's all on this year, baby. My point is that NFL GMs a lot of times get sucked into being the smart, trying to want to be the smartest guy in the room. So don't blame Bryce Young that he was the number one overall pick. Right. He's the same quarterback right now as he was at Alabama. The difference is I'm guessing he's a decent human being, too. Yeah, he seems like it. The difference is at Alabama, he had better receivers than he has right now at Alabama. He had a better offensive line than he has now. And this is the key part. At Alabama, he was a better athlete than most of the D linemen he was playing against. So he could scramble around and get away from guys and make things happen. He is not a better athlete than most backup defensive linemen in the NFL, and he doesn't have a single physical trait or mental trait that makes him stand out above anybody else. He has an average arm, maybe a below average arm in some respects. They list him at 5'10". That dude ain't 5'10". He might be 5'9". Maybe. I think he's probably closer to 5'8", 5'8 1⁄2". He's not very fast. He doesn't have great mechanics, and he sails the ball a lot because he can't see over anything, and he can't get to the edge, which is where he did most of his damage in college. It's not his fault that a team said, let's make you the number one pick and give you lots of money. He's trying to do what has made him good his whole life. It's just not capable of doing it at the NFL level. He'll have a long career in the NFL. He will be a backup and a spot starter. He could be improved. He can be, but the genetic qualities are never going to change. They are what they are. Drew Brees was six foot. Drew Brees was three inches taller. Russell Wilson is 5'10 1⁄2". He's an inch and a half or two taller. How tall is Kyler? Kyler is 5'9", but Kyler is one of the fastest human beings on planet Earth, and he has a rocket for an arm. He has to jump sometimes to throw. But he can do it. Every one of those guys, though, had at least one characteristic. Most of the time, a couple that were standout characteristics that made them special. Bryson doesn't have any of those things. It's not his fault, and it's not his fault that the Carolina Panthers decided to take the number one pick and trade their whole future for him. That's not his fault, just like it wasn't Mitch Trubisky's fault that the Bears took him ahead of Patrick Mahomes. Let's not blame the players when their front offices are idiots. Also, don't go buy his cards. They're not a good buy even now. The other point is you can be very wrong or very right at the beginning of a season. It is cool to see. I do think there's been a resurgence to the run game this year, and you see a little bit more of it happening at the college level as well. Well, football is cyclical. It always is. Spread offense, wildcat stuff is kind of a little more... Well, teams are just playing cover two shell all the time. They're playing cover two, cover four. They're rotating to three with motion, and they're just shelling it out and saying, if you're going to throw the ball, you're going to have to throw it underneath, and we're going to rally up and tackle you, and we're going to keep five or six guys in the box, and we're going to see if you're patient enough to run the ball. For a long time, that wasn't the case. That's why I get so frustrated with Chip Kelly at Ohio State. He is not patient enough to run the ball 15 straight plays if that's what the defense gives him. If that's what will work. I mean, my head coach, the last guy that I was an offensive coordinator for, for about two weeks would yell at me every week, you're predictable, and I was like... Because one game, I ran the exact same play nine straight times to the same spot. It wasn't even going hash to hash. I've played Madden with you, I believe you. It was power right. It was power right. That was it. I did it out of the same formation. You know why? Because they didn't stop it a single time. Yeah. And if they had stopped it once, I'd have run it two more times to see if they could stop it again. Show me you can stop it, and then I'll change. And I think that some coaches are finally figuring out, okay, we're going to do what they give us. I'm not going to try to be a wizard and put up massive numbers. I want to win games, and if that means the game gets shorter, and you know, we only get seven possessions, six possessions, and we run the ball. I have noticed a lot more clock management this year, so I do love seeing that kind of shift, just how you have to think a little differently about it. And it'll get cyclical, and as more teams start doing that, you'll start getting that sixth guy back in the box, and then you'll get to more play action stuff, and then you'll get the shift down again, and then you'll get back to spread, and it comes in 10-year waves. I got you a little too excited there. I love football. I love the minutiae of football. It's fun. All right. What do we have coming up? You are going to be where this weekend? East Gate Ball in Cincinnati. Cincinnati, down on the east side. Also, sneaky play right now, card-wise. DeAndre Hopkins' rookies are still cheap. He may just win a Super Bowl this year and submit himself as a Hall of Famer. His low-end stuff is flying out of my store right now. Yeah, so don't be afraid to maybe go pick up a little bit of his stuff, because I think he's a borderline Hall of Famer as it sits right now, and now he's at the Chiefs. He's 2013? Yes, and his— That means there's a bajillion products out there. There's a lot that— You get some nice-looking stuff for pretty cheap. That year, you have a lot of licensed stuff. Autos, low-numbered relics are pretty cool still. Some products that aren't around anymore. 2013 is actually a pretty fun year to collect football. He had two tutties this week, and the Chiefs desperately need a receiver that they can actually rely on. It would not shock me if he starts getting 10, 11 targets a week down the stretch. Listen, Kansas City's not going to get worse the rest of this year. That's not how they do things. No. You leave them in the mix, they're going to be a little dangerous. You got anything else for today? No, bro. I think that's it. This has been the Ball Card Show eSports Podcast. With eSports Collector. Bye now. Peace!