If You Build It, They Will Come

 The newly fashioned USFL had their draft February 22nd and 23rd to fill the rosters of their new 8 teams.  Now, I'm trying to not be cynical because I do want this league to survive and provide opportunities for players to reach the NFL.  Just like I wanted the XFL to make it, and the American Alliance League, and the XFL again.   To be fair though...I just want the cards.  After the draft, I count 8 Iowa Connections in the league, with the Michigan Panthers leading the way with 2.  Houston currently with zero, but each team has end of rosters, practice squads and coaching staffs to fill. Here are the 8 Iowa Connections in the league: Seth Thomas, OT, UNI (Birmingham) Derrick Willies, WR, Iowa (Tampa Bay) Kamilo Tongamoa, DT, ISU (New Orleans) Jackson Brown, G, UNI (Philadelphia) Angelo Garbutt, LB, Iowa (New Jersey) Kirby Wilson, HC, ISU (Pittsburgh) Jaquan Bailey, DT, ISU (Michigan) La'Michael Pettway, TE, ISU (Michigan) Its still early, but currently the leader for the team

The player collector post 2000 has had to change their mindset from when I was a kid.  It is not unreasonable for me to say I am going to collect every Kevin Wickander card.  In TCDB he has 78 cards listed, and while I'm not near close to that goal (I have 27 cards), there is not a card in that list that should be impossible to get.  The difficult ones would be Tiffany cards, minor league cards, team issued cards, Desert Shield, and 1997 Donruss Signature cards, the rarest being 100.   Kevin Wickander is not a Hall of Famer, nor a fan favorite.  No intended shade here, just saying that he hasn't had a card made since 1997.  So I can actually collect all his cards and be done.  Kirby Puckett has not played since 1995 and continues to have cards made.  So, even if I collected every single Puckett card, by next month I will be needing more cards. Wickander's lowest serial numbered card is 100.  Tough, but not impossible.  Puckett will have 10-100 new cards each year that is se

 I've spent the last week being inundated with pictures of everyone's hauls from their Series One breaks, and I regret to say that I have yet to see anyone post their Mitch Keller pulls, which means he must be one heck of a hard pull.  Not like that Frank Wander guy, everyone seems to have pulled him.  Must be overproduced.  I have yet to find a box, but to be fair I've only been out once since they came out so I'm not surprised.  Hopefully today will be the day.  Along with the Mitch Keller hunt, I discovered that Iowa is represented in the SP cards in the set this year.  Sometimes Bob Feller will show up as a SP, but not this year.  This year Topps has cards of its most famous children, its corn.   These are obviously taken from the White Sox / Yankees game last year, because there are the baseball players in the way of the corn.  It looks like they go for about $30 on eBay currently, with Judge being closer to $50.  Seems like a first week bump, but we'll see. Wi

 I'd like to start a new series of posts where I list the Iowa Connections within each set, but that is ridiculous, so I plan on doing one major set for each season.  Obviously Topps with baseball, but with the Panini sports its not quite as obvious.  You need a larger checklist, and preferably one that comes out during the season.  I'd pick Prizm for both, but we won't get Prizm in football until after the season is over.  I'll probably go back and do Score for football since it is a reasonable get and has a decent checklist.   For the NBA, I'm going with Hoops.  These are the Iowa Connections in 2021-22 Hoops: #51 Monte Morris : Iowa State #78 Harrison Barnes : Ames #108 Tyrese Haliburton - Iowa State #193 Doug McDermott - Ames #245 Joe Wieskamp - Iowa #250 Luka Garza - Iowa Notable exceptions include Nick Nurse (UNI), Talen Horton Tucker (Iowa State) and Tyler Cook (Iowa).  

 Try as I might to stay on top of everything, sometimes information slips through the cracks.  I'm working on my Iowa Connections football list, and finished working through coaching staffs of the various Iowa Colleges and Community Colleges.  You might think that is way too much work, and I wouldn't disagree with you. I don't dig through every staff for every year it exists, but rather rely on Wikipedia to highlight the more important names on each staff.  Yesterday, I found one that I hadn't know before, which was exciting because it was a name I knew and better yet, a former NFL player with a bunch of cards to collect. The coach was Timm Rosenbach. I still love the 1989 Pro Set Rookie Cards Timm Rosenbach played college ball at Washington State, and was drafted by the Phoenix Cardinals in 1989 where he played until 1992.  A year in the CFL and a year with the Saints after that and his career was done.  Why he is relevant to this blog is his one season with St. Ambros

 This week is the official start of the 2022 MLB season with the drop of Topps Series One.  There is 330 cards in the base set, probably a bunch of SPs and SSPs that will become apparent soon.  Its always exciting to get the new Topps set because it always holds so much promise.  Rookie cards of players you haven't seen on cardboard yet, players on new teams, etc.  However, this year the common refrain online has been complaints about the weak checklist for Series One.  The complaint is that there is only one player to chase.  From what I can tell looking at the base checklist, I agree with this sentiment. THERE IS ONLY ONE IOWA CONNECTION AND HIS NAME IS MITCH KELLER! Now I know I've only seen the base and clear checklists, and perhaps Bob Feller (a often seen Topps staple) will be in an insert set or as a SP.  I doubt that we see any others until Series Two. The best Iowa Connections options for Series 2 are: Michael Wacha Nick Allgeyer Erik Swanson Colin Rea Derek Hill Tony

Football is finally updated in TCDB.  This probably my best category in the database. Football Iowa Connections will fall under four categories...mostly.  NFL players (Shonn Green, Kurt Warner), CFL players (Drew Tate, Randy Duncan), Arena players (Kurt Warner again) and college football players and coaches (Hayden Fry, Nile Kinnick) make up a majority of the collection. I have 1009 Iowa Connections currently in my spreadsheet, and of the 1009, 611 of them have at least one card tracked in TCDB.   I developed a ranking system for the player collections to determine which players I have the best (and worst) collections of. For context, of the 611 players with cards, I have at least one card of  274 players.   Other numbers of note: 164 / 274 Collections are in the Top 5 50 Collections are #1 Best #1 Collections are David Johnson, Darren Sproles and Bob Sanders I have 70% of Bruce Reimers cards, but remain in 22nd place.

  Let's see how the Divisional round finished: **** 1 - 1 (9 - 3 total)**** (3)  Cincinnati  at (6) Kansas City (2) San Francisco at (3)  Los Angeles Rams Note: (#) is the number of Iowa Connections Cincinnati pulls the upset and keeps Anthony Hitchens and Ben Niemann from adding second rings.  

1995 would mark the last year of Kirby's career.  Kirby suffered an eye ailment in the next spring training and never played with the Twins again.  So, from his first year in the majors (1984) to his last, the cards span 13 pages in TCDb, meaning somewhere between 1200-1300 cards for his major league career.   1996 set inclusions are not unreasonable, as he was with the team for spring training and those checklists are done pretty early, but for sake of argument we are sticking with 1995.  There are 43 total pages of Puckett cards, meaning that about 70% of his cards have come out after he retired.  One thing that jumps out when scanning through the cards I'm missing currently is that there are a lot of variations on cards that have popped up over the years.  Three types specifically come to mind. One is the Donruss variations where the Leaf Inc on the back either ends with a period... or doesn't. Second, the 1991 Upper Deck Hologram variations, and third are the Topps code

I have tabs for a bunch of different sports in my Iowa Connections spreadsheet, none quite as big as baseball and football, so I merge some of the sports here.  Here I'm going to cover Golf, Soccer, Tennis, Boxing, Hockey, Vollyball and the Olympics.