There are bidding wars, and then there are bidding wars. It’s one thing to see $100 and $200 cards selling like crazy in first and second year players, but it’s another issue entirely when the young gun players have sales consistently in the $10,000 and higher price range. Super Bowl 56 is just a few days away and the sports collecting community just cannot get enough of Joe Burrow. What is so amazing about this bidding craze on Joe Burrow cards is that Matthew Stafford and the Rams are currently favored to beat the Bengals. The bidding frenzies in the more affordable cards are off the charts, but the $10,000 and higher priced Joe Burrow cards are generally seeing massive bidding as well.

Collectors Dashboard filtered through the recent eBay auctions under the Sold (not just completed) auctions. We used post-Christmas auctions and used a $9,500.00 threshold rather than a flat $10,000 — because when you add in taxes and shipping most will be $10,000 or more. We did not include any of the Buy It Now sales that included “or Best Offer” because we have no formal way of tracking exact prices on those sales.

Card collectors and those who are investors in cards hopefully understand that there is no such thing as a guaranteed profit just because they are paying up. And using the cut-off of $10,000 hopefully implies that the buyers have pockets big enough that they understand investments, risks, and the inevitable losses that can happen. If stocks and bonds come with no guarantees, then sports collectibles absolutely have no guarantees.

This all begs the question of whether or not the sports card collecting community should be focused on Matthew Stafford instead of Joe Burrow.

We have listed these in a spreadsheet format. When we wrote about “Not Every Hot New NFL QB Goes to the Hall of Fame” at the start of the 2021 NFL season. We had noted this about Burrow along with about 10 other young quarterbacks:

Joe Burrow is entering year-2 for the Cincinnati Bengals. The Cincinnati Bengals QB has played 10 games and racked up 2,688 yards for 13 touchdowns. One problem is that the Bengals have been known as “an easy win” by every other football team since 2016. That leaves a lot of upside if this franchise becomes a contender. It also means he is coming into a situation with demoralized fans who may give up quickly after just 4 wins in 2020, 2 wins in 2019 and 6 wins in 2018. Burrow’s knee injury did interrupt what was the start of a great career and the Cincinnati Enquirer laid out how great his stats were looking up that point and what to expect for 2021.

Again, these are just the sold items in auction format — and there are still technically 4 days of time for endless auctions, Buy It Now, and other transactions elsewhere before Super Bowl 56. We did include the items that sold with 1 bid because they were in an auction format. This is also just the eBay sales and does not include transactions on Goldin, Heritage, PWCC, direct on COMC and elsewhere.