Now that Super Bowl 56 is set, Joe Burrow is set to lead the Bengals against Matthew Stafford of the Rams. Collectors have decided with a serious wave of purchases that they want to own a serious piece of Joe Burrow’s sports cards. In fact, Joe Burrow related card sales on eBay alone have been more than 4,500 in the last 24 hour period alone and that was using a $20 floor price to avoid all the junky cards. Some of these are graded and some are not, and some are Auctions and some are Buy Now with the “or Best Offer.” That is a frenzy in its own right and the bidding wars and last-minute price chases for Joe Burrow’s cards would certainly indicate that buyers want to own Joe Burrow at any cost.

One question that should be considered is whether or not the older Matthew Stafford should be more of a focal purchase than Joe Burrow cards above $20. Is it possible that the sports collecting hobby has it all wrong? This will sound like blasphemy to many collectors right now. This is also not intended to do anything else besides making sports card buyers think at least once before they throw down hundreds or thousands of dollars that may have very little value in the months or years ahead.

The sports card collecting community sometimes allows emotions and frenzies to overpower common sense and sensibility in the sports card hobby. If you need frenzy evidence, just look at the eBay bidding aftermath of the Joe Burrow cards right around and right after the Bengals beat the Chiefs. It has been proven time and time again that sports card buyers have chased up players with unrealistic expectations. And it has been proven time after time that the price of those cards can plummet. And yes, a few hundred dollars of purchases can also net thousands of tens of thousands of dollars.

Collectors Dashboard ran a search on eBay of Matthew Stafford related card sales for the last 24-hour period using the same $20 floor price for each lot. This is to get to the sales right after Joe Burrow upset Patrick Mahomes in overtime and includes when Matthew Stafford was leading the comeback against the 49ers. According to eBay’s sold items list using auctions and the Buy It Now (or Best Offer) categories there were approximately 500 of the Matthew Stafford related card sales. That’s about 9-to-1 in favor of Burrows over Stafford.

Both searches were done screening out the “Completed” listings and using the $20 floor. The other issue to consider is that Matthew Stafford’s volume being about one-ninth of Joe Burrow’s volume also was characterized by considerably lower sale prices on a relative basis.

Matthew Stafford has now played in 13 NFL seasons. Having his entire pre-Rams career as QB for the Detroit Lions is not exactly the sports card hobby’s biggest attention grabber. The Lions only had 4 winning seasons in the Stafford years there. That said, Stafford already has an impressive 49,995 regular season passing yards and an impressive 323 TDs against 161 interceptions. His 4,302 completions out of 6,825 attempts gives Stafford a 63.03% career completion percentage. And with OBJ and the Rams he had an even better 67.22% completion rate in 2021 and a career winning high of 12 games in the season.

With the Rams favored currently over the Bengals, the over/under total was set at 50.5 points. The website SportsOddsHistory.com. indicated that the Bengals were at 100 to 1 odds at the starts of the season and they are said to be the first team to reach the Super Bowl with odds like that since the 1999 St. Louis Rams’ 150-1 odds.

Everyone can admit that the sports collectors are currently in love with Panini’s flashy Kaboom cards. We tried to run some recent side-by-side comparisons of each player. Here’s what we lined up:

• A 2020 Panini Absolute Kaboom! #KMS Matthew Stafford SP Case Hit sold on January 30, 2022 for $355.00 after 26 bids, and that was after the game’s outcome was known.
• We then looked at 2021 Kaboom prices for Joe Burrow to avoid the 2020 rookie card premium. Again, Stafford’s career has now spanned 13 seasons so none of his Kaboom cards are of him young. The last 2021 Panini Absolute Football Joe Burrow Kaboom that was ungraded selling in an auction format sold for $1,425.00 after 16 bids and that was on Monday rather than in the evening hours of euphoria (because you know some liquid consumption may have occurred last night).

We also cross referenced the “trending cards” on the Sportscard Investor site’s most popular football cards. The top 6 cards trending at this time were all Joe Burrow cards (with 8 of the top-10 being Burrow) and we did not get to a Matthew Stafford leading the trending cards until #33 in the most popular within football cards. And yes, we know all about the hobby speculating on young guns over veterans who have had less than stellar careers.

You can look through sales at PWCC Marketplace, Goldin with nearly $500K, COMC and elsewhere and the easy answer is that Joe Burrow cards are just exponentially more popular. And on top of that, they are more plentiful in the graded cards and they come with much higher prices. We also looked at a graph of Google search data and the interest in Google Trends is not even close.

And looking at the Heritage Auctions comps, it has hardly sold any Matthew Stafford cards — and the most expensive was his 2009 Panini Playoff National Treasures (42/50) in Gem Mint 10 condition for $2,520 in April of 2020. Heritage hasn’t exactly sold hundreds of Burrow cards either, but his most expensive sale was a 2020 Panini Chronicles Draft Picks Donruss Optic Rated Rookies (signed) PSA 10 for $7,200 in December of 2020. (Image above and below by Heritage Auctions)

Using the trends and the flurry of live data during a frenzy can be a bit maddening in the sports card hobby. A lot of emotional buying gets carried away, and it’s not a secret that strong adult beverage sales ahead of big football games has influenced some purchases that shouldn’t have been made (or should have been made at half that price!).

There is also a lesson using a “value stock” mentality from traditional investments. Buying old boring companies is not as exciting as buying the greatest technology and growth companies of the time. Value usually lags growth in performance. And “value” is usually considered as value for a reason. We would also remind sports collectors that not every hot young quarterback makes it in the NFL, nor do they all end up in the Hall of Fame.

There is no crystal ball in sports and the movie Any Given Sunday lays out exactly how anything can happen in any game. Joe Burrow is a second-year quarterback. The Rams have been placed as a 3.5 to 4 point favorite to beat the Bengals in Super Bowl 56 on February 13. The amount of “What If” questions you can ask is endless. What if Matthew Stafford has the performance of a lifetime and Joe Burrow doesn’t measure up? And what if Stafford and the Rams are just crushing their opponents next season?

The Hobby is looking for its next GOAT in what will now be a post-Brady era. That GOAT candidate was supposed to be Patrick Mahomes, but a younger quarterback and an underdog team knocked him out of his shot to win another Super Bowl ring.

It’s easy to get carried away on “what if” questions and carried away on relative values. The sports card collecting community has exponentially demonstrated in the last 24-hour period that chasing and paying whatever it takes to win has not died off despite some of the price trends that were seen over the last 9 months. Is it at least possible that the focal point is on the wrong quarterback heading into Super Bowl 56?