A while back I opened a few football wax boxes and decided to take the Pack vs. Pack concept into football. After opening 1990 Fleer Football and 1991 Fleer Ultra Football I had plenty of packs to experiment with.
So beyond what I set aside for packs to save, I set aside two packs in each box that I would open separately and compare for this effort. Based on doing this for older packs in baseball recently I knew I would need two packs each to make it a little more interesting score-wise. I used the same Star / All-Star / Hall of Famer concept and others that I put together for baseball and then scored them.
So let’s dig in! If you need a reminder of how I give out scores you can check out my old post on the concept.
’90 Fleer Packs
These packs were pretty even but in the end this one came out slightly lower than the second pack. The Giant in this pack was Raul Allegre and the Hall of Famer was Art Monk. I counted Karl Mecklenburg, Anthony Carter, and Reggie Roby as the All-Stars and use 3 Pro Bowls as my factor for fitting guys in to that category. Then I had Greg Townsend, Drew Hill, Gil Bird and Keena Turner as Star.
This pack was the best of all four. The main reason for that was that there were two Hall of Famers in this pack. John Elway of course as you can see from the picture above and then Morten Andersen. Ottis Anderson was both a Giant and got some points for being a Pro Bowler and Rookie of the Year Award winner. Other big stars in the pack were Leslie O’Neal and Duane Bickett who won Defensive Rookie of the Year honors in their careers as well as Neal Anderson and Jerome Brown.
’91 Fleer Ultra Packs
This was my lowest scoring pack of the bunch. It had one Hall of Famer in Richard Dent; three All-Stars in Andre Rison, Dennis Smith and Leslie O’Neal; and then one Star in Jay Schroeder (he had one Pro Bowl). There were no Giants in these packs, but there was one Draft Pick card. It wasn’t a good one, but it was a Draft Pick none-the-less.
This pack actually was on par with the ’90 Fleer packs and had two Hall of Famers that helped: Bruce Smith and Warren Moon. The Rookie in this one was Chris Zorich. Other than that it was mostly Star-level guys that scored points with Ken O’Brien, Chris Chandler, Chris Miller, and Ethan Horton being in there. The only All-Star I counted was Rodney Holman.
The Final Tally
Drum roll please…
’90 Fleer (34 pts)
- Favorite Team: 2 (2 pts)
- Stars: 7 (7 pts)
- All-Stars: 5 (10 pts)
- Hall of Famers: 3 (15 pts)
’91 Fleer Ultra (30 pts):
- Stars: 5 (5 pts)
- All-Stars: 4 (8 pts)
- Hall of Famers: 3 (15 pts)
- Rookies: 2 (2 pts)
The ’90 Fleer packs had two Giants and the ’91 Fleer Ultra packs had two rookies. Each of the offerings had three Hall of Famers. That meant all those areas cancelled each other out. After that the ’90 Fleer packs took the other categories. I was kind of thinking it would be the other way around before I got into it. But it was close in the end though.
Some other things I noticed is that within each type, each pack was pretty even. Also, I was keeping track of Super Bowl winners because I was thinking it could be some kind of tie-breaker but it turned out it wasn’t needed. Still, the ’90 Fleer packs each had four while the ’91 Ultra packs had three and zero respectively. Not sure that means anything but I thought it was interesting.
I tried this experiment in baseball (’91 Fleer Ultra Baseball and ’89 Pacific Senior League – which honestly I don’t know if it’s ’89 or ’90) and the older packs in football are very much the same as the experience in baseball. Without the inserts, parallels, short prints, etc., the scoring is all about who you get and not what type of cards you get (regardless of who is on the card).
It was fun to compare the packs. I think using different types of packs definitely changes it and makes it feel more like a competition rather than using the same packs.