Card Collecting Gone Mainstream

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Patriots won the Super Bowl last night.  Tom Brady became the winningest quarterback in Super Bowl history, it was the first overtime game, largest comeback, yada, yada, yada.  Can we talk about the major news from the game last night?

Trading cards were featured in a commercial!

Now, I rarely rave about a commercial after the game, but come on!  How often does this happen?   Especially nowadays, when we are decades past the Golden Age of collecting.  I mean, I asked my students once about their collections (because they're kids; they've got to collect something, right?) and hardly any of them admitted to collecting anything.  Most thought the idea of accumulating things for the sake of accumulation was silly.  Not one mentioned a sports card collection.  And the card shows I attend are filled with guys my age and older with a small handful of kids mixed in.  And yet here we are with a Donruss Terry Bradshaw in the artistic hands of a child on a Super Bowl commercial.

As far as I can tell, the card actually pictured in the spot does not exist.  But the photo matches Bradshaw's 2016 Donruss Legends of the Fall insert, shown here courtesy of COMC because I don't own this card.

What does this mean for the hobby?  If Topps were still around, the answer would be obvious: a Bradshaw rookie reprint with a stained shirt SP.  But on a larger scale, how will the hobby handle all of the certain exposure this will bring?  Will those of us who have been collecting for years welcome all the new blood this commercial will surely bring?  Or will we wall off and feel the need to defend our collections in a "I liked collecting before collecting was cool" manner?  Only time will tell.  But in the meantime, let us all bask in the limelight of a three-second stretch of a minute long Super Bowl ad.  We're the cool kids now.  Welcome to the mainstream.