Whats next for college athlete trading cards?

Good morning, and thanks for your continued support of Extra Points.

Do you guys like collecting stuff?

I do! Right now, I collect vintage college pennants. I bought a few when I first launched Extra Points because I didn’t want my zoom background to be a boring wall…but then people started sending them to me, and I started trolling around Etsy and various estate sales, and now I have this fun collection…even though my wife likes to joke that my office now looks like a KIPP school Guidance Counselor's office.

I’ve spent enough time on eBay and Etsy to probably flip a few pennants and make some extra money, but that isn’t why I collect the pennants. I collect them because I think they look cool.

When I was a kid, I collected sports cards…mostly basketball ones, but some football and baseball too. I wasn’t too concerned about selling them or flipping them, even though I was aware that people did that. I mostly bought them because having a huge binder full of cards was cool, and I loved memorizing all the little stats behind the cards.

Of course, back when I was a kid, you couldn’t buy college football trading cards. NIL wasn’t a thing in 1997, and nobody even made unlicensed ones. But now, major industry giants and smaller firms are getting into the college athlete trading card game.

Which, I’m told, presents a tricky problem for everybody.

The trading card market has to satisfy two very different consumer groups, which creates a tricky problem.

On one hand, the industry needs to serve hard-core collectors, folks who are buying cards are investment vehicles. Very generally, these folks want the supply of cards, particularly cards involving elite athletes, to be lower, so the cards they have retain value. The inability to strike this balance is one of the (many) reasons NBA Top Shot struggled.

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