7 Day Trading Card Challenge #3

Time to get back on the horse and get a post up.

As a reminder, Tim over at Cardpocalypse put together this 7 Day Trading Card Challenge and here is the whole list:

I am up to #3, the favorite football card in my collection.  My collection is a majority baseball but I do have my fair share of football cards and football card pursuits.  As a graduate of USC, collecting former Trojan football players was my first team collection, a few years before starting my Giants collection in earnest.

I am have a solid number of sets in my football card collection.  I have decided to go after a lifetime Topps football card collection from my birth year of 1971 up through 2015 when Topps stopped producing football cards.  I am waiting for my last group of 1977 cards from COMC to finish off that set and that will leave me only lacking 1993 and 1994 for a run from 1977-2015.  I am also about 10 cards short of the 1971 set and under 20 cards from completing Series 1 & 2 of the 1972 set.  I haven't looked hard but it seems Series 3 in football is even worse than the high series of 72 Topps baseball.  The lowest priced complete set is about $3.5K on eBay and you can get the lower 2 series for under $400 so that high series will be a beast to collection. 

I have shared my 49er collection where I am looking to pick up all the Topps, Bowman, Fleer and Philadelphia base and insert cards.  I also collect a few non-USC players in Dwight Clark, Roger Craig and Fred Dean and a small collection of Kenny Stabler.  I share all this to illustrate that I have a lot of football cards to pick from to find my favorite.

I think my pick for this could differ depending on the day but when I was giving thought to which card to pick my mind went immediately to my Ronnie Lott collection.  Ronnie was a Trojan and a 49er and I had a chance to meet him in the mid-80s at the height of his Niner career during training camp in Rocklin, CA.  I had a few cards in mind but when I was flipping through my Lott binders I decided on this card:

I prefer on card autos and this isn't the cleanest Lott auto in my collection but I just love this card.  He isn't featured in his USC uniform on that many cards and I love the College Greats theme.  This card has a great SC logo on both sides and is low numbered to just 20 copies.  I hunted this card down and negotiated with the seller like crazy to add it to my collection and got what I thought at the time was a good deal.  I think the fun of the chase adds to my liking of this card and for today it is my favorite.