Super Bowl Collectibles

I hope everyone enjoyed the Super Bowl last weekend. It was a pretty exciting game. The half time show was interesting and the commercials were mostly duds in my opinion. I did like the Amazon commercial about the dog. Maybe some of the items from this past Super Bowl will be collectibles in the future!

The first Super Bowl was held on Jan. 15, 1967 at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs 35-10. The name “Super Bowl” wasn’t originally used until a few years after the first game.

Football collectibles have not always been a big market hit until the last decade or so. If you attend sports collectible shows you will find more baseball items than football items. Of course baseball has been around a lot longer and Super Bowls haven’t been such huge events that even non-football fans watch as it has become over the last fifteen or so years. I know lots of folks that just like to watch the commercials and half-time shows and could care less who is playing!

Early Super Bowl tickets, which are more brightly colored and have nice graphics unlike baseball tickets, have become very valuable, and collectible. At a recent sports collector show in New York, a collector paid $12,500 for a Super Bowl II ticket that was a full ticket, unsold. It was a small work of art reflecting the pop art movement of the 1960s. Only ten of these full tickets have been graded by independent experts.

Remember that grading and rarity are very important when collecting sports cards and collectibles. Today is seems like there is a bobble head doll for every celebrity and non-celebrity around everywhere but if you have a 1960 original bobble head football and majorette set of “kissing” nodders, whose magnetic lips would attract each other, you have a collectible worth about $550 if it is in excellent condition.

“Nodder” is the old school term for what we call bobble-heads today. This particular pair of nodders was made of paper mache and was often displayed on car dashboards so it is rare to find a set in excellent condition today. The African American versions are even rarer and can bring around $1000.

As far as football collectibles go, the old leather helmets, 1950s helmets and football cards prior to 1970 are fairly hot but yet affordable. Probably the most highly prized Super Bowl collectible would be a coveted Super Bowl ring. Those do not come up for sale often. A popular pawn shop show on television comes up with one every now and then that brings tens of thousands of dollars but of course they give the poor person that owns the item about half of what it is worth.

Collectibles from famous football stars from their college days are also valuable. I don’t know why but I just remembered those terrible old metal toy football games from my childhood. You lined up your players on the metal field and turned it on and the vibration made the little players wiggle wobble all over the field. You might actually have one with the football make it to the end zone but the odds weren’t very good. We sure have come a long way from those days to Playstation football games!

Happy Collecting!

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