Panini Blog
Panini Blog
53,2358 passing yards. 392 career touchdown passes. 160 regular-season wins. 12 AFC East championships. Six AFC titles. Four Super Bowl rings. Three Super Bowl MVP awards. More touchdown passes . . . and passing yards . . . and completions . . . and attempts than any player in Super Bowl history. Indeed, when it comes to the on-field accolades that matter most to expert NFL analysts, New England Patriots superstar Tom Brady has them all. And because he does, the 199th player selected in the 2000 NFL Draft also has most of the accolades that matter in the sports-card world, too.
Brady’s 2000 Contenders Football Rookie Card is a bona fide collecting icon that means as much to the modern era as, say, Mickey Mantle or Babe Ruth RCs mean to the vintage arena. And to think, that now-landmark Contenders Rookie Ticket Autograph — card No. 144 on your checklist — started out as little more than afterthought filler when it released in January of 2001. The first published value for that card appeared in the the March 2001 issue of Beckett Football: $20.
Today, that card, which ascended to an unfathomable peak value of $1,600 in late 2007, is valued by Beckett Media at $1,000 — but it often sells for more than that. The Championship Ticket parallel version limited to just 100 copies is valued at $3,000 — but a BGS 8.5 example sold for $4,999 earlier this week, a transaction no doubt fueled by Brady’s masterful performance against the Seattle Seahawks in last Sunday’s Super Bowl XLIX victory.
But even that staggering sale pales in comparison to the $5,995 paid in mid January for Brady’s 2014 Flawless Football Flawless Patches Autographs Platinum 1/1 — Brady’s “best auto patch card in the hobby” according to the eBay listing. Clearly, much has changed for Brady — on the field and in the hobby — since his days as a fourth-fiddle rookie who barely made New England’s final roster coming out of his rookie training camp.
Fifteen years later, the seventh quarterback selected in the 2000 NFL Draft (behind Chad Pennington, Giovanni Carmazzi, Chris Redman, Tee Martin, Marc Bulger and Spurgeon Wynn) is largely considered the greatest quarterback selected in any NFL Draft. As a result, his best Panini America trading cards are treated — and coveted — like priceless artifacts.
In the staggering showcase that follows, we honor the Patriots’ legendary No. 12 by profiling 19 Brady cards — new and old — that have sold on eBay in recent weeks. Collectively, the cards represent $29,889 worth of “Wow!” — which just might be the best way to sum up the career of one of the greatest quarterbacks we’ve ever seen.
Values used in the gallery above were taken from closed eBay auctions. We’ve used images of the actual cards sold whenever possible; in some instances we used pre-release images of the actual cards or better-quality images of cards from the same sets.
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