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As a lifetime Detroit Lions fan (yes, I will gladly accept your pity), I naturally don’t like the Green Bay Packers, but that didn’t stop me from always being impressed with how consistently good James Lofton was.

James Lofton - WR

HOF Induction in 2003

Standout Stats:

For one of the best wide receivers of the 1980s (his 9,465 receiving yards topped all receivers that decade, per StatMuse), his collector-grade rookie card is pretty affordable, averaging $13.97 over the last 10 PSA 7 sales.

Because vintage football cards tend to be more affordable than vintage baseball cards, I imagined that second-year football cards would be especially affordable relative to rookie cards - but I was also curious to continue testing the theory I had about the variance in affordability based on the popularity of players.

My assumption has been, for more popular players, that the variance would be a bit smaller, since people would, for instance, be more likely to want to collect player runs of more popular players and thus drive up prices for the second-year cards and beyond.

After testing the theory last week with 1970s baseball cards, I realized my assumption was incorrect, at least for baseball, as the percentages for the more popular players and for all the players came in dead even, with a gap of 73.3% between average prices for rookie cards and second-year cards.

Is it because the more popular a player is, the higher likelihood there is that his rookie card will be that much more expensive and, even if those players’ second-year cards are relatively more expensive as well, they still have a pretty big gap to make up? Or, because it’s an even smaller sample size for the popular players (three of the 19 HOFers for baseball), maybe certain players’ cards are more likely to skew the results (like the Schmidt rookie did)?

I don’t have that answer, but I’ll see what happens with 1970s football cards. I’ll again use the average prices for collector-grade rookie cards and second-year cards (courtesy of Card Ladder) for 19 HOFers. For the more popular players, I’ll again choose three, as I think Terry Bradshaw, Walter Payton and Roger Staubach separate themselves from the rest.

Indeed, second-year football cards are more affordable, coming in at an average of 82.9% less than the rookie cards, a difference of 9.6% compared to baseball. I think that makes sense, as I imagine there are fewer people doing football HOFer card runs than for baseball. Some other notes:

Like last week’s exercise, I decided to see how the cards one grade higher performed. Overall, they were pretty similar, with the second-year cards landing at an average of 83.6% less than the rookie cards, a wider difference of 10.9% compared to baseball.

The notable outlier was O.J. Simpson, whose average second-year card in an 8 ($835.79) was actually (and noticeably) more expensive than his rookie card in the same grade ($637). This disparity was especially unusual being that the collector-grade averages had his rookie card as 38.7% more expensive than his second-year.

What’s fascinating is that, of the five most recent sales of the PSA 8 second-year Simpson card, two of the sales were of the exact same PSA slab, and the sale price went from $701 to $950 in the space of almost six weeks, the later price likely helped by the sale of another PSA 8 two days earlier for $949.95.

For the three more popular players, the disparity was even higher, coming in at 91.1%. Staubach’s disparity was the highest of the 19 players at 93.1%, Bradshaw’s was second at 92.7%, while Payton’s came in at ninth place at 84.7%.

From collector-grade to one grade higher, nearly half (nine players) had their percentage gaps go lower, including two doing so by double digits (Simpson and Gradishar). Meanwhile, Ken Riley, Harold Carmichael and Jack Lambert had their percentage gaps go up by double figures as their card grades increased.

Next week, I’ll take a look at the 1970s basketball HOFers to see where things stand. Any predictions?