The Wagner Of Football Cards

John Dunlop's 1894 Mayo Cut Plug card

The Wagner Of Football Cards

In the mess of irrational exuberance that grew around baseball cards in the 1980s, football cards were largely ignored and forgotten.

The truth is that there was no real reason to be interested in football cards in those days. Unlike baseball, where competing companies had entered the market to challenge the Topps monopoly, nobody bothered to make cards to rival Topps’ stranglehold on football.

This eventually changed — but not until 1989 (incidentally, the same year that the hockey card market opened up). We’ll talk about the world of football cards in 1989 next time.

The truth is that the world of pre-modern football cards has largely been ignored by collectors. And that’s why most people won’t recognize the elusive holy grail:

This John Dunlop card, often referred to as “anonymous” since it lacks his last name on the front, is almost certainly as rare as the famous T-206 Honus Wagner. It comes from the first football focused card set of all time — a 35 card tobacco set featuring players from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. And, if you’ve been keeping up with my history posts, you already know that those three teams basically defined the early years of college football.

Harvard managed an 11-2 record in 1894, losing to Yale and Penn at the very end of the season. Sadly, there’s not much out there in terms of a statistical record. Most game reports of the era included vague descriptions of action and boxscores that looked like this:

From The Boston Globe, November 30, 1894, page 5

As you can see here, it seems that Dunlop was at least occasionally a substitute fullback. There is some evidence that he was a first team player at least on occasion, however:

From The Boston Globe, October 17, 1894, page 5

Dunlop stayed with Harvard for 1895:

From Boston Post, September 29, 1895, page 6

And he played a little bit in 1896, though it seems that he didn’t last long in this game against Princeton:

From The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 8, 1896, page 9

By 1897, Dunlop had become football coach at Boston College, where he would stay until 1901. He compiled a 16-16-2 record over 4 seasons (Boston College did not field a team in 1900), after which he left the sport for good.

So why is his card so scarce? And why isn’t there a name attached to it? I’m not sure if anybody knows.