One of the most significant injuries to ever impact the sports card injury took place 25 years ago this week.
In a pre-season game on August 28, 1999 against the San Diego Chargers, St. Louis Rams quarterback Trent Green was hit low and awkwardly by Rodney Harrison. The result was a season-ending torn ACL.
Suddenly, the Rams’ season seemed to go down with the free agent quarterback they had signed to a four-year, $17.5 million contract just six months earlier. It was too late to find another starting quarterback, and coach Dick Vermeil emotionally announced that the team was going to rally around Kurt Warner.
The rest is one of the greatest stories in NFL history, and an even better story in football card history. In a year that was pegged the year of the rookie quarterback, it was undrafted Kurt Warner who stole the show and had perhaps the greatest season of any first year starter.
The Warner story has been told a million times and even made into a movie, but the story of how he impacted the football card market is almost always glossed over. In 1999, I was working for Collector’s Edge and its parent company, Shop at Home TV. While we were all expecting Ricky Williams to drive the hobby that year, it was Warner, the quarterback no one knew anything about, who turned 1999 into an even better year than Payton Manning had done a year earlier.
Warner’s story begins with Green. The Rams were rebuilding their offense, and had let quarterbacks Steve Bono and Tony Banks go. No one really talked about Green in the offseason. At Shop at Home, I remember water cooler discussions with Don West and Mike Waddell and a few of the other guys. We were all sports geeks, but in particular, we were football geeks. Waddell had been a fullback at Indiana when Green was the quarterback there. He couldn’t say enough great things about him.
In 1998, Mike kept telling us that Trent Green was going to be the breakout star. Green had been an eighth round draft pick of the San Diego Chargers in 1993 and spent a year on the bench taking no snaps. He went to Canada the following year and was cut by the BC Lions after dressing for two games and sitting on the depth chart behind established CFL stars Kent Austin and Danny McManus. He eventually ended up with the Washington Redskins. Heading into the 1998 season, he had thrown only one pass.
That year, while I was singing the praises of Doug Flutie, Mike was giving us Trent Green updates. The once overlooked quarterback finished the season with 3,441 yards and 23 touchdowns. He became a free agent after turning down a four-year, $12 million contract.
The Rams had also signed Marshall Faulk that year, and Torry Holt was drafted to complement Isaac Bruce at wide receiver.
At that time, eBay was really starting to pick up momentum as a player in the sports card market. We watched it closely at Shop at Home, as we were constantly looking for trends. The Trent Green situation was fascinating, and it really tested the standard definitions of what a rookie card was.
Heading into that season, there were only a handful of insert cards out there. None were technically rookie cards, as a rookie card is defined as a base set card. In 1993, Pro Set had a Green Rookie Quarterbacks RQ5 card, and then a Pro Set Power Update Power Prospects card #PP3, as well as a gold version of the same card.
They are his first NFL cards, taken during a photo shoot with him wearing a San Diego Chargers uniform. But they do not get the RC designation.
He didn’t appear on a football card again until 1996 Pacific Dynagon Best Kept Secrets #BKS 98, and 1997 Pacific Dynagon Prism Best Kept Secrets #32.
After I left Shop at Home to go and work at Pacific, the company’s President and CEO Mike Cramer and I talked about Green and his inclusion in not one, but two Dynagon sets. Cramer’s thinking was simple and logical, yet followed by very few card companies. Green, he said, was a quarterback that no one was making cards of. He wanted to get as many quarterbacks as possible into sets, because those are the players collectors want. Plus, with so many injuries during a season, there is a good chance that some of these players will get a chance to play, and maybe they will be really good.
In 1998, Trent Green was really good.
Going to Collector’s Edge and Shop at Home after working at Pinnacle was nothing less than the ultimate hobby juxtaposition. At Pinnacle, there were more than 200 of us hammering away at our tasks while nestled into our cubes. At Collector’s Edge, there were less than two dozen of us. Yet, we made great NFL cards and we were on top of everything. The realization while in Denver at the company’s Denver office was that at Pinnacle, we were spinning our wheels a lot more than we needed to.
Having said that, one of my roles at Collector’s Edge was to make our checklists. Because we sold a lot of our products on Shop at Home, you can imagine that priority number one was to get Trent Green into as many of our sets as possible.
After he had a few good games in Washington, the hobby started to wake up. He had two cards plus a parallel in 1993, and one card in each of 1996 and 1997. In 1998, when he had his breakthrough, Green had 26 cards. Eleven of them were Collector’s Edge cards. He also had several Pacific cards, along with a few Fleer and Playoff cards.
Heading into the 1999 season, Green was a big deal. Because the football season is so short and because of the window required to produce a card set, which includes an approval process that takes several weeks, most of the sets are planned and the checklists created well before the season starts. Some of the late sets that come out in December or January are a little more up to date, but the reason why Green was not in a lot of 1998 sets is that they were planned before he had his breakthrough.
After the injury, and Warner’s success, Green became the NFL’s answer to Wally Pipp.
But he did not disappear by any means.
In 2000, when the Rams had the Greatest Show on Turf but lost in the playoffs, Green filled in for Warner while Warner nursed a broken hand. Green started five games and threw for 2,063 yards. He led the NFL with a 101.8 passer rating.
Before the next season, Green was traded to the Kansas City Chiefs for the 12th pick in the 2001 NFL Draft. Green started every game for the Chiefs for the next five years. In 2004, he led the NFL with 4,591 yards passing. While he wasn’t in the league of Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Brett Favre or Drew Brees as far as the hobby was concerned, he was solidly collectible and had a strong following, especially among the passionate Chiefs fans and collectors.
After a year as a back-up in Miami, Green wrapped up his NFL career in 2008 as a back-up for the Rams. He ended his career with 28,475 yards passing. He had 21,459 yards for the Chiefs, which is third all-time in Kansas City behind Len Dawson and Patrick Mahomes. He had 118 of his 162 career touchdown passes in Kansas City.
One can only wonder how NFL history would have unfolded if he’d managed to avoid Rodney Harrison.
