Review: 1991 Bowman

"You ain't a beauty, but hey you're alright." - Bruce Springsteen

The year was 1991. Operation: Desert Storm was the big news item of the year, the last thing even slightly resembling a good Metallica album was released, and The Undertaker began his Wrestlemania undefeated streak that still stands. Meanwhile, the football trading card industry was about to explode. After brands like Pro Set, Score, Fleer, and Action Packed proved that the hobby could support multiple brands, more and more wanted in on the action. And along with new entries like Upper Deck, Pacific, Pro Line, and Wild Card, the existing companies all decided that maybe they could put out more than one set themselves. (More on that at a later date, probably) So after resurrecting the Bowman brand for baseball in 1989, the Topps company decided to do the same for football in 1991. But what did the new Bowman brand of cards have to offer that the regular Topps set didn't? I dunno, but I do know one thing: Our Wal-Mart had apparently ordered a metric fuckload of these things, so within a few months, they got as low as 20 cents a pack, so we all bought the living crap out of them.

Design-wise, they were really nothing special. While all the newer entries into the business had seemed to leave Topps in the dust as far as physical quality went, these were even a step down from the regular Topps set. The design was boring, the photo printing was dull and grainy, the cards were the same old-school Topps thick card stock that was all lumpy on the front and could get rounded off at the corners with even slight abuse, and the card backs were done in a two-color process that left most of the card area in an unprinted raw cardboard gray. It's a shame, too, because with better print quality, the fronts really would have looked okay, in a simple, stripped-down sort of way.


As far as player selection goes, I guess they did as much as they could with what they had to work with. Like I mentioned in the '90 Fleer review, overproduction had sucked all the potential value out of any standard-issue set of the time anyway, and most of the hot rookies of 1990 and 1991 really didn't pan out whatsoever. And like just about everyone else, they neglected to make a card of an unheralded rookie out of Southern Miss named Brett Favor, or something like that, so there went the one guy that could have saved the day, as far as book value is concerned. Still, this was a HUGE set with a lot of draft picks included, and they put a few guys in there that weren't in other sets, and were one of the very few to make a 1991 card of Shannon Sharpe. It's like a fifty-cent card, but hey, it's something, right?


Also included were special gold-foil stamped cards at a rate of one per pack. This was kind of a big deal, as foil on cards wasn't a very common thing back in those days, and these served as a precursor to the foil cards that were really hot in the 1992 set and to a lesser extent in 1993. These inclided subsets for star rookies, playoff game highlights, and league leaders. Sadly, these were viewed as a subset with less value than the player's standard-issue card, so they didn't generate a whole lot of interest among collectors. They looked kind of nice, though.


Overall, I shouldn't like this set, but I still do. 1991 Was kind of the last gasp for cards coming as a base set and nothing else, and as one of those sets, Bowman did everything it needed to. Sure, there was no Favre rookie, but at the time no one cared, as we all chased after the $1.25 (and that was big money at the time) cards of Todd Marinovich and Dan McGwire. The sad part is that we may be looking back with the same "boy, how stupid were we?" hindsight when Matt Leinart and Jay Cutler's careers go on horrible death-spirals and Brodie Croyle ends up being the new Football Jesus someday. Hey, it could happen.