Uncut Sheets of 1968 Topps Football Cards

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Below are two virtual uncut 132-card sheets of 1968 Topps football cards, one from each series. If you hold your cursor above a card, your browser should show you the number of the card and the name of the player. Clicking on a card will bring up the full-sized scan. (A real uncut sheet would not have black lines between the cards--that is an effect of scanning them individually.)

There are 220 cards in the 1968 Topps set, 132 in the first series and 88 in the second. The first series consists of cards 1-131 and 219A. 219A is one variation of the second series checklist; it has green printing on the back, like the rest of the first series cards. Presumably Topps included the second series checklist in the first series to alert kids to watch for more cards. The second series cards are numbers 132-218 and 219B. They have blue printing on the back.

Full sheets, such as this 1966 Topps baseball card sheet, contain 264 standard-sized cards. Each of the virtual sheets shown here represents half of a full 264-card sheet. A full first series sheet held two copies of each first series card, and a full second series sheet held three copies of each second series card.

Series 1 Sheet

Series 2 Sheet

All of the Green Bay Packers and Oakland Raiders cards in the 1968 Topps set are oriented horizontally, and they have cartoons of football action in the background. The Packers and Raiders were the Super Bowl teams of the previous season. (Also see my blog article, 1968 Topps Football Cards: Honoring the First Super Bowl Teams.)

Twenty of the second series cards have puzzle pieces printed on the back, rather than the usual statistics and fun facts. The puzzle pieces form pictures of Len Dawson and Bart Starr, the Super Bowl I quarterbacks. You can see the assembled puzzles on my 1968 Topps Football Card Puzzles page. The twenty puzzle cards are the leftmost ten cards in the bottom two rows of the sheet; they are marked in green below. An uncut second series sheet would have the Starr and Dawson pictures intact on the back.

My Beckett price guide has second series commons priced higher than first series commons, but, judging by PSA's population report, the cards in the two series were printed in approximately equal numbers. At the time of this writing, PSA's report showed nineteen cards in the set with two or fewer examples graded 9 or 10. They were Kent McCloughan, Carroll Dale, Gary Ballman, John Mackey, Elijah Pitts, Richie Petitbon, Jerry Mays, Mike Mercer, and Ordell Braase in the first series; and Tucker Frederickson, Jerry Smith, Andre White, Jack Kemp, Lonnie Wright, Don Trull, Daryle Lamonica, Ernie Wright, Maxie Baughan, and checklist 219B in the second series. All but three of these--Ballman, Petitbon, and White--are on the corners and edges of the sheets, again showing that a card's position on the sheet is a good predictor of its scarcity.

The following tables show how the cards were arranged by number on the sheet. As I said on the other virtual sheet pages, this was probably so the cards would appear to be randomly distributed in packs, even if they were packaged in order by row or column.

Series 1 Sheet Numbering

Series 2 Sheet Numbering

For more virtual uncut sheets, see the Gallery's master uncut sheet page.