1994 Action Packed Monday Night Football

Hope you football fans enjoyed this weekend's games! Well, Titans, Panthers, Giants and Chargers fans didn't but I hope all three Cardinals fans are going nuts right now! Let's open a football pack to celebrate and since the post probably won't be done until after midnight anyway, let's do some Monday Night Football from Action Packed. I saw this monstrous package of 6 cards for a buck and figured why the hell not. At bare minimum I have a neet looking Emmitt card on the front of the package. Here's the back:

10 of those suckers and a time machine gets you a FREE Mammoth "Super Sized" card of a QB club member. I probably would have gone with Chris Miller unless he has gone on to the Rams by then. My backup probably would have been Favre or Rice. I didn't buy a single pack of this in '94 so I got NOTHING. I got one now! Let's open!

68 HOW-AAD CO-SELL

This pack is automatically worth 18 billion dollars in coolness money to me. Just for his play-by-play in Woody Allen's Bananas

21 Rodney Hampton

Another awesome card this time of a Georgia Alum. This card has a weird oil slicky sheen on the left side of the foil which is odd. I wish they all had it because it scanned pretty good. The foil actually looks silver! The back has some of Rodney's highlights and promotes the matchup of the Giants and Vikings on 10/10/94, which happened to be my grandfather's birthday. Giants lost 27-10. Too bad.

52 Dan Marino

Holy CRAP this is a good pack! The Monday Night Fact on the back is that Dan has the most 300-yard passing games on Monday night at 5. I'm sure that's been broken already, at the very least by Dan. His matchup is the Dolphins and the Chiefs on 12/12/94. Dolphins on top, 45-28.

33 Mike Sherrard

The streak of awesome had to break at some point. Giants at Dallas, 11/7/94. Dallas spanked 'em 38-10

7 HUSHEL WALKAH

Jumpin Jesus on a pogo stick!!1 This is damn near the best football pack ever! Chicago at Philly 9/12/94: 27-13 Bears. I'm almost afraid to look at the last card... After all the awesome it almost has to be a Jeff George to even everything out.

14 Andre Reed


My God, this pack was epic. Lookit Reed doing somersaults. He had the most catches in a Monday Night game with 13 against Denver on 9/18/89. His matchup: Broncos 20, Bills 27 on 9/26/94.

Dang, I wish I had bought the other two packs now. It's sad that we'll never have another Action Packed ever again.

Video Pack Break: 1989 Action Packed Football

In 1989 the football card Hobby was beginning to change. For much of the 80s Topps was the only game in town. But in '89 the NFL granted licenses to three companies. Fresh off their success in baseball, the NFL gave Score a license. The other two went to two start up companies: Pro Set and Action Packed.

While Score and Pro Set produced traditional card card sets, Action Packed put out what could best be described as a test issue to demonstrate their bas relief printing process to The Hobby. It featured 30 cards from only three NFL teams: the Bears, Giants, and Redskins. (The first "Real" AP card set would not be released until 1990)

This was NOT Action Packed's first trading card set. A year earlier, they applied for an MLB/MLBPA license and created a six-card baseball test set. Ultimately, both MLB and MLBPA rejected Action Packed's effort and awarded the licenses to another start-up called "Upper Deck."

Each pack contained six cards (two from each team) and one of three stadium hologram stickers.