Cards
Collector builds impressive collection of iconic cards of GOATS across all sports
Since 1999, Jeremy Jensen and his buddies get together every year to conduct their fantasy football league draft.
The gathering they had in 2020 produced a life-altering moment for Jensen.
While smoking a cigar on the back patio at Jensen’s house, a conversation between Jensen and a friend turned into a familiar topic.
“He tells me about how the card market has exploded with COVID,” Jensen said. “I looked at him and I was like, ‘Geez.’ So, I’m asking questions, and he says, ‘You mean you collect?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve got quite a bit of stuff. Let me go downstairs and grab a little bit of it and you can kind of tell me what I’ve got.’”
What Jensen pulled out of storage was mind-blowing. There was an unopened box of 2000 Bowman Chrome Football along with a number of Tom Brady rookie cards from that product in PSA 9s and 10s. That was just the tip of the iceberg.
“I purchased this stuff and I just kind of sat on it,” said Jensen, who collected cards as a kid and then again in the early 2000s. “It was at that point in time that I realized—and I had a bunch of vintage stuff—and he’s telling the prices of some of this stuff. I’m just like, ‘You’re kidding me. There’s no way.’ From then on, it brought me back into the hobby.”
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Jensen came up with an idea on what he wanted his collection to look like: amassing the top 50 cards in the hobby. He conducted Google searches that produced different lists of the GOATs in each respective sport.
And The 308 Collection was born.
“I’ve always been a rookie card guy, and so it was saying, let’s figure this out. You kind of start with a group of cards and you pare it down, especially in the last year or two where I’ve gotten the collection down to that manageable 50 number, that’s when the real strategy comes into play,” said Jensen, whose collection is named after the 308 area code at his home in central Nebraska. “Now rather than just saying I’ve got excess cash and this card’s really cool, I think I just want to buy it, I don’t do that because that’s where it could get out of hand.”
There’s no deviating from his top 50 list. If Jensen adds a card into his exclusive collection, he needs to remove one.
“I don’t just say to myself, well, what’s the difference between 50 and 51? Because if I do that, it’s going to open up a door that I don’t want to,” Jensen said. “I’ll be like, well, maybe I should just have this collection be 75 cards, maybe 100. Then it defeats the purpose of it, so I’ve really been true to it.”
TRADING UP
Jensen’s project has taken on a life of its own. He has really focused on quality over quantity.
“I took the stuff that I had and used it to kind of trade up into other things,” he said. “I started dwindling my collection down but really taking it up in terms of what I actually had. I really wanted my collection to be manageable. I wanted it to be liquid. And I wanted it to be what I would consider investment grade.”
Jensen, a financial advisor at Wells Fargo, finished out his top 50 in 2024.
“The chase has been creating the 50 and then fine-tuning it,” Jensen, 53, said. “It’s been a great journey.”
With Jensen being a baseball fan, it’s not surprising that 23 of the cards in The 308 Collection are tied to America’s pastime. The breakdown of the rest are: 12 basketball cards, seven football, three soccer, two hockey, two wrestling and one golf.
“There was really no rhyme or reason to say that, well I’m a baseball purist, so I have to do this, that really wasn’t it,” Jensen said. “I think when you look at the hobby, there’s just way more what I consider iconic baseball cards as opposed to say, for instance, iconic football. That really blows me away too, if you think about it. Football is such a massively popular sport but there’s not really a whole lot of truly iconic football cards.
“When you look at it and think to yourself, there’s just all these superstar football players since 1980. But even like an ’84 Marino rookie in a PSA 9, you can get it for a few hundred bucks, and they’re everywhere. Then the Elways and going all the way up to Barry Sanders and the Aikman and all the way up through.
“For me, it was a matter of, I want to try to also focus on cards that are maybe a little bit more difficult to get as well. It’s really truly a blended equation from, do I like the player, is the card iconic, is it something that’s going to hold its value or appreciate over time? So, it’s really a matter of all that stuff that I take into consideration.”
It’s not shocking that there are multiple cards of some of sports’ all-time legends. There are three cards apiece of Michael Jordan and Mickey Mantle, along with two each for Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson and Lou Gehrig.
“I’ve very nostalgic, and the guys that are in there are the Mantles, the Ruths, the DiMaggios, the Aarons. So, when I was trying to figure out, OK, what’s that 50 list look like, it was a matter of let’s figure out the true GOATs of not only their sport but also the hobby.”
Jensen’s top 50 is vintage heavy: 27 cards were produced prior to 1980, and 37 were made pre-2000.
Pinpointing Jensen’s favorite cards is like picking which one of his kids he likes best. However, he was able to pare it down to five.
In no particular order, Jensen’s top cards are: 1933 Goudey Babe Ruth #53 (PSA 4); 1984 Star Michael Jordan #101 (PSA 7); 1935 National Chicle Bronco Nagurski #34 (PSA 3.5); 2004-05 Panini Megacracks Lionel Messi #71BIS (BGS 9); and 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee Wayne Gretzky #18 (BVG 8).
TOP 50 BREAKDOWN
For photo purposes, Jensen has displayed his top 50 cards in five rows of 10, from each sport’s earliest card to the newest.
His favorite row consists of a 1909-11 T206 Ty Cobb Sweet Caporal Portrait Red (PSA 4); 1911 M16 Sport Life Honus Wagner Pastel Background (PSA Authentic Altered); 1920 W519 Babe Ruth strip card (FCG Authentic); 1928 M502 Lou Gehrig #26 strip card (FCG 3); the aforementioned Ruth Goudey; 1933 Goudey Lou Gehrig #92 (PSA 3.5); 1938 Goudey Heads-Up Joe DiMaggio #274 (FCG 3); 1939 Play Ball Ted Williams #92 (BVG 4.5); 1948 Leaf Robinson #79 (PSA 3.5); and 1948 Bowman Yogi Berra #6 (PSA 4).
“Everything there is just so vintage. You’re just kind of going across there and it’s like, geez, you’ve got Honus Wagner, you’ve got Cobb, you’ve got the Ruths,” Jensen said.
Of course, his collection wouldn’t be complete without a 1952 Topps Mantle. He bought it raw and got it slabbed a 3 by FCG. Jensen’s also has a 1951 Bowman Mantle rookie. It’s graded PSA 2.5, but Jensen said his example is better than some 5s he’s seen.
Five of Jensen’s baseball cards are signed versions of iconic images in the hobby. Jensen has a 1948 Bowman Stan Musial (PSA Authentic autograph); 1968 Topps Nolan Ryan autograph (PSA 10 autograph); 1982 Topps Traded Cal Ripken Jr. (PSA 10 autograph); 1993 SP Derek Jeter (BAS Authentic autograph); and 2018 National Treasures Shohei Ohtani Rookie Materials Signatures Holo Silver /10 (BGS 9).
Some of his top basketball cards include:1957 Topps Bill Russell (PSA 5); 1961-62 Fleer Wilt Chamberlain (BVG 6.5); and 1986-87 Fleer Michael Jordan (BGS 9).
When Jensen was a kid, he had access to a seemingly unlimited number of 1986-87 Fleer basketball cards. He remembers pulling at least 20 Jordan base cards from packs. About 35 years later, he submitted one for grading. That’s the card he keeps in his top 50.
For football, Jensen owns a 2000 Playoff Contenders Brady card (BAS 8.5, 10 autograph). Jensen used to have multiple Bowman Chrome Brady rookies, but he sold them off to buy the Contenders card.
“One of the things that I regret was that when I was getting all the Bowman Chrome ones, I didn’t get a refractor,” Jensen said. “That’s one card that I would kind of like to add at some point in time.”
A big Denver Broncos fan, Jensen needed to have a Bo Nix card in his collection. He nabbed the ultimate one, the 2024 National Treasures NFL Shield #1/1, which is ungraded. This is the most modern card in The 308 Collection.
The card in Jensen’s collection with the most unique provenance is a 1958 Pelé Bremer Fachring Kaffee Fussballbilder-Weltmeisterschaft (PSA 1.5, 10 auto). Prior to Pelé’s death in 2022, he had PSA come to house and he signed cards from his personal collection and had them slabbed. Jensen’s German card comes from that autograph session and bears “The Pelé Collection” on the slab.
Growing up and watching wrestling, Jensen had to get his hands on two of his favorite showmen: Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair. Jensen has autographed cards of both guys—authenticated by BGS—from the 1982 PWE Wrestling All-Stars–Series A product.
LATEST ADDITIONS
Jensen doesn’t tweak his top 50 too often, but he recently added two cards.
Like a lot of Americans, he got wrapped up in the amazing run by the U.S. men’s hockey team in the 2026 Olympics. Right after the squad beat Canada in the gold-medal game, Jensen wanted a piece to commemorate the monumental victory.
He jumped on eBay in search of a card of Jack Hughes, who scored the game-winning goal in overtime. Jensen discovered a Hughes 1-of-1 card featuring an American flag patch.
“I’m like, ‘Oh my God. This is just so iconic,’” Jensen said. “The seller is from Canada, but he had adjusted the price before I got to it, so I didn’t steal it by any stretch of the imagination.”
Getting his hands on the 2019-20 Upper Deck Black Rookie Pride of a Nation card was the ultimate impulse buy. The Hughes card entered the top 50 and pushed out a 1964 Topps Pete Rose in which Rose autographed it “Charlie Hustle.”
In mid-April, Jensen did a bit of an upgrade. He had a 1980 Topps card of Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Julius Erving in a BGS 8.5, but he found a version signed by all three basketball legends in different color ink. He had to buy the card slabbed with a PSA 10 autograph.
“You can look and find all different kinds of cards that you want to buy, it’s a matter of which one do you want to get rid of,” Jensen said. “I kind of always know the two or three cards that I’d consider to take out.”
Jensen doesn’t have a want list per se, but he does have cards in the back of his mind that he wouldn’t mind picking up.
It’s been an enjoyable project, and something he can continue for as long as he’d like.
“It’s been incredibly fun. I would tell you it’s very humbling,” Jensen said. “I’m really proud of what I’ve been able to create. But I think back to my childhood and a lot of the stuff that I do own today is stuff that I would have never dreamed that I would have an opportunity to own when I was a kid. … That’s the exciting part for me, knowing I can pull it open and see that I’ve got a ’52 Mantle and I’ve got some of the stuff that I would have never thought of.
“It’s neat from that standpoint but I also love sharing it. To me, I don’t just want to keep it all locked up where nobody ever looks at it. It’s cool to be able to share the stories and let people see a lot of the cards.”
