Drum or Uzit?

[JerryTotino]

I realize that population reports are not even close to being 100% accurate because cards are cracked out and either resubmitted to the same grading company hoping for a possible bump or submitted for crossover, but they can at least be used as a high level gauge of populations.

The PSA population reports indicate that approximately 33 UZIT and 60 Drums have been graded. Note: Thanks to Ron for pulling this data.

- 41 of the 60 PSA Drums are from the St. Louis find.

The SGC population reports indicate that approximately 81 UZIT and 62 Drums have been graded.

- 27 of the SGC Drums are from the 2007 Hunt auction.
- 33 of the SGC UZITS are from the 2006 REA auction

Thus, we have a graded total of 114 UZIT and 122 Drums.

At the surface these numbers pretty much indicate a wash, but if you look at the numbers in more detail they may provide some additional insights.

Out of 113,000 T206 graded by PSA, 64,000 are listed as 'unknown back'. Thus, there is no clear evidence of how many of these 64,000 'unknown backs' are either Drum or UZIT. If I had to guess I would say that maybe more UZIT's can be found than Drums in these 64,000 cards because graded Drums were encountered less frequently before the 2 large Drum finds took place and before PSA began to track backs. We know for a fact that the 64,000 'unknown cards' do not contain either of the Drum finds because PSA only recently graded the St Louis find and SGC graded the Hunt find.

Even if we assume that Drum and UZIT exist in approximately the same numbers I think there may be one key factor that denotes a major difference between Drums and Uzits.


- Out of the 62 SGC graded Drums 33 grade Authentic and 8 graded as 10's with only 4 grading vg-ex or
better.

- Out of 81 SGC graded UZIT's 14 grade vg-ex or better.

- Out of 60 PSA Drums only 4 grade higher than vg-ex.

- Out of 33 PSA UZIT's 11 grade higher than vg-ex.

- Total of 25 UZIT's grading higher than vg-ex and only 8 Drums higher than vg-ex.

Condition may be the key factor that separates these very tough backs.

PS - No one knows how many ungraded examples of these backs exist. As these surface it's hard to say what impact it may have on our future perception of these backs.

Jerry