Bull Tosi Auction

[TanksAndSpartans]

Thanks Jeff - definitely a mystery about Kostka having both a card and a premium. One thing about him is that he was a hot prospect when the set was released. From the University of Minnesota, he was coming off a 1934 season that saw them win the the National Championship. Had there been a draft, he'd be considered a "bust", but it could be argued that given the popularity of college football, there would have been above average interest in his card at the time of release......

When I first looked at Tosi's career, I scratched my head as to why he was included in the set, but hindsight is 20/20. He was actually a starter at that time, but would soon be beat out by future hall of famer Wayne Millner.

Looking at just the PSA pop report, I actually see 93 Luke Johnsos cards and 92 Tosi cards - Nagurski has the most graded, but the other high numbers don't vary that much at least in my opinion. 10 or 12 cards does seem like a low number, but maybe I'm underestimating it because in percentage terms, we're probably talking about some cards having a 10 or more percent higher population than others.

Throwing the hoarding theory out the window, could it be that at one time (I think this is true) the Tosi did lag in the population report significantly which actually brought Tosi cards "out of the woodwork" to get graded. But,... the perception remained that Tosi was rare keeping the price up. I watch the auctions pretty closely and I haven't been seeing Kostka sell at a premium - a recent PSA 4 on eBAY sold for about what I would expect had it been Ernie Smith or Isola or whoever. And actually same goes for Masterson (last card). I'm only seeing Tosi sell at a premium recently.

Fun stuff to talk about it - if there is a perception driven Tosi bubble (just a theory I'm throwing out), I don't see signs of it going away....

Finally, I think another theory is that Tosi is a condition rarity. I think that argument would go something like: because there aren't enough high grade Tosi cards to go around, the high grade collectors bid up the lower grade Tosi's just to finish the set. This seems plausible, I'm just not sure if it's true. The Tosi isn't the first or last card, we don't know what the sheets looked like.... does Tosi usually have bad centering?