Are Purdy Buyers Panicking?
In what I'm sure is a complete shock to you all, reactions to the Super Bowl outcome have been all over the board. Let's look at what Jalen Hurts to get a sense of what to expect with Purdy cards.
Thanks in no small part to some serious special teams blunders by the 49ers, the Chiefs pulled out another Super Bowl victory last night.
Brock Purdy had a mostly solid, unspectacular outing which of course lead to all sorts of very totally rational and definitely not over-the-top reactions on social media.
I saw a few people asking how “Purdy buyers” were feeling now and comparing his cards to what happened with the value of Jalen Hurts cards, and I thought that was actually a very interesting comparison that paints a very different picture depending on when you stop paying attention.
Building up to the 2023 Super Bowl
Last year, Hurts came through in a big way, having a huge year and leading the Eagles to the Super Bowl. As is typical, his card values ascended as a result. Here’s a look at his Silver Prizm rookie card (always a really good gauge of overall card value) from the middle of December (December 18th) right up to the Super Bowl (the game was February 12th, so we’ll stop at the 11th).1
The average sale price of Hurt’s Prizm Silver went up about 22% during that span as people started getting excited for the playoffs, and then the Super Bowl. Not a bad little jump and if you had Hurt’s cards, you were feeling pretty darn good.
Super Bowl Fallout
Hurts actually had a really solid game in the Super Bowl, but it wasn’t enough and Mahomes and the Chiefs got the win. The falloff for Hurts cards was steep and fast.
Up 22% just through that late season period, the value of his silver prizm dropped literally overnight, and continued to drop through April, bottoming out at 50% the average sales price as it had been the day before the Super Bowl.
Not a great time to be someone holding Hurts cards for sure. I suspect this is what the “look at what happened to the value of Hurts cards” folks were alluding to, because a 50% drop is definitely significant.
But if we stop here, we aren’t telling the full story.
Building up to the next season
Football has a quiet period there, after the Super Bowl and as all the focus gets pushed to baseball. But as the minicamp and preseason starts to appear on the horizon, and fantasy football draft season starts to heat up, so does football prices.
The Eagles played their first preseason game on August 12th. Between the end of April and that first preseason game, the Hurts Prizm Silver card shot back up, just as dramatically as it fell off.
That’s a 65% jump by the time preseason started, bringing the card even higher than it was at its pre-Super Bowl peak! Offseason hype is a real thing in any sport, with it being most dramatic in baseball and football, and this is a very familiar pattern.
The hype dies down
After the wild frenzy of mini-camps and preseason build-up, the card started to drop back down. Again, this is pretty typical. Barring an early season power-house performance, cards tend to cool off a bit mostly because off-season hype is so high that real-life rarely holds up.
Hurts actually had a good season, but it wasn’t a big enough step up from the year before to bring consistent hype, and as a result, we see the card drop by 41% over the next several months.
So what about Purdy?
Ok. So let’s return to our “how our Purdy buyers” feeling right now?
Well, if we’re using Hurts as our comparison point, the answer is probably not too bad if they’re looking out far enough. There will be offseason hype around Purdy as mini-camps and preseason roll around. He’s a young quarterback with a great story (haters gonna hate, but “last pick in the draft to starting Super Bowl quarterback” is some Disney-level story telling), on a team with a big fan base, surrounded by a lot of talent.
So it seems like it would be safe to expect some drop-off in value now in the next few months, followed by a climb as the new season rolls around.
It will also be interesting to see how significant the drop-off is, because Purdy’s card values have been on a different trajectory than Hurts. Purdy has few rookie cards because of his draft position, and that combined with his performances as he took over the starting job have resulted in a pretty steady and consistent climb in his value since then, with a few blips up and down along the way.
We actually don’t see the same dramatic “playoff hype” rise for him as we do for Hurts. In fact, his card was slightly down over a similar period this year leading up to the Super Bowl.
If I had to guess, I would expect a similar post-Super Bowl drop and preseason spike, but maybe just not as dramatic as we saw for Hurts.