When will Prizm football prices stabilize?
Someone asked when to expect the price of Prizm football cards to stabilize a bit, so I did a quick at last year's release to compare.
I’ve written before about the post-release hype cycle—how prices start out super high when a release first hits the market, then slowly decreases as the market saturates until it finally stabilizes a bit.
Someone asked when they could expect Prizm football to stabilize, which is a great question. Prizm is, whether deserved or not, the premier product release for both football and basketball, and the Prizm silver card’s in particular are a card that has the ideal combination of liquidity (lot of people buying and selling) and value.
The offseason is often touted as a good time to buy, as the hype of the season wears off and attention turns elsewhere for a bit, so it’s natural to want to “time” things so you’re getting the lowest price before things swing back up.
The usual disclaimer of “timing the market is hard” applies here, but we can still get a relative idea.
Looking back at 2022
The 2022 Prizm football release date was March 15th. I went into Market Movers1 and plotted the raw Prizm silver cards of four quarterbacks who all received a good amount of offseason hype last year—Brock Purdy, Kenny Pickett, Sam Howell and Desmond Ridder—from that release date through to the start of the preseason (August 10th).
A few things jump out to me.
Prizm stabilized about one month after release. All four cards started hot and the value dropped off for each, hitting a floor somewhere in April.
Just one month after release, Purdy’s card was down 61%, Pickett was down 78%, Ridder was down 52% and Howell was down 79%. (As an aside, look at how much higher Pickett started than Purdy. Seems silly in retrospect.)
From April on, the cards all started to climb back up as pre-season approached. Again, preseason kicked off in mid-August—August 10th to be exact. By that point, all four cards had climbed back up in value a bit.
If we start at that April 16th spot and compare to August 10th, Purdy was up 142%, Pickett up 34%, Ridder up 14% and Howell up 34%.
The pre-season hype cycle is very reliable, and something I touched on recently.
Despite the pre-season hype, all four cards were still below their launch date value. There was significant off-season hype around all four players, but by the start of preseason (where hype is at it’s highest), all four cards were still much cheaper than they were on the day of their release.
Timing is everything
I mentioned at the start of the post that trying to time the high’s and low’s is hard, nearly impossible even to get right. If you look at each card individually, you’ll see the each bottomed out at slightly different points, and peaked at different points as well.
Ridder’s card actually peaked in June, as his mini-camp and preseason performances didn’t command as much attention.
Howell and Pickett both had strong preseason performances that fueled their hype, so their cards actually peaked right before the regular season kicked off.
And Purdy started off hot so his cards didn’t start to decrease in any meaningful way until late October (before rising again pretty quickly).
What does it mean for this year?
Ok, so far we can say:
Cards will be really expensive when they release
They will drop down pretty quickly before starting to slowly rise again as the hype for next year picks up
Predicting a preseason/mini-camp jump in value is fairly reliable (aka: buying in August is expensive)
So where are we with this year’s Prizm?
We first started seeing sales of Prizm singles in late December/early January. So right now, we’re about 2 months after the initial release.
Sure enough, if we look at four quarterback’s with a decent amount of hype (Stroud, Richardson, Young and Levis), all four are down since the release date.
Interestingly, Richardson’s cards don’t seem to have budged hardly at all from the release. He’s kind of an interesting example because he looked fantastic at the start of the season before getting injured (seems almost funny in retrospect, but at the time there were analysts writing about how he was looking like the best QB in the class at the time). So his hype wasn’t as high as someone like Stroud’s, but his performance was at a level that ensured a much higher floor than Young and Levis.
We may have actually already seen the floor on Prizm prices. If you look from January 21st (a month after release) until today, all of those cards (other than Stroud who had so much hype there was no place to go but down) are actually up in the last month.
It will be interesting to see what happens from here on out. If we really have already seen the floor, how high will these each end up by that preseason peek-hype moment? And who from this group is going to live up to those expectations and potentially continue to climb? (I’ve got my bets!)