DUKE UNIVERSITY BASKETBALL CARD ENCYCLOPEDIA
This website is an effort to document and catalog sports cards featuring Duke University Blue Devils players and coaches. The vast majority of these cards feature basketball and football players, although there are a limited number of releases for lacrosse, soccer, and golf. As of April, 2014, for example, we have cataloged 1964 different basketball cards and 162 different football cards featuring Duke players in their college jersey. We have tried to focus on card releases that clearly feature Duke jerseys. To this end, we have excluded pro jersey cards, high school cards, all-star game cards, Olympic cards and the like. We have, however, tried to include cards featuring jerseys which are clearly Duke jerseys, even if the manufacturer was not licensed by the NCAA and has touched up the player photos to remove school names and logos, or perhaps used photos on their card which are angled such that school names and logos are not visible. Such releases would include Collector's Edge, Bowman, and Leaf to name a few.
In pursuing this effort, we hope to serve as a resource to card collectors, to clarify specific information about the various cards, and to establish a forum for discussion and enhancement of the collecting hobby. One of our goals in putting together this website is to help the collector distinguish between releases from legitimate manufacturers and cards printed by some joker in his basement. We have no issue with anyone making or buying whatever sort of collectible they wish. However, in my experience, the majority (but not all) of the cards being made by unlicensed individuals are sold with vague and deceptive descriptions with the sole intent of misleading the collector.
Our intention when we started was to put together a complete compendium of Duke cards using photographs we took of our personal collection or photographs received from website member collections. However, multiple releases from Upper Deck starting in 2010 featuring cards of limited quantity and absurd prices have made that goal impractical. For this reason, not all photo albums will be complete, and we have tried to specify the completeness of each album in the album description contained herein.
We welcome your input, and are particularly interested in hearing from you if you have information that could strengthen the accuracy of information listed for each card. Most of the card photos on this website are from our personal collection. We'd like to acknowledge those of you who have graciously sent pictures of your own cards in order to build this website. Card descriptions lacking an accompanying photo indicate a card we have not been able to identify or locate. If you have such a card, and wish to submit a photo for use, that would be greatly appreciated and photo credit will be provided if desired. We have multiple copies of many of the cards listed on the website, and am always interested in trading with other collectors to mutually build our collections.