2011 SAGE 5 Star Football Box Break Recap and Review

Have you picked up a box of 2011 SAGE 5 Star Football yet?  If your answer is no, what are you thinking?  At an unbelievable 24 cards, all hits. with at least 40 autographs, SAGE 5 Star is, by far, the most voluminous Rookie Auto prospector box out there.

SAGE does not give odds of pulling hits, since every card is a hit, but they have released a detailed checklist, which I’ve used to approximate odds for you.  Please keep in mind these are not official odds and I might be slightly off, but I don’t think by much.  Figuring a production run of about 800 boxes, the odds of pulling this year’s holy grail, a Cam Newton Auto, are about 1 in 37 cards, about 1 in every 1.5 boxes.  Is there another product out there you can think of that provides those kinds of odds?

2011 SAGE 5 Star Football, incredibly, fits into our premium cards category.  You would think this would be an Ultra Premium, product, but at about $10 a card it is still within reach of most collectors. Each box contains 8 packs with 3 cards each. Each 8 pack box contains 40 autographs on 24 cards with one triple autograph card on average.

Here are the cards we pulled from the box.

Single Signatures

 First Round Picks - Mark Ingram, Aldon Smith

 First Round Pick - Julio Jones, Second Round Pick - Torrey Smith

Second Round Picks - Rahim Moore and Da'Quan Bowers

Sixth Round Pick - Allen Bradford, Undrafted - Currently on IR with the Houston Texans Lestar Jean

Double Signatures

 Mark Ingram & Casey Matthews, Aldon Smith & Ryan Kerrigan

 Charles Clay & Daniel Thomas, Chimdi Chekwa & Denarius Moore

 Doubles of Kyle Rudolph and Charlie Gantt

 Jordan Todman & Delone Carter, Luke Stocker & Charlie Gantt

 Mark Herzlich & Anthony Castonzo, Cecil Shorts III & Jeremy Kerley

 Shane Vereen & Stevan Ridley, Nate Solder & Shane Vereen

 Rob Housler & Sam Acho, T.J. Yates & Jeff Maehl

Jeff Maehl & Casey Matthews

Triple Signatures

Auburn Teammates - Cam Newton, Nick Fairley & Mario Fannin

Overall Look

For an unlicensed product (no team logos) these look good.  SAGE has done a nice job of getting a lot of the players in uniforms without any visible logos.  Clearly some care has been taken with the autos.  It was a rare occurrence that signatures went off the stickers used, which probably meant there was careful supervision of the signing processes.  Write-ups and stats on the backs of the cards work well.

Quality and Variety of Players

The most desirable Rookies are all here, 70 names of the recent Rookie class.  Only 14 of those players were undrafted, but eventually picked up by teams.  We pulled one player who is no longer with a team. All other players who are not on team rosters, only a handful, are either on a practice squad or on IR.

Do the Hits satisfy?

Even if you are not happy with an autograph card, there are 23 others.  We pulled 8 First Round picks, 6 second round picks, 2 third round picks, and 6 fourth round picks.  In total, we hit autos for 33 different players, almost half of those available in this product. Not too shabby.

Will you keep coming back for more?

This one box probably contained more autograph hits than all the other boxes of football cards we’ve opened this year combined.  The only thing that should dictate how much SAGE 5 Star you buy is your budget.  Get your hands on as many boxes as you can.

Rating

5 out of 5

2011 SAGE 5 Star Football is an amazing offering for rookie prospectors.