If you're a football card collector who likes high end cards, then by now you are aware of Panini's debacle with 2014 National Treasures Football. And in case you aren't aware of it then I'll summarize the situation right now: a whole week after 2014 National Treasures Football was released there were still no Odell Beckham Jr. and Teddy Bridgewater RPAs, or booklets.
This incident spawned
a huge discussion on the Blowout Cards forums.
Everyone agreed that it was extremely unusual that no Odell Beckham Jr. and Teddy Bridgewater RPA or booklet redemptions had been hit even after a whole week since the product's launch. Between all the cases being broken all across the nation in hobby shops, and in online breaks, by now at last a couple of each should have surfaced.
The conspiracy theorists believed that Panini purposely withheld those cards -- arguably the two biggest cards of the two biggest players in the 2014 rookie class -- to drive up sales not only in successive shipment waves of the National Treasures product, but also in other Panini products like Spectrum Football.
Other people who were less willing to immediately jump to the conclusion that Panini was up to no good believed that this could be an honest collation mistake or error.
I gave my two cents in the thread and noted how the chances of NOT seeing an Odell Beckham Jr. or Teddy Bridgewater RPA or booklet redemption was practically impossible if we assumed that 500 cases of National Treasures had been broken within a week.
Below is my full comment.
There are 150,552 cards in the set. There are supposed to be 8 cards
per box but most boxes have 10 or 11. Let's just choose 11. (The
higher number actually works in Panini's favor.) Divide 150,552 by 11,
and that means there are 13,686 boxes in the entire production.
There are 312 total OBJ and Teddy RPAs
Let's assume that none of the OBJs and Teddy RPAs will ever appear in
the same box. Divide 312 OBJ/Teddy boxes by 13,686 total boxes, and
that means there is a .0228 chance of hitting one of those cards in the
very first box of NT opened.
Alternatively, there is a .9772 chance of NOT hitting one of those cards
in the very first box of NT opened. Expressed as a fraction that's
(13,686-312)/13,686 or 13,374/13,686.
As each box of NT is opened and a OBJ/Teddy isn't hit, then the
probability of hitting one of those cards goes up ever so slightly.
Similarly, as each box is opened and one isn't hit, the probability of
not hitting one in the next box goes down. Number-wise, it looks
something like this...
(13,374/13,686) x (13,373/13,685) x (13,372/13,684) x etc. as each box is opened.
Now, let's assume that 500 cases have been broken by now which is
probably a reasonable assumption. There are 4 boxes per case. So
that's 2000 boxes opened. (2000 boxes would also represent around 15%
of the production run) We need to do that above equation 2000 times.
What's the probability of opening 2000 boxes of NT and not hitting a OBJ or Teddy RPA?
Expressed as an equation it looks something like this:
(13,374! / 11,374!) / (13,686! / 11,686!)
None of the scientific calculators I could find could hand this
calculation because the numbers are too big, but it should be pretty
close to zero and I think we can show that another way.
When figuring out a probability and a past event influences a future
event, it's called conditional probability. Our situation is
conditional since once a card is pulled, it is removed from the
available pool and not replaced.
But because our numbers are so big, we can actually treat this as the
opposite of conditional probability (unconditional probability?).
As we found out earlier, the chances of a OBJ/Teddy RPA NOT being pulled
from the very first box of NT is (13,686-312)/13,686 or .9772. Even if
2000 boxes were opened and a OBJ/Teddy RPA still hadn't been hit, then
the probability of NOT hitting one in the next box opened would be
(13,686-2,000-312)/(13,686-2,000) or (11,374/11,686) or .9733.
.9733 isn't too different from .9772, so we can treat this entire
calculation as unconditional probability (probability with replacement).
So, if the probability of NOT hitting a OBJ/Teddy RPA is .9772, and 2000
boxes have been opened, then the probability of that happening is...
.9772^2000 which is 9.27^-21 or basically zero.
Even if we used a lower probability like .9733 and 2000 boxes were
opened, then the probability is still 3.11^-24 or basically zero.
For comparison, even with a probability of .9733 and only 200 boxes
being opened (50 cases), the probability of still not hitting a
OBJ/Teddy RPA would be .00446 or about 0.446% chance of happening.
In short, if we assume that 500 cases of National Treasures have been broken (2000 boxes) within a week of the product's release, then the chances of NOT hitting an Odell Beckham Jr. or Teddy Bridewater RPA (just RPAs and not booklet redemptions) is practically zero, or about 0.00000000000000000002116%.
What does this all mean?
It means that
without a doubt the Odell Beckham Jr. and Teddy Bridgewater RPAs were NOT randomly distributed throughout the 2014 National Treasures production run. This is a fact. The above math, if accurate, and I think it is, proves that it is about as close to statistically impossible for this to happen by random chance.
If Odell Beckham Jr. and Teddy Bridgewater RPAs were randomly distributed throughout the 2014 National Treasures production run, then statistically, collectors should have seen a handful of them pop up already whether it be on eBay or online box breaks. Clearly, something went wrong when National Treasures was packed out.
Now, whether this was an intentional act by Panini or a mere innocent collation error we don't know. Panini haters are quick to assume it was an intentional act by Panini, but I could see this being a simple innocent collation error too. Don't get me wrong, I am not completely dismissing the idea that Panini did something intentional, but I think without any evidence proving their guilt that the most we can say happened is that there was a horrible collation error.
My guess is that Panini was still waiting on those cards to come back signed, but in the mean time they started the packout process believing that they'd get the cards back in time before the packout process was complete. But while the packout process was still in progress, they realized they wouldn't get those cards back in time before packout was complete so they needed to insert redemptions for those cards. They began inserting redemptions into the production run at that point in time, but by that time the first wave of cases had already been packed, sealed, and prepared for shipping to distributors -- all without any Odell Beckham Jr. and Teddy Bridgewater RPAs in them. Panini then completes the packout process. From their point of view, the RPA redemption cards have all been packed out and they've done nothing wrong. But in reality, because the RPA redemption cards were inserted into the production run mid-packout, the boxes which had already been packed out and sealed had none of those cards. Meaning collectors who bought those initial cases had ZERO chance of hitting an Odell Beckham Jr. or Teddy Bridgewater RPA.
Is there a moral to this story? If any, I suppose it's that pre-ordering a product is a gamble. Who knows what production issues it might contain. Topps has had its share of problems too. Most recently its 2015 Topps Tribute Baseball release was
recalled due to a large portion of the autograph cards being smeared. Also, Topps' 2013 Five Star Football release was plagued by many of the cards suffering from ink stains on their edges from the cardboard boxes that they came in. (See my blog post on that issue
here.) Had a consumer waited until after the release of the product then they could have avoided these problems.
Topps seems to have a little more trust in the collecting community than Panini. It may not be a lot, but it's there. Panini on the other hand has proven themselves very adept at losing consumer confidence by using questionable patches in their products, putting the wrong patches on cards for players, putting questionable player autograph stickers in their products, and now having major collation issues with their products. Since Panini will now have the exclusive NFL license for football cards starting this year, I want to like them. I'm trying to like them. But they sure are making it difficult. Clearly they have a lot of room for improvement, and it would be nice to see them make some improvements.
