1994 Classic Pro Line Live

Here's a pack I'd never seen before when I ran into it at a card show recently. Many of us are familiar with the Classic brand name from their late '80s/early '90s run at some baseball card themed games or their draft pick sets in various sports. I had forgotten that they also at one point had a full license to produce NFL cards, but at this point, who didn't? We had a pack of the 1995 set posted here a few years back. I'm not entirely sure about the branding here. Why is there seemingly three brand names? What makes it "Live" exactly? And there are basketball preview cards in a football product? Very strange, indeed.

387 - Doug Nussmeier - First up, we have an Idaho quarterback in his Senior Bowl uniform. I'm curious if there are any Senior Bowl (or other college all-star type games) collectors out there that want all the cards in these one-off uniforms.

332 - Trev Alberts - I vastly prefer football cards in college uniforms to seeing players in their offseason workout attire. There's just something odd about seeing these guys out of pads on cards.

319 - Natrone Means - Here we have a full fledged NFL player and also, perhaps not coincidentally, the first player I've heard of in this pack. Means was a huge back, at least by mid-'90s standards, though he wasn't particularly tall.

378 - Lamar Smith - These cards have a very Fleer look to them, so much so that I felt like I needed to check the copyright information to see if Fleer had taken over the brand at some point. (An internet rabbit hole tells me that Classic was ultimately absorbed by the ill fated Score Board (not Score!) brand in 1995 before shuttering a couple of years later.)

361 - Chuck Levy - These cards seem great for college team collectors like myself.

368 - Thomas Randolph - Yet another college player aka Classic Pro Line Rookie.

353 - Henry Ford - Not the automobile legend, apparently.

339 - Aaron Glenn

110 - Johnny Mitchell - We finally have another guy in a pro uniform. Note that the logo changes from Classic Pro Line Rookie to Classic Pro Line Live.

69 - Anthony Smith - I give '90s football cards a lot of credit for actually including players who aren't skill position players and aren't rookies, because it seems to be pretty rare these days.

19 - Carl Pickens - With a name like that, I was always disappointed that Carl Pickens wasn't a defensive back instead of a receiver.

123 - Greg Lloyd - Well, this pack is certainly backloaded with veterans.

143 - Nate Odomes

55 - Bruce Matthews - He of the famous football family.

401 - Sterling Sharpe - Again, I swear this isn't a Fleer set. Instead of a "Pro Visions" card, we have this illustration thing that purports to be one of five different ones included in the set. Apparently if you collected all five, it fits together as one large illustration. I wasn't able to find an image online of all of these together.

PB8 - Jerry Rice Spotlight - This one per pack "bonus card", commonly known as an insert today, featured Rice on an almost-but-not-quite-dufex design.