Therein Lies The Rub

If you really want to drive yourself batty, try giving some of the 1960's Topps CFL inserts sets a go. I don't collect full sets, only an example of each set, issued by Topps through 1980 but I also seek out examples from their Canadian issues.  Some of these are branded as Topps products and others were issued under license by O-Pee-Chee.  I've covered the inexplicable eight year run of Topps CFL cards here and here in the past and today want to examine the first insert CFL set from 1961.

Topps mirrored their US Baseball inserts up North in 1961 with a small set of CFL Magic Rub-Offs. Recently a group of 16 were sold on eBay (the inspiration for this post) and they were in really nice shape.  I have used a mirror-image to show these as they would look applied to a notebook or some other surface:

The above lot represent a significant portion of the entire set.  However, the exact percentage is not necessarily a determinable number as this time.  The back of each Magic Rub-Off  has instructions in English and French and clearly indicates there should be 27 subjects:

Well as you may have guessed, there are not 27 known subjects but only 24. According to Andy Malycky's ridiculously comprehensive Collecting Canadian Football Volume 1, which is my go to guide for Topps and OPC CFL information (and from which the above back scan is pinched), only 24 have surfaced and the set may be complete at that number.  Topps often printed their insert sets in multiples of 12 so 24 is a reasonable landing spot.  

There were 9 teams in the CFL in 1961 (the Western Conference played 16 games and had five teams, while the Eastern Conference played 14 games with four teams) and all nine logos have been accounted for as the Calgary Stampeders, Ottawa Rough Riders, Toronto Argonauts and Winnipeg Blue Bombers were issued in addition to the teams shown in the scan above.  With four players produced that are also not shown above (Don Clark, Gene Filipski, Ron Stewart & Dave Thelen), all teams have three subjects except for Edmonton, Montreal and Toronto, which are each missing a player for a perfectly balanced issue of two players and one logo per franchise.

Malycky states that no unopened was packs are known to have survived from the 1961 CFL issue so the odds of missing subjects hiding in unopened product are astronomical.  Were the three missing players produced?  Probably not but the set is so hard to piece together anything is possible.