1981 Fleer NFL Football Stickers - Buffalo Bills and Chicago Bears

As I mentioned in the previous post about the 1981 Fleer Team Action NFL Football stickers, each team has 2 variations, and in some cases there appears to be a 3rd version.

Buffalo Bills:

The first team where we see what appears to be a 3rd variation is the Buffalo Bills:


The Bills have helmets with a white face mask, a blue face mask, and a black face mask. The buffalo on the helmet is dark blue on the helmet on the left, a lighter shade in the middle sticker, and black on the sticker on the right.

The same holds true for the logo stickers with the different shading of the buffalo and the team name. I'm guessing that the stickers on the right with the black facemask and buffalo are most likely due to printing issues as opposed to intentional variations. However, given the fact that I've come across black versions for both the helmet and logo lead me to believe that these were more than just a mistake that was limited to a small portion of the production run.

Chicago Bears:

The Bears have two distinct helmet sticker variations. The sticker on the left has a white facemask and a navy helmet while the helmet on the right is black with a grey facemask. The other difference is that the coloring of the word Bears is slightly more orange on the left and more red on the right.

Unfortunately my scanner doesn't do a good job of showing the color variations between the 2 logo stickers, but just as with the helmet stickers, one version has a more orange shade of the word Bears while the other version is more red. When looking at the 2 logo stickers in person, the difference is much more noticeable in the color than what the scan is showing.

The other very subtle difference has to do with the positioning of the logo. The sticker on the right has just a tiny bit more of the goal post showing.