Wooooo! Football season is here! More or less, anyway. College is about to start up and the NFL will be kicking off soon enough. I got a fantasy draft in an hour and a half so that counts. I've gotten apathetic towards most football products but I still like the Topps flagship. I picked up a few packs out of habit, here's a rundown of what you will find.
First 2010 Topps Football card:
Early Doucet of the Cards. If I had opened the bottom half of the rack pack my first card would have been Matthew Stafford. Oh well. As you can see it's a direct copy of the baseball design. It looks good enough on football I suppose but I miss the days where Topps gave every set a unique design, no matter how horrible the design turned out to be. The only weird thing is the team logo in the bottom left corner. Like on the baseball set, the logo is large to the point of gaudy, but some of the logos incorporate the city or state name as well which looks odd. Shuffling through the cards I got it looks like if the team existed in its current city in the early '80s, then there's no city name, otherwise the city or state is included. Cincinnati Bengals blows my theory, but it works for most all other teams.
Here's the back of a card:
Same back as baseball, this one of Ricky Williams' up and down and back up again career was interesting enough to scan.
There's a few subsets at the end of the set including this All-Pro subset:
That is a weird looking uniform for the Jets, but I love the old-school Oilers helmet on the right. When I first saw the All-Pro logo I hoped it was on the base card like back in the old days, but nope, it was a subset.
The team cards look kickass.
Here's a rookie card:
The rookie logo is 3D tilted for coolness effect but not overly large. The packs all claim "A rookie in every pack!!!". I found 6 in the rack and anywhere from 1 to 4 rookies in the normal packs.You will have rookies. Rookie cards also seem to be the only place you'll find an Offensive Tackle in the set, though I could be wrong.
This is kinda neat, they used the 2010 Rookie Premeire poster shot as a checklist card. I would always pick one of these posters up from the local card shop and it would get trashed before I thought about hanging it up.
Ok time for the inserts. We'll transition into it with an insert that is a base card from another set.
Here's an Attax Towncard of Tom Brady. Take my code, please. After looking though some Panini Adrenalyn cards, I think I like their game better. These waste one card per pack.
Now for the Proper inserts, at least the ones I pulled.
Peak Performance cards are back and they are not as dreadfully boring as the ones in the baseball set.
This one is particularly interesting as it is a card of Jonathan Dwyer, celebrating his run in the ACC championship game for Georgia Tech, while wearing a Steelers uniform that was either photoshopped or taken at the Rookie Premiere day.
The Peak performance cards also come in relic flavor.
If these photos of the rookies were actually taken at Rookie Premiere day, then the swatch on the card came from the jersey in the photo which is kinda neat. I
would pull a Panther though....
Rookies have TONS of inserts all over this set. Here's another one:
This is a throwback to the 1952 Bowman set. The Chiefs didn't exist in 1952, and neither did cards with dudes wearing dreads. It's a pretty nice looking set as far as Retro goes, and there is also a greyback parallel of this set that is some ridiculous odds like 1:50 Wal-Marts apparently. I didn't get one so I don't know how it looks.
Topps double-Bowmaned their set with this retail only insert:
Here's a sneak peek of the 2010 Bowman set, these are 1:4? packs in Wally World and Target loosey packs. I was lucky enough to get one of this dude on the Broncos. Better than that other dude on the Broncos, I guess. You know, Pigskin Strasburg..
Veterans and rookies are all over the insert sets, this one is a little of both.
For the 75th anniversary of the NFL Draft Topps has this rather nice looking insert of some of the best draft picks. It's a welcome change from the retros and the holdover inserts from baseball, that's for sure. I got Dan the Man, which appears to be a theme in my packs.
Here's another boring-ass baseball holdover insert set. Blech.
Gridiron Lineage. A Patriot and a Cowboy on the same card. Whoop-de-damn-do. Like in Baseball, I shall collect any of these with an Atlanta player on it and shun the rest.
These aren't cards Yo Momma threw out...
They're just reprints. You probably threw out your old football cards yourself anyway. Here's another Dan Marino. I love reprints so I'll be keeping this one. The picture quality on the front is atrocious. It looks like they scanned it at about 96 DPI.
Here's the back:
Other than the card stock and copyright date, there's no indication that this is a reprint. Expect to see shady eBay sellers hawking these off as originals. Also expect idiots to buy them. Sigh.
There's also Transmogrifier cards out there too.
Yep, another Marino. Now let me show you all the Falcon cards I got!
EL ZIPPO. One rack, 5 hobby and three retail packs and not one %#@! Falcon. Typical.
