Topps NFL cards Kickoff and Topps Football

Last weekend on a card buying spree I picked up a few new football products: the 2009 Topps Football series and Topps Kickoff 2009. I've been too busy to post up my pulls so I thought I'd lump the two products together and compare them the best I can.


I picked up a cereal box of the flagship football series from Topps and a blaster of Kickoff. They were both the same price at about 9.99 and the cereal box contained 55 cards with 4 exclusive chicle cards while the blaster contained 66 cards from 10 packs plus the one bonus pack.

First off is the Topps Football cereal box.

It has been discussed before by me and by a lot of bloggers much better than what I could do, so I won't go into too much detail with the base set.


The big draw for me is too see what the advertised "4 Exclusive Chicles" were all about.

The cereal box actually has 5 included in the package.

As far as the exclusives go I pulled Heyward-Bey, my personal favorite: Wes Welker, Jon Beason and Stephen Jackson.


The regular Chicle is of John Carlson. I like the Chicles okay, some of the backgrounds are cool, I especially like the pennant background on the Jackson card. The actual National Chicle series released by Topps is much better looking than the inserts included in the football set probably because it is a dedicated set of cards with the Chicle artwork instead of a hastily done insert set. The reason why I say it's hastily done, is that they look like photos that have been photoshoped to look Chickled out, whereas the National Chicle is actually painted by artists from photos, not just remade photos.


The Kickoff product looks basically like the flagship set, with a "Kickoff 2009" logo above the team and player nameplate. They are also numbered differently on the back.


According to the checklist the base set is only 165 cards with 30 Kickoff Komics and 25 Stars of the Game.


I only pulled the second of two checklist cards, but at least it lets me know the total number of cards to look for. From the looks of things almost a third of the cards are rookie cards. Having not seen the first checklist and being too lazy to look for one online, I'm assuming that it's mostly a rookie and stars sort of thing.


They advertise 2 rookie cards in every pack. Here are two cards that I love. I like the empty stadium posed shots.



I don't like the training camp warm up stuff much though.



Even though the warm up action shots aren't too bad.


I realize that sometimes with rookies it's necessary, but I wish they would do more of the posed photo instead of a player stretching on the ground. ( I realize that this one is not from the Kickoff set, but I wanted to show one of my favorite former OU players; Juaquin Iglesias.



The Kickoff parallel is numbered to 2009. I don't have a regular card to compare them with, I'm assuming it's the same card with a foil "Kickoff September 10, 2009" stamp on the front with foil serial numbering to 2009 on the back. The Eli card is cool because of that big out of focus "Giants" lettering behind him.

The best thing for me in the Kickoff product is the Comics.





I pulled three of these, but didn't realize it at first because they have a tendency to stick to the back of the card on top of it.

They're printed on a transparent paper, sort of like wax paper. Very thin, but colorful. If you look close enough you can see my scanner mechanism in the background of the Favre card.

Stars of the Game are seeded 1:4 and I pulled two of them.

A Matt Forte.



I was lucky to pull a Rodgers Stars of the Game.

This Romo card is my favorite of the bunch. I can't make out the faded logos on either side of the tunnel. I'd like to find out what they are from.

Kickoff seems like it would be a fun and cheep set to try and finish. The Komics are cool and the base set is not as vast as the flagship product, so I'll probably try to pick up some more of these and try to at least pull a A.D. (Adrian Peterson) or some more Packers.

Thanks for sticking around to the end! I hope it was worth the time to wade through my post.

2009 Topps Football

In honor of the Hall of Fame ceremony this weekend I thought I would do a post on a few hobby packs of 2009 Topps football. I went in the hobby store to find a variety of stuff to buy and came out with this.

Hopefully it won't be as boring as the ceremony.

When I first opened the pack I was immediately taken by the shininess of the cards. I thought the photography was really vibrant and colorful.


This shot of Scheffler is the first one i pulled and is a perfect example of why I like this set. It's a nice action shot. You can see his eyes and see the ball in the frame. It might not be an actual game action shot, but it works for me.


The next card I pulled is a good example of what I hate about these types of mainstream card sets.

You might say, "well it's got action and the ball, the eyes everything that you just said was perfect."

If you look closer you can see that it's a pre-game warm up shot. He's not wearing full pads and there's some dudes wearing warmups and big white shoes in the background. It's just one of those random player shots that doesn't really do anything for me.


This is a really nice example of a game-action shot of Ricky Williams. I hope to see a lot more of this type of shot in this years set instead of some sort of football version of the Humberto Quintero card.



I really like the football design on the bottom of the card that contains the team and player name.

The silver foil really looks nice in contrast to the team colored border surrounding the card and football graphic at the bottom.

The football texture is continued on the back of the card.

In all the cards I pulled, I noticed that they are all lighter at the end of the card containing the card numbers. That should make it a lot easier for people to read.


I know a lot of bloggers had trouble seeing the numbers on this years series one and two baseball. You can include me in that group, I'm glad they did this, it'll make collating these cards so much easier. I actually think my eyesight has gotten worse in the last month or so because of trying to collate all those Topps cards.
I picked one of the darker cards that was in the pack to give a good indication of how even a dark card looks relatively light on the area with the number.


As you can see the basic layout is rectangular on the back. A pretty simple design with stats and a little bio of the player on the bottom. That's pretty cool.


Their are a variety of inserts this year. In my two packs I only pulled two different inserts.

The first one was one of the 50 year AFL Flashback insert. I think that's what it is anyway. There are 25 cards in this insert.


I pulled one of the Oiler's Bill Groman. I'm sorry to say that I don't know this guy.

I like this card. It's a little washed out looking, but it still looks good to me. That could be on the designers or it could just be because of the original photo. I don't know, but it looks a lot better than some sort of "Heritage" design where the colors are cross-processed and the designers add a little blur to make it look more "vintage." I don't really like overdone fake vintage.


On the back they have a nice description of the player.


Another insert I pulled was the cheerleader thing.

It's nice I guess. I don't mind it too much. The design is a little more "girlie."
Their is a team colored swirl on the left side and the team logo on the bottom right.

...and a little bio on the back of the cheerleader containing a "head shot" taken from the photo on the front.
I'd be a little miffed if I pulled too many of these though. I can't imagine really wanting to collect the entire insert set of these cards.

They've also included a Toppstown card. I pulled a gold and a silver one, each in a different pack.

basically the same as the ones from 2009 Topps series one and two.


It looks like a good companion to the '09 baseball that I'm trying to put together.
The series one and two is at like 650 cards and this one is 440 base cards. Doesn't seem too hard to finish. I'm not sure if this is just a series one set and another will follow. If so, it might be a lot harder to finish. I didn't see anything on the packaging to indicate that it's split up into two different series.

I really like the photos in the baseball series so I hope that 2009 Football doesn't disappoint. I have a feeling it will be hard to not try and build the entire set.
I'll probably start out by finding some former OU players and eventually trying to complete the entire set once I see how good the photography is. (hopefully)

In case anybody's still reading, here is my breakdown of the cards I pulled in order.

202 Tony Scheller
242 Kevin Walter
305 Reggie Wayne
322 James Harrison
396 Shonn Greene
402 Shawn Nelson
35 Braylon Edwards
64 Jason Avant
FB8 Bill Groman
TTT18 Drew Brees(silver)

pack two
91 Jason Peters
41 Josh Cribbs
285 Michael Turner
295 Jason Witten
399 Marcus Freeman
410 Mike Thomas
102 LaRon Landry
38 Ricky Williams
C8 Amanda
TTT24 (gold)

Thanks for reading, if anybody has any comments or critiques, please let me know.