When I first saw the preview for Topps Gridiron Legends, I was cautiously optimistic, mostly as a result of the previous offerings released earlier in the season. Topps has hit a relative home run with many of its products, with some, like Flagship Topps, Finest, and Inception being grand slams. After seeing some of the cards put up from Gridiron Legends, it looks like more of a Panini product than anything. In case you dont know, that is not a good thing.

There are some great parts to this set, which I very much enjoy, but not many. I really like the Legends auto jersey cards a ton. I think the design is awesome, simple and clean, which facilitates a very classy look. I love that the cards are focused on the player with a borderless look and even the hint of a game photo.  I wish the rookie jersey autos were very similarly designed, as it would be very cool to have a jersey auto that has a full shot, and a well placed swatch/sticker combo. For once, there is no trapping of the sticker with a border, instead separating with little graphics that look very nice, almost like they would on a plaque.

Gale Sayers Legends Auto Jersey

I also love the signed base rookie cards of the premiere rookies, as you are all familiar with my affinity for this type of cards. The full sized action shots are great against the photohop altered background, and when the sticker is added, it doesnt detract at all from a card that isnt afraid of white space. White space has seemed to be the enemy of manufacturers lately, especially some of the horrid examples from Panini lately, but many of the cards in this product dont shy away from it. For these two examples, its a great thing.

AJ Green Base Rookie Auto /50

The rookie auto jerseys arent bad, but they are oddly composed with the close up on the player instead of a zoomed out shot. Because there is a limit to space, it looks confined to an invisible border, and that looks a little awkward. As I mentioned above, Topps should have gone the direction of the legend auto jerseys, and I am actually disappointed in our being short changed in that respect. The patch autos are actually the 1/1s, which means that the top tier you can pull is a card that would be a box hit in any other product. That is a piece of junk. No idea why a patch is the top level, when it should be something more than that.

Torrey Smith Rookie Auto Patch 1/1

The main points of my absolute disapproval of this set is two fold. First, Topps took a page out of Panini’s ratty playbook, and started to parallel insert base cards into jersey cards and otherwise. I hate insert base cards at this point, as they are completely worthless in every set other than one like Allen & Ginter in baseball. In a hit based collector system like football, insert base cards separated from the regular are worthless. Then, to add jersey swatches and parallel them, is even worse. Like inception and otherwise, make all jersey cards start and end as jersey cards. Its why the inception ones looked great, regardless of their lack of value. If Topps was going to use a slew of jersey cards make them right. Dont make them like the dual player cards, where its obvious the two swatches were just slapped on top of the players because they dont really matter all that much.

Secondly, the combine pictures on the cards are getting freaking annoying. We are 9+ weeks into the season, counting the four preseason games, and we are past the point of tolerance here. Panini has already secured new photos for the rookies that played for Absolute next week, and Topps has been nicely airbrushing pro uniforms on some of the rookies since the beginning of the year. Enough is enough. It detracts from collectability, and looks absolutely stupid.

I also cannot stand the cannot stand these Canton Hopeful cards. First, assigning that type of title to a subset is something Panini would do, and it bothers me. The small fraction of people in that set that will make the HOF should be enough to scare the manufacturers away from using it on active players. In addition, the cards are horribly ugly, with the sticker embedded down into the bottom border like that. I dont get why they decided to do that, as it makes the whole card look beyond awkward.

Ray Lewis Canton Hopefuls Auto Jersey

In the end, its obvious that this set is being used as a filler, and its unfortunate that it is. They had some real opportunity to make great looking cards before Chrome, and came up short in just about every sense. I will definitely be avoiding these cards, and waiting the two weeks for chrome to hit.