Though 2008 football cards have been steadily hitting the market since spring, interest obviously cranks up when the start of the season approaches. The card companies all have their own ways to take advantage of that fact, and for Topps that means releasing one of its most affordable brands of the season.
Hobby boxes of 2008 Topps Kickoff Football contain 36 packs of 10 cards each in a 220-card base set. Expect to find two rookie cards in every pack.
Base Cards and Parallels
One card design is sure going a long way for Topps in 2008. That's because Topps Kickoff cards share an identical look with regular Topps Football, Topps Baseball and even the 2008-09 Topps Basketball set. The white borders and team-colored circles are the same, but these cards do bear the official NFL Kickoff logo to help tell them apart.
The base set is a slightly slimmed down version of the standard Topps set, with 195 veterans joined by 55 rookies. Since the rookie cards fall two per pack, a full box should yield all of them with no problem.
Appropriately for a low end set, parallels are limited to just one level. Kickoff Edition cards sport a multi-colored stamp with the date of the first game of the season - September 4 in this case - and are numbered to 1349.
It seems a bit strange for Topps to put together retail and hobby versions of a product that can be found for $1 a pack, but that's the case here. I opened a random hobby box and found 89 veterans and all 55 rookies, plus doubles of numerous first-year players. I also pulled 36 Kickoff Edition parallels, or one per pack.
Insert Cards
Befitting its low price point, Topps Kickoff has a couple of insert sets geared toward younger collectors. Tattoos of NFL team logos are inserted one per box, while 28 Puzzle Cards can be combined to make one big montage of NFL stars. I found an Eagles Tattoo and 12 Puzzle Cards in my sample box.
More standard inserts are seeded six per box in the form of Stars of the Game, a set that features 20 top veterans and five 2008 rookies. Sure enough, I pulled six from the About.com review box.
Fans of Toppstown, the company's online community for kids, will find more codes in Topps Kickoff, though not as many as in the base Topps brands. I found six code cards in all, four regular and two Gold.
Autographed Cards
Topps threw in just a few autographed cards into the mix as an added bonus. Kickoff Autographs can be found one per case and feature a lineup of 10 players, including top rookies Matt Ryan and Darren McFadden.
The Last Word
It would have been nice to see a different design for this brand, since the one it uses has been seen so often. It also has the potential to confuse beginners, who are the targets for a set like this, and a box only gets you about two-thirds of the way to finishing the set.
Still, it's nice to see products like Topps Kickoff on the market, since affordable cards are essential to preserve the hobby for the next generation of collectors. You could do a lot worse for a buck than two rookie cards, a few base cards and a kid-friendly insert.