For everyone who bemoans the rising price of football cards, Score is proof that affordable products still exist. Armed with the lowest price point in the Donruss stable, 2008 Score Football also has one of the largest base sets in the hobby. It also comes in a higher priced hobby version called Select, featuring cards on foil stock.
Boxes of 2008 Score Football come with 36 packs of seven cards each. Expect to find one rookie card and one insert card in every pack. Hobby boxes of Select Football hold 20 five-card packs and should yield three autographed Inscriptions cards on average.
Score Base Cards and Parallels
With 440 cards in the base set, Score Football can go a little further into the roster of every NFL team, always a good thing for a product in this niche. The design has splashes of team colors in the corners and at the top of the player photos, and the card backs are well done.
The 110 rookies are pictured in their pro uniforms for the first time in any 2008 Donruss product. The first batch of them are also organized in the order they were drafted - Matt Ryan is the first rookie card, Jake Long is second, and so on - which is a nice touch.
Glossy parallels found in every pack give the regular cards a bit more shine. There are also Scorecard parallels with a special stamp numbered to 649, as well as Red Zone, Gold Zone and End Zone levels that are easy to spot since the entire borders of the cards are a different color.
The Score base set begs to be completed, but it will take more than one box to pull it off. I opened a random box to review and found 176 of the 440 base cards, including Ryan, Darren McFadden, Jonathan Stewart and Brian Brohm among 35 rookie cards. Also in the box were 36 Glossy and two Scorecard parallels, a Gold Zone Brandon Marshall numbered to 400 and a Red Zone Tony Gonzalez numbered to 100.
Score Insert Cards
Insert cards add a bit of extra fun to each pack, especially two sets aimed toward younger collectors. Donruss Decals Stickers are cards that have, well, stickers that can be peeled off, while Donruss Decals Tattoos are actual temporary tattoos of NFL team logos.
Those looking for more traditional favorites will find a lineup of returning inserts, each highlighting a group of players with different levels of NFL experience. Hot Rookies is pretty self-explanatory and utilizes a fire motif, while Young Stars, Future Franchise and The Franchise go right up the ladder from top second-year performers to the guys who are all "The Man" on their respective teams. Hot Rookies has parallel levels similar to the base cards and all of the inserts can be found in Glossy versions.
Taken altogether, inserts fell about one per pack in my review box. My total haul consisted of five each from Hot Rookies, Young Stars, Future Franchise and The Franchise, plus six Stickers and nine Tattoos.
Score Autographed Cards
Inscriptions has been providing Score Football with a small autograph component for quite some time, and it's back in 2008 as a partial parallel to the base set. Both veterans and rookies can be found on cards that simply add an autographed sticker to the base card design.
No Inscriptions cards emerged from the About.com sample box.
Select Base Cards and Parallels
Select base cards can best be summed up in one word: foil. Take the same design, substitute shiny silver foil for all the white cardboard and you've got it.
Players have the same card numbers in Select and Score. The big difference with the rookies is that they are numbered to 999, which by current standards is a large number and shouldn't help them carry too much additional value. Parallels are the same as for Score though with slightly different print runs and more generous seeding.
I also broke a box of Select for this review, finding 78 of the 330 veterans and six rookies. Parallels included four veterans - one each Scorecard, Gold Zone, Artist's Proof and Red Zone - and possibly the best card in the box, a Scorecard Felix Jones numbered to 100.