Outside of the absolute debacle last year with the Teddy Bridgewater and Odell Beckham cards, National Treasures was a pretty solid set. The design was nice, the cards were pretty high end, and for the most part, I liked the look of the product. Leave it to Panini to throw consistency to the wind and barf out a set like we are getting for 2015. Funny thing is, I think the design from 2015 College National Treausres would have been more than fine. Nope, we get the poopy looking crap.

Starting with the most important cards, the rookie patch autos, I absolutely HATE that they went with a vertical approach. Vertical approaches are fine when you have silhouetted players or small swatches. When you are looking to do cards with jumbo swatches, horizontal is almost ALWAYS the better approach.

I mean, this set has had good looking cards maybe once or twice since 2007. For some reason collectors really think that this is the premiere rookie patch auto available in Football, and it makes literally no sense. Exquisite was far more valuable when it was NFL licensed, and Treasures just took over by default it seemed like. Crazy unfortunate, considering how much better Five Star has looked on a consistent basis.

Regardless, Panini is going to be the only game in town starting next year, and the way this set was designed should showcase what that continues to be a disaster for people like you and me.

Moving on, the rest of the set really sucks as well, ESPECIALLY this horrific booklet with more acetate scrap signatures being forced down our throats. I swear I expect to see boxes of this shit opened up with acetate scraps, black paper scraps, and manupatches just to fuck with all of us. Not only does the booklet look like hot garbage, but it makes you wonder why they use booklets for this and not more appropriate stuff.

The inscription Mariota I like. I like it a lot, only because of the potential that the Five Star quotables set might be resurrected in some minor fashion with something like this. Inscriptions are awesome, and as long as the card design looks reasonably okay im on board.

As for the Colossal set, I think its pretty blah. Very white, not much there, and just the player, the auto and the swatch. Its definitely not bad looking in any way, its just not that much involved. I love simple and white designs, but this is just too simple and too white.

Lastly, the Staubach sticker is disgraceful. Treasures is a late release set. It also costs a shit ton of money per box. For whatever reason, Panini just cant get their crap together when it comes to getting Treasures to be 100% hard signed. They need to figure it out. Now.

I didnt buy Treasures last year because of the Teddy situation, and I am DEFINITELY not buying it this year. Ill stick to buying Immaculate singles and will reserve judgement on Flawless singles until I see what they are looking like. Really too bad they couldnt continue last year’s success.