Today and yesterday, Panini provided an extended look at this year’s Playbook Football – a continuation of a product that in 2011 and 2012 had struggled to be relevant in the market. Although some of the cards looked absolutely incredible in previous years, the release time frame, combined with lack of unique content, led to a flat response from collectors. I absolutely loved the Silhouette style booklet cards, even buying a few for my personal collection. Other parts of the set were not even close to successful.

Here are some of my favorites from the previous sets:

2012 Playbook Adrian Peterson Patch Booklet

2011 Playbook Colin Kaepernick Auto Patch Booklet

2012 Playbook Andrew Luck Auto Patch Booklet

This year, the recipe for Playbook hasnt changed much, and that isnt necessarily a bad thing. The rookie playbook auto patch cards continue to look pretty much exactly the same as they did last year, only with a few veterans sprinkled into the mix. Outside of a few trapped signatures that didnt turn out well, the cards look as good as they did last year.

The only issue is that outside of the booklet cards, there is little to nothing there to drive the product’s content. Most of the other cards look absolutely awful – especially the base cards and base autos. Panini, in true DAD JOKE fashion, thought that adding a notebook paper theme to a product named Playbook would be a “haha, get it?!?” moment. There could be success in design, even with a lame attempt at deriving a theme for the set, but the cards look horrid. Every part of the card looks out of place and oddly proportioned.

I was going to look at buying a few singles, but the guys I would collect, inexplicably signed their cards like some of the other Panini cards this year. This should have been a chance for Panini to build a new brand, instead of just rehashing the previous year’s set to the point of boredom. Its too bad really, there was a lot of potential here.

Here are some of the images: