We all love free shit. Its part of human nature. If you bought any Topps Football over the last few days, you know all about the Gridiron Giveaway, the sister program to its immensely successful baseball counterpart. If you havent heard about it, things are pretty simple. Redemption codes are inserted into most of the Topps Flagship products, both retail and hobby, for collectors to input online at ToppsGridiron.com. When the code is entered, you are assigned a topps card that is now yours, spanning over 50 years of stuff. While most cards are dogs from the late 80s and early 90s, there are some vintage cards definitely worth your time. There are also mentions of memorabilia being given away, and considering this is all an add on to the already awesome set, its pretty nice that we have this chance.

Today on Twitter, Jeff from I Am Joe Collector made an awesome suggestion of adding exclusive rookies and autos to the program, and I sincerely hope that Topps takes heed and gets it done. Going even further than that, this is a wonderful opportunity to get people to buy as much of the product as possible, a la Baseball and the Strasburg 661 card that went for $300+ upon release. Although I would never buy codes to chase the exclusives or the autos, I definitely think there are thousands of collectors who would. Add in Chrome paralllels of the SP Variations for Topps Football and you have a hit like no other. Because Chrome will most likely have their own variations, it gives Topps a unique opportunity to create them. When you could also do autographs and exclusives of the rookies per Jeff’s tweet, this program could be epic. The problem has to stem from the time and money needed to do that, mainly because the Gridiron Giveaway is a ridiculously cheap program to begin with.

Personally, I think the program needs more legs to succeed like it did in baseball, mainly because so many of the baseball collectors go for low end over high end. Football is a much different animal, and you need a lot of extra stuff to bring around collectors like me who could give a shit about base cards from 1988. This is the ticket, no doubt.