When I saw that 2010 Topps Football had hit retail shelves, I was extremely excited to have the chance to see what the rookie cards looked like before the hobby boxes hit shelves later this week. When I actually sat down and looked at some of the cards that were showing up on eBay, some looked to be everything I didn’t want in a card. Others, on the other hand, were great, but seemed to feature a tactic that Topps rarely uses outside of their sell sheets these days.

First the good. When you look at the top rookies of the class, almost all of them have great pictures and good looking cards. I like the Ryan Mathews’ card because its not the typical running back pose, but its not Mike Williams or Mark Sanchez with the price tag on the football from last year. I also like Toby Gerhart‘s pic, as well as Sam Bradford’s, and surprisingly even Tim Tebow’s card too. Dez Bryant has a nice pic like the others, but outside of these guys, there is some major disappointment in the way the cards were produced.

The main weird thing I have noticed is that for the first time in a LONG time, Topps didn’t update the pictures on the cards from the sell sheet. Usually they use different pictures for the mock up previews than the ones they actually put on the cards, and to see them use the same pics is odd. The other odd thing is that there are a lot of rookie cards where there is some evident paintshopping or airbrushing, and Im not sure what to think about it. I like that there isnt a with a tent in the background like there were for some of the cards last year, but im also noticing some parts of the shots that don’t look real.

When it comes to the bad part of all of this, we have some rookies that got a terrible picture with their first Topps card. Jimmy Clausen’s card looks horrible, same with CJ Spiller’s grimace displayed on his. Ndamukong Suh’s picture is really stupid looking, which sucks, because they had a cool opportunity to get a beastly shot from what I heard.

The reason these pictures are so important, is that the Chrome cards that have dumb pictures are usually worth less from my tracking of the autographs from years past. Because of the odd pictures Topps selected for 2010, its pretty obvious that some of these cards are going to fall under that experience. Either way, its not hard to get a cool shot from the hundreds or thousands that are taken at the rookie premiere, and I would MUCH rather have the stock pose for the position than one that looks like this ridiculous Arrelio
us Benn picture. I know that the brand managers have great power over the pictures that are used, and I don’t understand why they cant save the experiments for the subsets instead of the first rookie card that actually makes a difference in the year.

Funny enough, this is one thing that Panini did a great job on with 2010 Elite, as every picture fit great with the final product.