Topps Football Gets Bigger, Better
Let’s continue the series of top Topps football designs that we started with the 1950s by taking a look at the top design of the Swinging ’60s.
The 1965 Topps football set was groundbreaking in many ways. Topps lost its NFL license in 1964 and issued AFL cards that year. But it wasn’t until 1965 and the signing of Joe Namath to the AFL’s Jets that the league was viewed as a serious threat to NFL supremacy. So Topps decided to get fully back into the football game in 1965 in a big way — quite literally.
What makes the 1965 set unique was its size. Instead of the standard 2.5 by 3.5 inches, the 1965 cards were 2.5 by 4.6875 inches. This odd size enabled players to be depicted seemingly as large as life and created ample room on the back for expansive biographical information (including stats for non-linemen) and a large, vibrant cartoon with another player blurb/fact.
The card fronts had a player’s photo silhouette in front of a bright color background. The color of was uniform for all the team’s players and played off their dark jersey color. So the Jets green was complemented by yellow. The Raiders black by green. The Chiefs red by blue. The images were a mixture of full-body shots, half-body shots and headshots.
The most famous card in the set and arguably the most prized in the history of post-World War II vintage football cards is the rookie Joe Namath. It was photographed in a Lenox Hill hospital hallway after Namath’s knee surgery that was delayed so he could play in the NCAA National Championship. Namath lost 27 pounds post surgery. As a result, his image has an ethereal quality, with the finished card seeming more of a rendition of Namath than an actual photograph.
Some variations of the Namath rookie card have a butterfly-like print error on his hand that does not impact the value of the card. There are only 3,335 graded by all companies. Compare this to the 2,834 for the famously rare 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle to get an idea of how tough this rookie Namath card is. In mid-grade, it’s about $4,500, according to CardLadder.
The other big rookie card in the set is the Fred Biletnikoff, which runs about $400-$500 in mid-grade depending on the centering.
The players are numbered according to their teams, so the Raiders are all sequenced together in numbering, as are the Oilers, Broncos, etc.
Many cards are listed as short prints due to the oversized nature of the cards and thus limits in how many could be printed on a sheet. But there is a long-standing controversy that the number of prints of certain cards are understated. However, that’s not material to their value and the value of the set given that these oversized cards were more difficult to protect and were not big sellers (as was the case with most non-baseball products of that time). Remember, the football season then as now was so much shorter than the baseball season. The last high-end complete set sold for $15,000 back in April, according to CardLadder.
What really makes this set fun is the broad sample of AFL players who have cards. The issue with football cards previously was that a relatively handful of the roster received a card, contrary to baseball where almost all rostered players got one. Even though this set was not big, relatively speaking, in the number of cards issued, the AFL had just eight teams then vs. 14 for the NFL. So this set has about 22 players per team instead of the 14 in the 198-card NFL set that year (issued by Philadelphia).
