Thank Goodness for That
December 6th, 2010 by slangon

The title of this post of course refers to yesterday’s Giants game, but not necessarily in the way that it might sound. Of course I’m glad they won. By doing so, they stayed on pace with the Eagles and remain tied for 1st place in the NFC East as well as remaining tied with the Eagles and Packers for the 2nd Wild Card spot. It was also a “Thank Goodness” moment because many of the guys who are sidelined for them are getting close to returning, so it’s pretty important that they win as many games as possible while they’re missing these key players.

Those are both reasons to say “Thank Goodness” but right now, for me, the biggest reason to say “Thank Goodness” is that they actually won a stress free game. I was able to actually enjoy the game and just watch them play, or out-play, the Redskins. I don’t mean to imply that I’m incapable of enjoying sporting events if the team I root for isn’t dominating. I actually really enjoy tight, well-played games. It’s just that after the way the Giants have played over the last few weeks (including their win over the Jaguars last week) has been a little nerve wracking. Couple that with the fact that I’ve been thinking a lot about the Mets over the last week or so in preparation for writing some posts about my thought on the team going forward and you can see why I kind of really needed a laugher like that for my own sanity.

If you watched the game yesterday, you’ll know that the key to the win was the Giants running game, which accounted for 90% of the scoring, specifically 2 touchdowns a piece by these guys.

It was pretty awesome watching both of those guys barreling down field, breaking one tackle after another all afternoon. The one thing that was still a little unsettling was watching Eli throw yet another interception in the end zone, but that was pretty well offset by 6 Washington turnovers.

All in all, a good day both offensively and defensively.

With that potentially stressful Giants game out of the way, I’m pretty psyched for the Jets / Patriots game tonight. I’ve sort of made peace with my dual fandom of the Jets and Giants. If it came down to it, and the Jets were playing the Giants in the Super Bowl or even a meaningless pre-season game), I would definitely root for the G-Men, but any other time I’m fine with rooting for Gang Green. What can I say, they’re a very exciting team to watch, and I’m surrounded by Jets fans on my wife’s side of the family. There is a kind of interesting power struggle going on however with them trying to get my 1 1/2 year old son to become a Jets fan and me and my father trying to instill Giants roots in him, so we’ll see how that plays out.

Anyway, in light of an impending power shift in the AFC East, here’s a card.

1968 Topps #195 Al Atkinson

In most of these vintage football card posts I’ve been doing, I’ve talked a lot about how there’s a lot of design similarities between various Topps football cards and Topps Baseball cards. The 1968 design is one that I’m sort of hard pressed to find any similar elements. I guess looking at it in a very broad way, it follows a standard card design formula of a photograph surrounded by some sort of border with a team logo up top and the players name, team and position down low. If I were hard pressed to define this design however, ala Night Owl’s system, I would call this the “Pill” set, since it looks like a stylized medicine capsule. So even though the design doesn’t stray much from the standard formula, I can’t recall any other set, baseball or football, that I would say comes from the same family tree as this one.

All that being said, it is a pretty cool looking design. One thing I would change if I were in charge, is I would actually use the Jets colors rather than the dark blue / light blue color scheme that Topps went with. That’s just a pet peeve of mine that seems to be prevalent in a lot of Topps designs.

What’s sort of interesting about this set, and I’m not sure if Topps ever did it again, is that all the cards of the Packers and the Raiders are completely different (and in my opinion, much cooler looking) than the regular card front from this set. That, of course, is because it was those 2 teams that faced off in Super Bowl II the year before. That’s a pretty interesting concept of differentiating the 2 teams that played for the championship. I’m kind of torn on whether I think it would be cool if Topps did that again or if it would get old after a while. I suspect that as long as the different design was as cool as the one they used for the Packers and Raiders I would like it, but considering that it seems that it’s enough of a challenge for them to put out 1 good looking design these days, maybe it’s for the best that they let this idea die.

This is the back of this particular card. This is not the typical card back from this set. Much like the 1969 Topps Baseball set, there were cards from this set that had puzzle backs. Unlike that set though which had the puzzle backs on the All-Star subset, there doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason as to which cards made up the puzzle here. There were actually 2 different puzzles in this set, one of Len Dawson (which this card is part of) and one of Bart Starr. Oddly though, the Len Dawson puzzle says he’s a member of the Kansas City Chiefs, which he was in 1968, but pictures him in a Cleveland Browns uniform. Considering Len Dawson hadn’t played for the Browns since 1961 and Topps had put out a bunch of cards with him in a Chiefs uniform up to this point, it seems kind of odd that they would do that. I guess we can just add that to the myriad of strange things that Topps has done over the years.

One Response to “Thank Goodness for That”

  1. Congrats on the big win for your GMen and very cool cards. what program do you use to design those cards?

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