The overwhelming majority of set comments on this site are of guys sharing their childhood memories of the set with most comments starting off with "The first this or the first that". That's all fine and good but the truth is that very few people really care about other people's personal memories. Those memories really only matter to the individual themselves. What is lacking here are comments about the sets themselves since that is the subject of the commentaries, or should be.

With that being said, I think this is one of Topps better football sets. I like the colorful borders and the posed photos of the players. The photos are mostly unique and not recycles from prior years. The contrast of the colors for the team and player names are appealing. The set has an enormous amount of rookies cards, 87 out of 263, or about 1/3 of the whole set are rookie cards. There is only one of Topps notoriously hideous helmet airbrushing - Jake Scott. That tells me that Topps actually invested time (and money) in this set by getting photos of every player sans helmet since they refused to pony up for the NFL license and therefore weren't allowed to display the copyrighted team helmets. The photo cropping is for the most part also very good which again reflects the care they took to produce the best quality image possible. All of the cards are vertically positioned which makes it easier to view and looks better in card binders. That totally changed in the following year with Topps choosing to present some entire teams in a horizontal position which I personally do not like. Lastly, I appreciate the full, year-by-year statistics and the thoughtful and interesting write-ups about the players.

A couple of things that I don't like about this set is the cartoonish images on the front of different player positions but I also realize that at the time this product was produced for kids so it's excusable. The bottom border is pretty big and takes up too much of the available landscape rendering less image of the player.

Overall and comparatively speaking, I think that this is one of the best football sets that Topps ever produced and is a fine example of the type of high quality product they could produce when they wanted to. Unfortunately, that would not be the case as the decade progressed.

Do you want to know where I got my cards and how much I paid for them and how they relate to my childhood? I didn't think so.

The first packs I ever opened were 1971 Topps football. However, the local supermarket had trading card vending machines at least a year earlier than that, so the first cards I recall buying were 1970 Topps football.

The first packs I bought at the drug store as a kid.
My favorite cards were Calvin Hill and Hoyle Granger. Tried to get all the running backs back then. Great memories opening a pack.

The first pack of cards I ever bought was a pack of 1971 Topps football. I remember it because we lived at Langley AFB, VA at the time and I was so excited to get a Johnny Unitas card in the pack. I was 5 years old.