Penn State Joins Trading Card Agreement with Fanatics, Topps

Fast forward to the year 2046 when you’re finally getting around to cleaning out your attic. Imagine your happiness when buried beneath heaps of old books and discarded exercise equipment, you find your once prized possession: a numbered, on-card autographed, parallel Drew Allar card.

This stupidly hypothetical scenario is now possible thanks to news from Fanatics Collectibles and Topps that Penn State is among the universities that signed a multi-year exclusive agreement with the company.

Fanatics has made waves in the card world by signing exclusive deals with players associations and leagues in recent months - most newsworthy was their deal with Major League Baseball and then its subsequent acquisition of Topps (and its Bowman brand).

So what’s this really mean?

It means that licensed Penn State football cards, both digital and physical, will soon be available.

Previously, Penn State, and other college football players, could be featured on cards once they were headed to the NFL Draft. Search the internet and you’ll find plenty of recent stars like Micah Parsons wearing their Penn State uniforms on trading cards.

But now, you can have current players and Fanatics has announced its intention to sell and has signed NIL deals with present-day stars in football, mens basketball, and womens basketball.

Already you can find Bowman U football cards on the shelves of your local retail stores - but you’ll notice those cards are stripped of any university logos. With Penn State’s famed plain jerseys though, your 2022 Sean Clifford card won’t look all that different from what a licensed Penn State player card would look like a year later.

Post COVID shutdown, the trading card hobby has once again exploded. While many serious collectors point to there being too many trading cards and the market being inundated with “junk wax”, adding a few Penn State player cards to a collection - and ultimately the attic - seems a fun thing.