Happy Easter! Today’s card of the day is a 1963 Topps card of Bob Lilly. (An Easter Lilly–clever, huh?) This is Lilly’s rookie card, issued in his third season.
Lilly’s card is one of the short prints in the 1963 Topps NFL football set. The Cowboys were one of six teams whose cards were short-printed. You can see on the Gallery’s 1963 Topps uncut sheet page that all of the players from each team were in the same row, and that each row was printed either once or twice on the full sheet. The teams whose row was printed just once are the short prints.
The card shown here is the “purple sky” variation of Lilly’s card. Though the price guides don’t acknowledge it, most player cards in the 1963 Topps set can be found with either a blue sky or a purple sky. A collector’s page on flikr shows examples of most of them.
Lilly appeared on many other cards, too. You can see all of Bob Lilly’s cards in the Gallery.
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Nice tie-in!