Interview: Panini Draws Big Players Crowd at 2025 NFL Combine

Interview with Jason Howarth: Panini Draws Big Players Crowd at 2025 NFL Combine

INDIANAPOLIS, IN – There is never a shortage of fantastic releases coming from Panin covering the baseball, basketball, soccer, entertainment, and especially college and professional football. The wide range of options include Donruss Optic, Select, Absolute, Phoenix, Score, Obsidian, Contenders, Illusions, Prestige, Rookies & Stars, Impeccable, Flawless, National Treasures, and more.

In Indianapolis for the NFL Combine, fans of the Panini line of products can expect more amazing cards in the coming months highlighting the 2025 NFL Draft, Combine, and college players.

At the heart of all the combine action in downtown Indianapolis, Panini was on location promoting their brand and interacting with the future draft picks – and their spot was the place to be.

Panini Senior VP of Marketing and Athlete Relations, Jason Howarth, spoke to Beckett covering everything from their upcoming releases to how they select college players for their brand.

Interview

Jason, the room Panini set up is an attraction. It looks like it took a lot of time to construct and put everything together; how much time did it take?

“It took a lot of time. The NFL Combine is a big event for us because it is our opportunity to connect with the players that are here as they are going through the draft process and will be the rookies in the upcoming class.

“It is a good touch point for us to talk to the guys that we have already worked with through the NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) side of the business from the college perspective. Guys that we’ve seen at the Senior Bowl, they’ll make their rounds through here when they have some down time.”

Are any of the players here signing Panini cards?

“This is more just for fun. This is a very stressful week for a lot of the guys here, so we are not asking them to sign cards. They’ve been signing all along if they have signed an agreement with us. This is more about come in, hang out, experience the brand, decompress. They’ll get their own Panini trading card to memorialize being part of the combine; that’s mainly what the focus is.”

How does Panini decide which college players to sign?

“Obviously, everyone likes to talk about quarterbacks, wide receivers, guys that score touchdowns – all those guys. Obviously we are paying attention much earlier from an NIL point of view whether there is a relationship we’ve had with them while in college and now they are transitioning (to the NFL), or guys that kind of just emerged.

“For us, we are looking at the players. We obviously have a handful of guys that we have targeted, many of which are competing here at the combine or are going through the combine process. But then there will be other guys that kind of emerged through the combine that maybe were not necessarily on our radar that we will want to engage with coming out of the combine.”

When will collectors get the next round of college football cards?

“We are at the combine, all of these guys are draft eligible players, that stuff will be in play. We are working on filling out our NIL product on the collegiate side.

“On the college side, we have exclusives with Julian Sayin, who will be the starting quarterback at Ohio State this fall, Dylan Raiola, who is going into his second year as the starter at Nebraska, Arch Manning, who will be QB1 at Texas this fall, and Keelon Russell, he’s a guy that played high school ball in Texas (Duncanville) and committed to the University of Alabama. Those are our four quarterbacks that are exclusive at this point in the collegiate space.

“We will have deals with guys that we thought were going to be in this year’s draft, like a Drew Allar, who decided to go back to Penn State; he’ll still be part of our mix.”

Will there be an NFL Combine element to Panini’s next football release?

“It will be in some of our draft picks products and it will also be in our upcoming NFL product once we see where players are drafted a couple of months from now.”

When will fans get the next round of Panini NFL cards?

“Typically, the NFL product will come out shortly after the draft. Usually it is three to four weeks after the draft, that is ideally when we will release our first product. It is a quick turnaround. We are waiting on guys to see where they land, and we go from there.”

Any teasers on the exciting new parallels and inserts in the upcoming releases?

“Not yet. Obviously there is always surprises in our product along with those elements that everyone has come to love as it relates to the Prizm products as you mentioned. All of those elements will be there for Prizm. We also have some other things we are planning that we expect fans to be excited about.”

Photo credit: Beckett/Ryan Wright