The Definitive Austin FC Giveaway Index: Yeti First team Poster (March 23, 2025 vs. San Diego FC)

There are very few things in life better than getting something for free. It’s why the human race has engineered ways to fire hot dogs, t-shirts, and tacos out of a compressed air cannon.

We here at The False Nine, in our attempt to cover all aspects of Austin FC fandom, have come up with a grading rubric to judge and rate giveaways at Q2 stadium. It’s a very simple system for very simple items, everything is graded 1-100 with 5 points possible for the Look, Usability, and Originality categories. An additional 85 points are available for the Throwability category.

Final Rankings:

1-24 – Not worth the effort of grabbing from the attendant

25-49 – No one will be heartbroken by not getting the item, nor will they be sad when they accidentally leave it at the stadium

50-74 – A perfectly cromulent giveaway item

75-99 – An item to cherish and display

100 – Reserved for a Rodney Redes bobblehead

Now, let’s get to the Giveaway:

Yeti First team Poster (March 23, 2025 vs. San Diego FC)

Look: It’s a team picture with everyone involved wearing the new “Heartbeat” kit. The use of the Verde Wall as the background is good as is the photoshopping.

Score: 4 out of 5

Usability: I guess you can frame this and put it on the wall, but…why?

Score: 1 out of 5

Originality: The club hands out match posters after match, usually featuring local artists and designers, and many people collect those, this would actually be better if it was a yearly or seasonal thing to have a collection and see how the roster changed. This feels like a thrown together add-on to fulfill that Yeti has to have a sponsored giveaway and they didn’t want to do hats or t-shirts.

Score: 3 out of 5

Throwability: The reason these rankings are definitive is because of the painstaking efforts we use to try and make sure of their accuracy. When a poster was announced we appreciated the deluge of messages asking about the possiblity of it being throwable via being made into a paper airplane. Those of course have been banned from the stadium ever since the “Groot” tifo where the placards were used to try and dive bomb the capos.

So yes, of course we did this.

The problem is the cardstock used is too heavy for this type of functionality, it puts too much weight on the nose and causes the plane to always dive bomb roughly 12 feet in front of the thrower. Perhaps a different design would work better, but thanks to multiple goals and a warmer temperature during the match all the other posters were ruined and this is lone survivor.

Score: 40 out of 85

Final Score: 48 out of 100

Ranking of Giveaways (score in parenthesis):

Yeti Season Ticket Holder Gift (98)

Yeti 10 oz Tumbler (96)

LED Bracelet Giveaway (95)

Dell Technologies/Intel Bucket hat (92)

Heineken Koozie (86)

4ATX Foundation/SeatGeek Fan (85)

SeatGeek Stadium Scarf (85)

Q2 Stadium Scarf (84)

YETI Hat 2023 (84)