What happens to the losing team's Super Bowl championship shirts?
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Version 0 of 1. On Sunday night, within 30 minutes of the end of Super Bowl XLIX, more than a dozen Sports Authority stores in the New England-area opened their doors at 10.30pm, less than three hours after most of the stores had initially closed for the night. Patriots championship gear filled the aisles. “The demand was definitely there,” said manager Scott Chamberlain, whose store in Braintree, Massachusetts, closed at 12.30 am and re-opened at 6 am Monday to accommodate the needs of Patriots fans. It could have just as easily been the other way around. In the game’s final minutes, as Russell Wilson marched his team down the field one last time, retailers throughout Seattle were ready to open their storage rooms and start unpacking boxes of T-shirts and caps proclaiming the Seahawks Super Bowl champions. If the Seahawks had won, a Sports Authority in north Seattle was going to stay open an extra three hours to accommodate the predicted demand, Brad Hanson, the store’s manager said. One of the shirts, reading “Back 2 Back,” was certain to be a top seller. Well, @12s here's what the #BackToBack shirts would have looked like! #Seahawks pic.twitter.com/zUoIxc5HS8 But those T-shirts are still in their boxes. Stacked behind locked doors, the $28 T-shirts, $35 hats and $45 sweatshirts are never going to go on sale. In the coming days, the boxes of clothing, still sealed, are going to be sent to a to-be-determined warehouse, where they will be sorted and shipped overseas to countries where clothing is most needed and the result of Super Bowl XLIX is irrelevant. For the first time since the NFL stopped destroying misprinted shirts in 1996, the job of determining what happens to an estimated 100,000 pieces of unsellable Super Bowl clothing belongs to Good360, a charity that specializes in delivering unused corporate products to those in need. After 19 years of partnership with the Christian charity World Vision, the NFL decided that in 2015 it would instead enlist the help of Good360, an organization lauded for its efficiency in working with a network of more than 40,000 other charities. The league did not respond to a request for comment on the switch. “The NFL likes the concept of an umbrella organization that has the ability to meet many different charitable organizations,” Good360 CEO Cindy Hallberlin said. “World Vision is part of our network, but we’re able to reach more organizations.” Good360 does not yet know where this year’s Super Bowl clothes are going to be headed, instead saying that they would be sent wherever they are needed most once the merchandise is ready to be put on shipping containers. “Where clothes might go [if we had them] today could be completely different tomorrow because the needs are constantly changing,” Hallberlin said. In the past, World Vision had distributed the apparel to Zambia, Nicaragua and Armenia, among many others. Last year’s shipment of Broncos gear, on its way to Africa, was captured by an intrepid World Vision volunteer, whose tweet went viral. shipping "broncos super bowl champs" shirts to africa today at @worldvision in denver. hahahaha. @arrowheadpride pic.twitter.com/on7mv49Nq6 “It’s a huge amount of stuff,” Hallberlin said. “It’s a fantastic opportunity and the start of a great relationship where we could do a lot of good for people through the teams that don’t win.” |