So What Happens to the Losing Teams Championship Gear?

Okay, flashback to Sunday night, the Seattle Seahawks have just won Super Bowl 48, the game has been over for just mere minutes and they’re already on TV advertising that you can buy your Seahawks championship hat, t-shirt and blue ray to commemorate this historic moment.

They obviously had all this gear ready to go for both teams, so there euphoric fan bases could whip out their credit cards and start charging immediately after the game. I mean it’s not like they knew the Seahawks were going to pummel the Bronco’s before the game started and they only produced Seattle Seahawks championship gear right?  

So the question becomes, what do they do with all the mass produced Denver Bronco 2013 Super Bowl Champion stuff? Does it immediately end up in some incinerator? Believe it or not, for the longest time that’s exactly where all that stuff went.

Fortunately the four major sporting leagues, together with the major manufacturers and retailers like Reebok, Sports Authority, Dicks, etc. have since changed their policy on what they do with the losing team’s championship gear.  They now save this gear from certain doom and send it to a group called World Vision.  

World Vision is an international humanitarian aid group that collects all the unwanted, incorrect items during the days immediately following a championship game from a major sporting event and stores the items in their Pittsburgh distribution center.  The items are then shipped overseas to disaster areas and impoverished nations.   

Sheryl Watkins, a representative from World Vision says she doesn’t know where this year’s Denver Broncos gear will go yet. More than likely it will be sent to countries they’ve helped in the past like; Bosnia, El Salvador, Mongolia, Zambia, Armenia, Nicaragua, Romania and Uganda to name a few.  

After all the items have been collected and inventoried, World Vision lets their offices all over the world know what is available, then they begin to distribute the various items like sweatshirts to colder climate countries and t-shirts to tropical areas.

Overseas distribution is part of the agreement between the sports leagues and World Vision. That is the main reason why these items are not allowed to stay state-side to be given to people who desperately could use a new shirt, hat, or jacket here in the U.S.

Another big reason why they ship all this woulda, coulda, shoulda apparel out of the country, they don’t want these items to end up on TV or pop up on places like Ebay. 

After all, we can’t have a bunch of people walking the streets wearing their New England Patriots “Perfect Season” Super Bowl 42 Championship t-shirts can we?  

Imagine all the emotional torment that would create should a person wearing one of these items encounter a heartbroken fan, or worse yet, a player from one of the losing teams.

That has the potential to give a whole new meaning to “Are you ready to rumble!”