Right after an NFL team clinches a division championship, conference championship, or Super Bowl victory, the players, coaches, family, etc. are seen with hats and T-shirts boasting of their accomplishment. Clearly, the different possibilities for each game are printed on hats and T-shirts beforehand, and then boxes full of the stuff are kept on hand at the game. So, what happens to the “wrong” ones? Do they burn them so that nobody can walk around with a “Tennessee Titans 2000 Super Bowl Champions” hat? Is hat security so airtight that not a single incorrect hat leaks through? I mean, movies slip out before they’re released every once in a while–you’d think someone would figure out a way to get the other team’s hat out to someone. How does the whole process actually work?
I read somewhere (no cite, sorry) that they give them to the homeless.
Why would someone WANT to wear a hat celebrating a victory that didn’t happen?
Have you ever met a pre-2004 Red Sox fan, TJdude825? 
One would think so, but then you’d see one of them sometime, right? I’ve lived and gone to school in areas with high homeless populations and never seen one.
I hear those are destroyed or donated abroad. There’s an urban legend about folks in Third World countries wearing Buffalo Bills Super Bowl Champs t-shirts. Don’t know if that’s true, though.
In 1993, Nebraska lost an extremely controversial Orange Bowl to Florida State. It make the 2006 Oregon-Oklahoma game seem like a Sunday picnic. A store in Lincoln sold the shirts saying “Nebraska: 1993 National Champs”, even though we lost. The logic being we won that game if not for getting jobbed by the refs.
Anecdotal, but: I have seen, on a television program, some of these very shirts in Eastern Europe (Romania is coming to mind). Perhaps I can find a link to a picture.
The very article you link to indicates that the NFL donates non-winning Super Bowl swag to World Vision, which distributes them to third world countries.
Oops - forgot the relevant quotation:
As friedo points out (from the link in Elvis’s post):
Donating to somewhere, anywhere would make sense because the manufacturer would get a tax deduction for it. I don’t know how you would value such a thing because it is almost worthless in the traditional marketplace but it would be worth something as a donation which is always better than nothing. OTOH, I have worked on inventory systems and losses there have tax advantages as well. I have no idea what losses due only to speculation would be accounted for but I suppose those could be worth something. I don’t no which is worth more. Any corporate tax experts out there?
That Slate article makes a point of saying that they only print a limited number of the hats/shirts, just enough for the people who would wear them on TV. But a few years back, I was lucky enough to go the NCAA basketball final, and they sold shirts with the winner as soon as the game was over. Pulled boxes out of the back somewhere and sold them to people as they were leaving. That had to be several thousand at least that were destroyed. Not very limited at all.
OTOH, the margins on a $25 white t-shirt are insane. So they can handle a little destruction.
Forgot to mention that it’s even harder for the NCAA final, since the final two teams are only determined two days earlier. So maybe they have to dispose of 3/4 of the shirts.
God, if civilization ever gets obscured in history through another dark ages I want to see the face of the archaeologist who unearths a miraculously preserved Blank #1 won the SuperBowl shirt, only to travel to the other side of the world and unearth Blank #2 won the SuperBowl shirt.
To say nothing of my forty-year collection of Cleveland Indians World Series Champions T-shirts…
With modern quantum physics, such wasteful duplicate printing is now a relic of the past.
The teeshirts, hats, and other merchandise is produced in specially prepared Shroedinger boxes (sans cats). The logos are created in a quantum superposition of game outcomes, entangled with the actual performances of the players and resulting score. (Although the players’ unions initially opposed the injection of radioactive isotopes into the athletes, the performance increases from the subsequent mutations muted later complaints.) As a championship game reaches its conclusion, the logos’ wave states collapse into the proper winner’s brand. Thus, as measured by any observer, the merchandise appears (and in fact was!) properly printed.
A few of the less capitalized leagues cannot afford the Shroedinger process, and instead FedEx their incorrect goods to the parallel universe where the other team won. The receipt of that universe’s spare merchandise lessens the overcall cost, as well.
There would obviously be a novelty value in “what-if” sports memorabilia. And the fact that only 300 official “Seattle Seahawks - Superbowl XL Champions” t-shirts exist would make them valuable collector’s items. But I’ve read that the licensing agreements with professional sports leagues prohibit merchandisers from selling or releasing any “false” memorabilia in the United States.
What? 
I don’t even know what you’re spoofing…
Amusing, none the less.
I got it.
Didn’t President Thomas Dewey pass a law regarding this issue?