A Super Bowl Shirt Story That Doesn't Involve an Impoverished Country

Those versed in sports media on the margins know that in the days following the Super Bowl to look for the inevitable sidebar story about how the losing team's merchandise store accidentally shipped shirts that said the wrong team won the Super Bowl, or that the losing team had their pre-made championship shirts shipped to a random destitute country.

Well, here's one in a similar vein, albeit with a slight, but delectable wrinkle: turns out an Adidas plant in Indianapolis has been tasked with producing Saints championship gear beyond the 50,000 print run that was created prior to the Super Bowl.

At the U.S. sports licensing division of Adidas, operating as Reebok just off Post Road, employees will work 12-hour shifts five days this week -- instead of their usual three -- printing Super Bowl apparel nonstop.

They will ship out 130,000 shirts a day, compared with a typical 65,000 to 70,000.

That means overtime for Deobalek Thomas, who was forlornly pulling long-sleeved gray Saints T-shirts off the screen printing press Monday, while wearing his 2007 Colts Super Bowl champions shirt.

"I would have rather worked three days and had the Colts win," he said. "These aren't the shirts I wanted to do."

"Yeah, he cried all morning," said co-worker Mario Zavala.

Yikes. That's probably the first time American workers wished for manufacturing jobs to get outsourced overseas.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.