What Does $2 Million In Free Football Merchandise Look Like?

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Before we begin, I had the pleasure this week of joining the best dang bros in Blacksburg on their podcast Sons of Saturday. We went deep on the Hokies’ fireworks expenses and shared some Brooklyn pizza recommendations.

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On to the article!

The astounding amount of merch football teams get

One of the annoying things about being a journalist is that you can’t (technically) accept free stuff.

I used to work at a men’s humor site where that wasn’t a concern, and brands foisted the most absurd things on us. Free vacations, helicopter rides. The bar cart in my living room comes from New Amsterdam, which I never even bothered to write about.

Nowadays, morals and ethics and all that “prohibit” me from enjoying the largesse of our most benevolent corporations, who just want you to know that nine out of ten martini drinkers prefer the bold juniper flavors of New Amsterdam gin to Beefeater.

You know who doesn’t have scruples? College football teams. They sign exclusive contracts to get loads and loads of free stuff. So much so that it’s almost impossible to properly convey.

Want to see what almost $2 million in free swag looks like? I bet you do.

Apparel companies like Adidas and Nike sign deals with college athletics departments to be their official sponsors. They fork over gobs of cash and tons of free merch to have the rights to exclusively outfit teams. In return, they get what amounts to free advertising.

When Louisville renewed its deal with Adidas in 2017, it was the fourth-largest apparel deal in sports history, worth $160 million over ten years.

But what does that look like in reality?

Last year, Adidas (along with other companies like Riddell and Saranac) provided the University of Louisville’s football team a total of $1,839,986 worth of gear. And FOIAball obtained a spreadsheet of every single item, alongside its retail value.

It’s, like, actually hard to fathom. You can view it here. Good freakin’ luck. It has 22,856 entries. It took me a whole week to sort through.

That’s not to say the school got 22,856 actual items, given the spreadsheet includes inventory audits. But in terms of what was directly handed out, FOIAball found 14,718 specific items distributed to individuals in and around the program. (Hope you like your shoes, hats, tees, polo shirts, and half-zip golf jackets, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear!)

Let’s start with head coach Jeff Brohm. In 2025, the equipment team handed him 20 tee shirts, 10 polo shirts, seven jackets, six hats, six pairs of shoes, four pairs of sweatpants, three sweatshirts, two bags, and a six-pack of low-cut socks.

It's so much I can’t capture it in a single screenshot.

All told, the merchandise for Brohm amounted to just over $4,000. A reasonable price, sure, to ensure that he looks sharp on the sidelines. But Jeff Brohm is far from the only Brohm the school needed to outfit.

His two brothers, Greg and Brian Brohm, are also on staff. They got plenty of gear. Then there’s Brady, who is on the team. We’ll get to players in a moment.

There’s his parents, Oscar and Donna; his wife, Jennifer; their daughter; and Brian’s wife, Ashley, all of whom got several hundred dollars' worth of shirts and jackets. The same went for most staffers, whose spouses also got free apparel.

As for what athletes received, let’s go alphabetically, since I can’t think of any other way to do it.

Items like skull wraps, sunglasses, headphones, and those capes players wear on the sideline were all filed under “Accessories.” Even the clear plastic bracelets quarterbacks use to check plays are included.

Arm compression sleeves. How many arm compression sleeves do you think a college football team needs? Well, needs is an arbitrary concept, but we do know how many they got.

That would be 700 arm compression sleeves at $15 each. That would be over $10,000 in free arm compression sleeves.

You want bags? We got bags. Louisville handed out three different styles of backpacks, as well as roller bags and totes and two sizes of duffle bags and sackpacks, those annoying nylon and string cinched backpacks given out at every conference.

How many bags? 710 bags.

Mind you… we are still on the first entry for the letter B here and have already dished out some $40,000 in merch. So let’s ditch the alphabet and jump around.

Gloves. Just how many different kinds of gloves do you think a football team goes through?

You’re thinking, obviously, receivers and linemen and quarterbacks all have different gloves. You’d be right. But then multiply that by the different designs for each game.

Players got gloves with the school’s logo and ones where its mascot Louie throws up the Heisman pose. There were gloves with great names like Chaos and Freak Max and Strategy, and camouflage gloves for respecting the troops.

Shoutout whoever put all the different gloves they got on eBay, so we can see them for ourselves.

Seriously, the Heisman bird is very cool.

All told, the Cardinals checked out over 1,500 pairs of gloves during the 2025 season. Last year’s leading receiver got 18 pairs. How much is that for gloves? That’s $100,000 in gloves.

Honestly, I could have broken every item into its own blog, there’s so much. Just in headwear, we have visors, slouched caps, structured caps, beanies, balaclavas, knitted poms, fitted caps, foam trucker hats, safari hats, and the most essential of hats, the Victory Performance Bucket hats.

You can’t spell “victory” without the Victory Performance Bucket hat.

Helmets. Helmets by Riddell and Axiom came at an ever-escalating cost.

The standard Riddell SpeedFlex runs $375. But the SpeedFlex True is $850. That’s cheaper than the SpeedFlex Precision, which costs more because it uses 3D scanners to perfectly map your head shape. Which is less than the SpeedFlex Precision Diamond, at $1,600 apiece.

I’m not gonna do the math on those. Helmets are good and players need them.

Cleats. Too many cleats to count. Would it surprise you to know that kickers' cleats are pricier? Kicking cleats run about $260, compared to $180 for regular ones. Fancy boys, those kickers.

We’ve yet to touch on jackets. Quarter-zips. Half-zips. Full-zips. We’ve got those options in woven and knit. Big puffers. Big free puffers. Golf jackets.

Look, I don’t know if I can go on. Next up is polo shirts. Imagine just how many polo shirts the average football coaching staff goes through. Seventy-some odd dudes. All rocking collared shirts. Just guess? It’s 760. Each one costs $70.

There is so, so, so much more that I feel like I’m doing the scale and scope of it a disservice. We haven’t touched on pants. Seriously, scroll through all this. Do your own research. We’ll just jump to jerseys. Jerseys cost more than you think. Head to the university bookstore and you’ll see an authentic jersey for $140. In reality, they cost around $500 each.

All told, jerseys were one of the priciest items the team got, totaling almost a quarter-million dollars.

What does this all look like for just one player? Here’s everything sorted just for last year’s starting quarterback Miller Moss. Which doesn’t include items checked out to player cubbies, like jerseys and socks and compression sleeves. The figure in the middle is the price for each.

It adds up to $2,600. For every player on the roster.

Want it visualized better? You’re in luck. We were searching online for examples and stumbled on a 2020 recruiting video from Louisville that highlighted it pretty clearly. So we turned it into a handy GIF.