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What happens to all the unused Final Four merchandise?

(Michael Wagstaffe / Yahoo Sports illustration)
(Michael Wagstaffe / Yahoo Sports illustration)

Under normal circumstances, four teams and their entourages would be in Atlanta right now preparing for this weekend’s Final Four games.

Fans of the programs that had survived the first two weekends of the NCAA tournament would be landing in Atlanta, which would be putting the finishing touches on a welcome for the entire basketball world. T-shirts, souvenirs, basketballs, tote bags, all emblazoned with the Final Four logo, would blanket every surface between Hartsfield-Jackson Airport and Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

That’s not happening. What happens to all that merchandise now?

The t-shirts already printed by the NCAA will be donated to World Vision, a charitable organization that specializes in putting unused clothing and merchandise in the hands of needy communities all over the world. (The NFL also used World Vision to distribute its unsellable Super Bowl merchandise up until a few years ago.)

One of the key design elements of any NCAA tournament is the courts. Here’s what the court would have looked like this weekend:

The floors themselves have gone back into storage. The first- and second-round courts, created by Praters Hardwood Flooring of Chattanooga, Tenn., were either in transit or about to be loaded onto trucks when the NCAA tournament was cancelled. (Prater also handles the floors for conference tournaments, invitationals, and a range of other games, including the Olympics.)

In a normal scenario, the champions have the option to purchase the floor where they won. Some universities have hung up the center court logo in their arenas or locker rooms. In other cases, souvenir merchants have diced up the floor into chunks suitable for dens and sports bars.

This time around, according to the NCAA, with no champion, the floors will be sanded down and reused at a later time; no souvenirs will be made.

Atlanta’s own Host Committee found itself with plenty of monogrammed gear and souvenirs and no place to sell it all. (Sorry, collectors; they won’t be doing pop-up sales.) The committee told Yahoo Sports it has donated 3,200 basketballs and t-shirts to the Boys & Girls Clubs of Metro Atlanta, a network of more than 20 clubs that serves about 3,000 kids and teenagers in Metro Atlanta.

There were supposed to be about 1,500 volunteers at the Final Four, all of whom were to receive a shirt, hat, poncho and flashlight in a drawstring bag, all branded with logos and sponsors. Those kits are going to be sent to recreation centers across Atlanta, a gift to workers who are providing meals to students during school closures.

More than 100,000 bags branded with Coca-Cola logos — the bags that would have been given to fans to carry souvenirs — will go to community organizations in locations including Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Birmingham and Phoenix.

So the 2020 Final Four is no more. But someday, years from now, you might see a kid wearing a 2020 Final Four t-shirt, or bouncing a 2020 Final Four basketball, and you’ll have quite a story for them.

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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter at @jaybusbee or contact him with tips, story ideas, etc. at jay.busbee@yahoo.com.

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