The NFL’s official online shop has plenty of great gift ideas for the football fans in your life. You can find decent prices on marked down jerseys for star players or various accoutrements to showcase your fandom to the world, whether it’s on your car or hanging near whatever television you deem worthy of Sunday afternoon broadcasts.
This gift guide is not about those gifts. This gift guide is for the weird and cheap among us, looking to fill our enemies stockings with NFL gifts that shouldn’t exist, yet do. With the holiday season in full effect, NFLShop.com has several marked-down items it is trying desperately to offload by slashing prices and offering free shipping.
Today, we’re gonna take inventory on those. Behold, the worst gifts you can buy for less than $40 at the NFL Shop’s rummage sale section:
A lot of the NFL Shop’s unsold inventory is related to marginal players who are no longer with the teams who rostered them when their merchandise was created. Most of them are quarterbacks, so it makes sense Indianapolis’ tragic tale of passer-retread woe makes up a lot of what you can buy for under $10 online.
The Brissett shir-sey is actually kinda cool; it denotes how your fandom never wavered and how you appreciated his service in the aftermath of Andrew Luck’s sudden retirement. The Wentz socks, however, should automatically get you registered on a nationwide list of some sort.
Finally, a chance to go back four years and get things right. This kit, which appears to be a poster and a bunch of stickers with players’ names on it, is for the time-traveling sad sack unwilling to bend to the whims of Yahoo! or ESPN and just handle their draft online. And, since it’s from 2018, it gives you the opportunity to draft Blake Bortles and DeShone Kizer — a bargain at only $2!
I get C-3PO being a Texans fan; his entire character arc is being a peripheral annoyance and completely useless in big moments. R2-D2, however, deserves better.
What better way to show your appreciation for the $88 million contract and 0-4 record Foles produced as a Jacksonville Jaguar than to slap this bad boy on the back of your 1998 Suzuki Samurai? Nothing says “please don’t break into my car even though it has no doors” quite like this.
I’m not sure what’s more offensive; that this shirt exists or that the NFL originally charged $50 for it. Sheeran looks like he’d collapse into a puddle if he attempted a tackle at any level of football.
UN.
DISP.
TABLE.
Wild that these didn’t sell better. Hilariously, this is an actual, slightly broken phrase in French. “A disputed table.” Incredible.
If a bunch of word fragments doesn’t float your boat, how about this one that assumes everyone will know you’re talking about the Lombardi Trophy and not the element widely regarded to stand for second place?
It’s like a bobblehead you have to assemble yourself, and it looks even less like the player it commemorates! Producing a line of semi-tragic figures truly fits the Gurley brand, as he went from All-Pro to out of the league in three years and had to watch his former team win a Super Bowl without him. This league is the worst sometimes, man.
This is the stationery found when you return to your car and realize someone has backed into you and blasted your side mirror off its mooring. When unfolded, the sloppily-scribbled handwriting simply reads “lol that sucks.”
Did you find yourself drawn to Rob Lowe’s famous hat, but wish it could be worse? Friends, I got a deal for you.
“Football? No, I’m not familiar with it. I do enjoy Progressive Insurance’s ad campaigns, however.”
… (sigh) withdrawn.
If you’re going to ask Atlanta to remember a Super Bowl, going with one the Falcons didn’t play in is actually the safest bet.
The NFL Shop’s discount section is littered with former jerseys/shir-seys of players who’ve since moved on from their teams. There’s a vast supply of Cleveland Browns Baker Mayfield and Carolina Panthers Christian McCaffrey and even a couple Detroit Lions Kerryon Johnsons in the bargain bin. But the only active players on their current teams in the mix are Matthew Stafford and Aaron Donald.
Which means if you’re one of the dozens of die-hard Rams fans out there, you’re about to save a bunch of money this December.
OK honestly that’s a great price to salute a legend of the sport.
You can get at least two Carson Wentz shirts for the price of this … thing depicting SpongeBob’s friend as an NFL head coach. This is how I will grade every Wentz transaction from now on. When he signs with the Falcons in 2023, I will convert his value into Nickelodeon-adjacent mashup shirts for children.
None of these would qualify as gifts. These are White Elephant offerings at a Christmas Party where you passive aggressively hate the hosts. “Hey, remember those two weeks where Cam Newton looked good, then got replaced by 2022’s 25th-best quarterback so hard the Patriots released him outright?”
.