Fitzpatrick, for one, had no qualms about the retailing of his jersey.

“Any way that I can help the Harvard football program and Harvard is great,” Fitzpatrick said.

Currently, The Coop gets its jerseys from two different providers—Russell Athletic and Nike.

“The ones we sell down in the stadium are from Russell, and we also sell some [in The Coop] from Nike,” Murphy said. “The reason we used Russell was that for the last couple years, Russell was the uniform maker for Harvard.”

All Harvard apparel sold by The Coop is subject to licensing approval by Harvard, and Russell Athletic and Nike secure those permissions on their own, as well as handle royalty payments. The Coop buys the finished product after all of those bureaucratic hoops are cleared.

Recently, the Harvard football team swapped its Russell Athletic jerseys for Reebok jerseys, creating a sticky situation for The Coop.

“That just happened, and it causes some problems for retailers,” Murphy said. “They have no obligation to call us and say, ‘We’re going to switch,’ so it’s the risk of doing business.”

Since The Coop deals directly with distributors such as Nike, its decisions are made completely independent of the athletic department, including that of choosing a player’s number.

“It’s a totally separate situation,” Murphy said. “We don’t talk to anybody. We don’t talk to the athletic department.”

“If I was really smart, I’d put the number on there of someone that has a very big extended family, because everybody would buy the shirt,” Murphy added.

But as funny as it sounds, there might actually be some truth to that theory.

“I’ve seen two fans so far with my jersey on,” Fitzpatrick said. “And that’s my mom and my dad.”

—Staff writer Michael R. James can be reached at mrjames@fas.harvard.edu.