Dan Wetzel:
For about 40 years Nike and Adidas ran college basketball. They sponsored the teams. They paid the coaches. They stocked the rosters … via everything from running vast grassroots systems in order to identify and control recruits to flat out paying players to sign with their preferred “blue blood” programs.
Their top teams, not surprisingly, dominated the game in general and March Madness in particular.
The past couple Final Fours suggest Nike's and Adidas’ influence over the on-court results may be waning, at least to the extremes of the past.
A year after a Final Four with three first-time participants (Florida Atlantic, Miami, San Diego State), here comes three more who either have never been (Alabama), or are ending lengthy droughts that date to 1983 (North Carolina State) and 1980 (Purdue). Each of them were constructed in ways that wouldn’t have made sense even five years ago.
Connecticut, meanwhile, is back and looking for consecutive national championships, but despite a Nike deal, it has never had the shoe company lean in heavily to do its recruiting. Under Dan Hurley, like Jim Calhoun before him, the Huskies are a product of intense coaching and culture as much as anything.
It begs a question, did the confluence of NIL, the FBI and the transfer portal combine to finally break the decades-long stronghold Nike and Adidas had on college basketball?
sports.yahoo.com
For about 40 years Nike and Adidas ran college basketball. They sponsored the teams. They paid the coaches. They stocked the rosters … via everything from running vast grassroots systems in order to identify and control recruits to flat out paying players to sign with their preferred “blue blood” programs.
Their top teams, not surprisingly, dominated the game in general and March Madness in particular.
The past couple Final Fours suggest Nike's and Adidas’ influence over the on-court results may be waning, at least to the extremes of the past.
A year after a Final Four with three first-time participants (Florida Atlantic, Miami, San Diego State), here comes three more who either have never been (Alabama), or are ending lengthy droughts that date to 1983 (North Carolina State) and 1980 (Purdue). Each of them were constructed in ways that wouldn’t have made sense even five years ago.
Connecticut, meanwhile, is back and looking for consecutive national championships, but despite a Nike deal, it has never had the shoe company lean in heavily to do its recruiting. Under Dan Hurley, like Jim Calhoun before him, the Huskies are a product of intense coaching and culture as much as anything.
It begs a question, did the confluence of NIL, the FBI and the transfer portal combine to finally break the decades-long stronghold Nike and Adidas had on college basketball?
March Madness: How the shoe company influence has been neutralized
Did the confluence of NIL, the FBI and the transfer portal combine to finally break the decades-long stronghold Nike and Adidas had on college basketball?
sports.yahoo.com
