agents or shoes, or agent and shoes?
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The correlation between summer team Shoe brand and school shoe brand is significant, but not 1 to 1. See these USA Today stories. http://usatodayhss.com/2014/basketball-recruits-shoe-contracts-nike-adidas
Looking at Shoe Brands and recruiting asymmetries in D1 feels like astronomers and physicists looking at the Milky Way Galaxy and saying something is missing. There aren’t enough stars here to form the gravity needed to hold this thing together. The stars are part of it, but there has got to be something more.
The astronomers and physicists finally figured out there was a black hole at the center holding our Milky Way together.
What might be the black hole at the center of D1 recruiting?
Pitino speaks of a reduced recruiting pool open to adidas coaches vis a vis Nike coaches, something the data seems to suggest.
But this does not explain the imperfect correlation either.
Hurt feelings and greener pastures and coach sizzle explain some of it. Relationships can sour and persons can change loyalties easily. But this does not seem to explain how much lack of correlation there is.
The only hint I have right now is the voice of 100 in my ear writing about World Wide Wes once upon a time.
Cal and some others interviewed in the USA Today stories seem to put some care into the wording of their answers that suggest shoe brand is not driving things. And Nike officials declined to answer questions. Some parents said they were in control of their children’s recruiting.
But no one is saying that nothing else is involved, and not a parent, player, coach or reporter, mentioned a word about agents or agent runners.
Hmmmmm.
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I think more than anything kids like the Nike Brand better. I don’t think it will ever change, its been ingrained in our culture. Addidas has tried with the funky colored jersey’s to sway brand recognition their way but no matter what happens they are not going to win.
On an individual basis with recruits, Blakeney is the first real blown up story about a recruit maybe being influenced on this. I’m sure its happened before without much pub, but because he’s a top 20 kid its gotten the notice of people. Recruiting wasn’t the same even 5 years ago and maybe this happened a lot behind the scenes.
Do you think shoe companies try and influence things on the AAU level, HS school level, maybe even before that yes I do. If you grow up on Nike and you go to a school with Addidas or Under Armor etc. it makes a difference to kids. It would basically take kids being undercover whistleblowers to find out exactly what might happen.
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Jaybate, just read this about Miami switching to adidas
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Why wouldn’t one just switch to Nike or Under Armour if it give you the competitive advantage?
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Several reasons, the main one being money. Also, Nike might not necessarily be interested in a particular school. Take KU and KSU. I will guess that KU is not a preferred target for Nike since the big money maker, football, is mediocre at best, and the Kansas market is very small compared to other schools. KSU, on the other hand, has a very good football program and because, like KU, is in a small market, the contract is relatively small. As a flagship Adidas school, KU gets considerably more money from Adidas that it would get from Nike.
Yes, Nike has the majority of schools but only the big programs get the big bucks, the smaller programs get considerably smaller contracts, many of them consisting mostly of uniforms and little if any money. In short, many schools may want to switch to Nike but Nike might not necessarily be interested.
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I don’t know generations can be fickle. Sometimes they do things the opposite or different just to be different than the generation before them.
That’s why we see a big advertisement push to brain wash, opps I mean to encourage kids to want their product.
There is a belief in the advertisement and business world of customer loyalty. However it’s really a ghost. A few generations back this theory would be correct flash forward a few generations, and it’s all about the next greatest and coolest subject matter.
Even the aging great Americans aren’t as loyal to the products they once bought. They too are looking over the fence.
No doubt Nike is King today, as they should be. They earned it, but things change. They really do. It wasn’t to long ago if someone said Under Armor, you would have thought is that some kind of protection that a person where’s under their uniform.
