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Today’s Case

Notre Dame’s partnership with Under Armour is ending - and they have an opportunity to usher in a new era of college apparel deal

With Under Armour pulling out of the college sports space after several years of expansion, The Athletic’s Andy Staples wrote an interesting opinion piece on how Notre Dame can use NIL to shape their next apparel deal:

Let’s say Notre Dame took my advice and signed with Lululemon, which does make shoes but not for basketball or any sport that requires cleats. The Lululemon logo would appear prominently on all of the jerseys and pants of every Notre Dame team, but footwear would be covered by a separate deal. It’s here that Notre Dame could make a non-exclusive deal with adidas or Nike for shoes. Even if it’s only a trade that allows the department enough product to outfit all the athletes who don’t have shoe deals (which would be most of them), that’s fine. This would work just as well if Notre Dame went with adidas or Nike for apparel.

The non-exclusive piece of the shoe deal means that if a top-10 basketball recruit wants to come to Notre Dame, that player can make a shoe deal prior to entering college. The shoe companies don’t have to wait, nor do they have to deal later with a flood of images of their player wearing a rival’s kicks. A football player could do the same, though it’s less likely that a player coming into college would command any sort of deal.

The Verdict:

• This is actually not a bad idea (in theory, of course).

  • Notre Dame’s brand is strong enough that they could leave some money on the table and leverage the true vision of NIL - allowing athletes to sign exclusive shoe deals AND profit from the Notre Dame brand.

• This won’t work for every sport and athlete.

  • As mentioned in the article, this will only benefit a handful of student-athletes having enough star power to earn their exclusive shoe deal via NIL. The other 99% of athletes could sign non-exclusive shoe deals.

• This is happening to an extent at other schools

  • Hailey Van Lith transferred to LSU (a Nike school) while maintaining her adidas contract to wear their products outside of official team activities and campus facilities.

    • Fairly certain adidas would highly prefer Van Lith to wear their shoes during games - something she could do in this proposed model.

More college athletes should be hosting youth camps this summer

This is one of the easiest ways (relatively speaking) for college athletes to make money. Check out this quick video!

Question of the Day

What percent of Division II & III athletes have completed an NIL deal?

• Less than 1%

• 1-5%

• 6-10%

• 11%+

Vote on the Sports Court Instagram Story and comment below.

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Court is adjourned. Go be great!!