USA TODAY International Edition
Once cheating, shoe biz payoffs now legit
On the heels of Adidas’ landmark announcement Wednesday it was launching a name, image and likeness program accessible to all Division I athletes at Adidas- affiliated schools, Georgia Tech athletic director Todd Stansbury called it “a perfect example of Adidas’ forwardthinking approach to college athletes.”
And to think, just a few years ago, a lot of folks would have called it something else: a crime.
Remember the FBI investigation into college basketball, which centered in part on Adidas facilitating the recruitment of prospects with illicit payments? As serious as it seemed then, when FBI agents were knocking on doors of college coaches and sweeping through basketball offices, the true legacy of that scandal is how much of a joke it turned out to be.
Aside from sending the already scandal- plagued Louisville program into a tailspin and just recently taking down LSU coach Will Wade, college basketball is basically the same as it ever was. For most of the programs caught up in the investigation, the heavy hand of justice never came.
But four people did get sentenced to jail so the FBI could justify the resources it poured into this investigation. One, Book Richardson, was an assistant coach at Arizona. Two of them, Jim Gatto and Merl Code, were Adidas employees. And then there’s Christian Dawkins, a grassroots basketball middleman who thought he was hustling a broken system when, in fact, he was dealing with undercover FBI agents.
As absurd as it is that people went to actual prison for under- the- table payments that have been part of the college sports environment since time immemorial, it looks so much worse today.
What’s the difference between what Gatto and Code were doing and the big Adidas announcement that it will pay college athletes at schools it sponsors? In principle, not much other than it’s out the open, taxed and the money will go to the players rather than handlers influencing their decision.
But the biggest thing that’s changed is that the NCAA is now allowing it.
Had the people running college sports figured out years ago that athletes earning money off their name, image and likeness was inevitable, it’s hard to imagine the need for the people running Adidas’ grassroots division to cut under- the- table deals to help Louisville, Kansas and other top- level Adidas schools land the best players.
Now, it will just be done a different way – through tweets and promotional activities that officially stamp the players as Adidas spokespeople. Which has actually been an unofficial thing for a long time in the basketball grassroots system where – surprise, surprise – many of the elite prospects end up at colleges sponsored by the same shoe company that provided travel expenses and gear for their AAU team.
Some people may not like those connections being as in- your- face as they’re now going to be in the shoe company world, but doesn’t that feel like a more honest transaction than the constant suspicion surrounding how so many schools end up with top recruits?
A lot of the specifics on how Adidas will manage this program are to be determined, including how much money athletes can make and what they’ll have to do to earn it. But of the many supposed game- changers in the evolving NIL environment, this is one that has real potential to shake up the business.
Will Nike and Under Armour now be forced to match or exceed what Adidas is doing, or risk more prospects flocking to their top competitor? Will recruitments of certain athletes become proxy wars among big brands, just as they are evolving now with booster collectives?
And ultimately, will the NCAA – which has been so overwhelmed by NIL to the point of not having many enforceable rules at all – respond by trying to limit certain aspects of this?
Either way, athletes are going to be the main beneficiaries, which is how it should be.
If Adidas is true to its announcement Wednesday, the women’s tennis player at Georgia Tech is going to have the same opportunity as the men’s basketball player at Kansas or the football player at North Carolina State to get a slice of the pie in return for wearing that company’s logo.
When longtime shoe company executive Sonny Vaccaro pioneered this practice in the late 1980s and early 1990s to help Nike grow its brand, the idea was to pay top coaches like John Thompson and Jerry Tarkanian in exchange for outfitting their teams with shoes and uniforms. Suddenly, the Nike logo was everywhere when college basketball was played on TV.
Over time, that concept morphed into schools making tens of millions of dollars ( with coaches still pocketing a lot of it) to partner with shoe companies. The only people who hadn’t been cut in on it, at least officially, were the players. And when the players did get some of the shoe money, it was quoteunquote “scandal.”
Now, as the Georgia Tech athletic director said Wednesday, it’s just a “forward- thinking approach to college athletics.”
And it can’t come a moment too soon.