The Auburn Tigers’ season is over. They were unceremoniously thrashed by South Carolina in the first round of the SEC tournament. With a 14-16 record, they will have no postseason. Tony Barbee has been canned after four unsuccessful years as head coach. I’m not sure the extent to which Auburn students and alums care about their basketball team, but anyone who does is surely unhappy. Also unhappy is graduating senior Allen Payne, who — feeling safe to speak his mind now that his college basketball career is over — tweeted that Auburn “will struggle as long as we are under Under Armour.”
Payne is being a whit cryptic, but I’m pretty sure he means Auburn’s association with Under Armour sinks it by making it nigh impossible to recruit top high school talent. Payne’s assertion follows the line of thinking that, because Nike and Adidas sponsor a slew of the most prominent basketball camps, tournaments and AAU teams, they have a hand in steering the best young players toward programs — and agents, for that matter — with which their companies are affiliated. This isn’t legal under NCAA rules, but there’s a mound of evidence that it goes on. It makes sense that shoe companies would purchase influence in much the same way corporations that contribute to political campaigns do. They bankroll the development of future stars and place them in friendly colleges; then, if and when those guys succeed in the NBA, the companies have a strong pre-existing relationship with a young up-and-comer who can help them sell gear and T-shirts.
Under Armour is — bear with me, this is going to sound nauseatingly Rovellian — a second-tier basketball brand. It’s not that UA doesn’t sponsor the same sorts of things the bigger companies do, but it doesn’t have the foothold in the marketplace that Nike or Adidas has. It also just hasn’t been around as long. Nike has been synonymous with basketball since Jordan; Under Armour was founded in 1996 and has allocated a hefty share of its advertising budget to gaining traction in the college football realm. The most successful Under Armour-sponsored school is Maryland or Boston College, whereas the big two provide jerseys and equipment for just about every major program in the country. The UA-funded Hoop Group camp just started in 2010; Nike sponsored Sonny Vaccaro’s now-defunct ABCD camp, which featured everyone from Ewing to LeBron during its run, back in 1984.
As with all influence-buying, it’s impossible to put numbers to what having an attractive camp or sponsoring a notable AAU team or providing jerseys to a powerhouse like Duke or Kentucky nets a shoe-maker. I’m sure there’s a cluttered whiteboard at Adidas headquarters that attempts to explain all this, but the basic strategy is: Spend some money to get the second-best 14-year-old in the country wearing your shoes; spend a little more to finance an elite AAU squad; spend a bunch more to put UCLA in three stripes; hope it all adds up to an all-star peddling your product. This is how you become a thing that people know about and want to buy.
I’m looking at this through a basketball lens, but Under Armour probably came to Auburn with an interest in being the chosen brand of Auburn Football, and because these types of deals are athletic department-wide, it also outfits the basketball team. This has had the unintended consequence of dooming the basketball program, which wasn’t particularly good in the first place.
It’s not shocking that the marketplace eats some programs alive. College sports are big business, and there are winners and losers, just like in any industry. When you start to examine the machine that identifies, develops and funnels basketball prodigies toward certain schools, it makes sense why Auburn carrying an Under Armour insignia on its chest as opposed to a swoosh might contribute to its futility. But knowing the truth is different from being comforted by it or comfortable with it. You start to feel like Phil Knight and Herbert Hainer run the world, and that feeling isn’t exactly pleasant.