NCAA Tournament of Shoes : Sneaker Makers Pay Big to Adorn Feet of Players on Top Teams

For Campbell University, the tiny North Carolina school competing in its first NCAA Division 1 basketball tournament, it isn’t bad enough that its opening-round opponent is Duke University, the tournament favorite and No. 1 ranked team in the nation.

No, the crowning indignity is that when the Campbell players take to the court this afternoon, they will be wearing sneakers that the school actually paid for.

The National Collegiate Athletic Assn. men’s tournament, the year’s most prestigious showcase for college basketball, is also the top showcase for shoe companies that sign star coaches to six-figure endorsement contracts.

It’s never specifically written into a contract, but the coaches manage to persuade their athletes to wear the sponsor’s shoes on the court. Thus, UCLA is a Converse school, USC an LA Gear school, Pepperdine a Reebok school and so on.

Nike and Converse are the leaders in this game, landing, respectively, 29 and 20 of the 64 teams in the tournament.

What’s the exposure worth?

According to Joyce Julius, an Ann Arbor, Mich., consultant on sports sponsorship, if a team took the national championship, winning all six tournament games on network TV, the exposure could be worth up to $15 million. That’s assuming an average cost of about $120,000 per 30-second commercial. (Final Four spots may go as high as $250,000.)

“One of those games has to be worth a couple or 3 million dollars to us,” said Don Crenshaw, a former USC basketball player who is now Adidas’ marketing manager for basketball.

Adidas can boast of only two teams, but they’re blue chippers: Duke and Indiana, both ranked by most oddsmakers as among the tournament’s top five prospects. Indiana’s Bobby Knight, arguably the nation’s best known college basketball coach, prowls courtside in a V-neck sweater with the Adidas trademark clearly visible.

Shoe makers prefer the NCAA tournament over other events because it’s “better delineated in terms of footwear than the Super Bowl or World Series,” Crenshaw said. “You’ve got one team wearing nothing but your product. In a three-hour broadcast, you can’t help but be noticed.”

Makers also like basketball because the shoes are highly visible on TV and more of the viewers are potential customers than, say, football or baseball fans.

The National Assn. of Basketball Coaches convention--held concurrently with the tournament’s Final Four matchups--has practically become a trade show for the athletic footwear industry.

Converse, for example, will “probably run 3,500 coaches through our tent” during Final Four weekend April 4-6 in Minneapolis, promotions manager Peter Judge said.

As competition among the shoe companies has pushed the price for the top basketball schools into the sky, smaller schools that used to at least be able to count on free equipment now have to pay their own way.

Dale Brown of Louisiana State University earns about $250,000 to push LA Gear, the top contract among basketball coaches, according to a well-informed source in the industry.

But Campbell’s coach, Billy Lee, has “one of those small-time deals where you buy 16 pairs and get two free,” an athletic department spokeswoman said with a laugh. “It’s no biggie.”