Once again, you bull****. You bull**** because that's all you've got. You bull**** because you know nothing.
As always, you make ad hominem arguments, because you've got nothing. I'm not trying to trash YOU, I don't care about you at all. I will, though, destroy your bullcrap argument. And before you go whining about what I did say about YOU, I just pointed out that you are a loyal foot-soldier for Beta Blake James and his false arguments about the adidas pot of gold under the rainbow. There may be other subjects on which you can contribute truthful and accurate points, but this isn't one of them.
And as for
@Rellyrell , don't go putting words in his mouth. He has never once been "unwilling to say that we would have actually made more money under Nike". In fact, he has pretty much said the opposite. Does he have spreadsheet evidence? No he does not. But do I know someone who knows the sales figures? Yes I do. And, yes, some of this depends on what the final royalty terms would have been and how aggressive Nike would have been. But just to use a simple example...if you put a UM design on, say, a Pegasus or a Jordan 1, IT WILL SELL MORE THAN A COMPARABLE ADIDAS SHOE, thus making us MORE ROYALTY MONEY. This isn't complicated. If you honestly believe that we would NOT HAVE sold more Nike merchandise over the last eight years than what we sold in adidas merchandise, then we can't even have a conversation. Simply stated, a higher sales volume on a royalty model would have yielded us MORE MONEY.
And, hey, if you don't want to take my word for it, go back into this thread. Multiple posters have said that they DID NOT purchase any adidas merch (excpet for perhaps the Boost) during the past 8 years. Why? Did our colors change? Did the logo change? If people don't like adidas, they don't like adidas. If people don't want to buy adidas gear, they won't buy adidas gear. That doesn't mean people stopped buying stuff. As has been pointed out, you can buy other brands who put the U on merch. So, just right there, you have an immediate impairment of volume by people who would buy Nike but would not buy adidas. AND THIS ISN'T UNIQUE TO MIAMI FANS. Multiple schools have learned the same hard lesson, when switching FROM Nike to go to (literally) any other non-Nike company. The money sounds nice, until you check the sales figures. This is not about me being a "Nike loyalist", this is about me talking to people who actually know what the numbers are (both now and in the past).
Finally, as per usual, you go back to the argument that means the least, and one that I haven't bothered to make in quite some time. "The uniforms were crap". Again, I won't belabor the fact that I ALSO TRACED the poor oversight of the last few Nike designs to our TERRIBLE Athletic Directors, one of whom was your idol, Beta Blake James. Nobody is arguing that the last few Nike uniforms were the best. But unlike you, I'm not some childish little product of going to school at UM in the late-aughts when it comes time to analyze EVERYTHING in that limited 4-year-window of a prism. I know very well what we had under Russell. I know what happened when UM became the FIRST UNIVERSITY IN THE NATION to sign a Nike-exclusive deal. We had plenty of great uniforms, plenty of great merchandise, plenty of great support from Nike and Russell when Sam Jankovich and Paul Dee were the ADs at Miami.
And don't give me crap about Miami "being bad at football" over the past 8 years. We still sold a ton of Nike merch from 2005-2015. And we have had a couple of "irrational exuberance" purchasing periods, when Richt was hired (and we made the ACC-CG), when Manny was hired, and now when Mario has been hired. Stop acting like we sell merch like we're Vanderbilt or something.
Keep turning this into a personal battle. It's ridiculous. This has nothing to do with whether I PERSONALLY want to go back to Nike. That is obvious. But my point of view means nothing in the big picture. NUMBERS DON'T LIE. You can sit here and trumpet the ONE DIMENSION of the up-front annual payment from adidas, while the rest of the building burns down. Sales are down. Interest is down. Designs are crap. Annual shoe offerings are mostly crap (unless its's an Ultraboost model).
And that's the thing. While every intelligent far-sighted university (not named Miami) continues to dump the adidas and Under Armour deals, you keep showing up like clockwork to tell us how awesome this deal was 8 years ago. In spite of how adidas tried to underpay us. In spite of the FBI investigation. In spite of Kanye. In spite of the poor sales. In spite of the terrible designs. In spite of saving the best designs for "team-only" release. IN SPITE OF THE OVERALL NUMBERS.
But, yeah, keep telling us about Beta Blake's one shining moment back in 2015, when he really stuck it to Nike. Continue to mock those of us who have both personal AND BUSINESS reasons for wanting to go back to our original FIRST-IN-THE-NATION relationship. And keep denying what the world around us sees, that Nike is DESTROYING adidas in the marketplace.
You want to make fun of the UM jerseys at the end of the Nike partnership? Hold my beer, and let me show you some of the ****** shoes that adidas has produced for Miami.
This was a special-edition "bowl game" shoe:
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This was the special UM "ZX 5000" model:
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This is the terrible UM "Supernova":
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The even worse UM Pro Bounce Low:
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And please allow me to say, I OWN EVERY ONE OF THE SHOES PICTURED ABOVE. And while they all look terrible, with the exception of the bowl-game AlphaBounce, THEY FIT EVEN WORSE THAN THEY LOOK. It's as if adidas paid a bunch of blind Asian children to both design and construct those shoes.
So, from now on, just keep your mouth shut when it comes to "the last few Nike jerseys" that they produced (and you conveniently forget about the FIRST BATCH of adidas jerseys). Because the adidas shoes are far FAR worse.
AND ADIDAS IS A SHOE COMPANY. But, hey, adidas is really knocking it out of the park with a basic jersey using block letters and simple sleeve stripes. Kudos. We could pay Russell to make a jersey comparable to what adidas has given us since the "feather sleeves".
THANKS ADIDAS, YOU MAKE A GREAT JERSEY THAT NOBODY COULD POSSIBLY REPLICATE...
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