Adidas on Wednesday added a new facet to the ever-growing NIL marketplace by becoming the first outfitter to launch its own program.
As an expansion of its "Impossible is Nothing" campaign, the multinational conglomerate will give the athletes at the 109 Division I schools it outfits the opportunity to get paid to wear the three stripes.
For those unfamiliar, "Impossible is Nothing" is a campaign built more on driving social change than thunderous dunks and sick catches. (As always, the end goal is to get as many people in as many Adidas-branded clothing items as possible.)
So, when I say that Adidas might be as or more interested in, say, an Akron volleyball player than Miami QB Tyler Van Dyke or Kansas small forward Ochai Agbaji, I mean it.
“As we look at college athletics and see some of the discrepancies within the landscape, we want to make sure we’re elevating our HBCUs and trying to find every moment we can to really elevate in this space and provide them opportunities that, quite frankly, in the past they might not have been afforded to,” Adidas executive Jim Murphy told Sports Illustrated.
As expected, details are scarce at this time. The program will begin in the fall with FBS and HBCU schools up first. How many athletes can opt in, what they're expected to do and how much they can earn remains to be seen.
If successful for both sides, the program represents groundbreaking shift in the college sports economy.
For decades, fortunes were spent and built on shoe companies paying adults -- from ADs and coaches, to AAU coaches, to the ever-present "handlers" -- to get the kids in those adults' care to wear their gear. While that market will surely continue, this is the first time an athlete doesn't have to be a pro-level all-star to make (over the table) money simply for wearing Adidas gear.
“We started to think about how we could do something on a larger scale outside of just individual endorsement deals,” Murphy told SI. “When we really looked across NIL and we grounded it in our mission statement that through sport, we have the power to change lives, I think that’s where we really started to grasp the idea.”
The Adidas campaign is also the widest-ranging NIL effort to date. A handful of schools have launched NIL collectives, but many more have not, and even those schools that have their own collectives are mainly focused on revenue sports. Roughly 30 percent of all Division I athletes wear Adidas gear.
If this push works, it's only a matter of time until Nike and Under Armour jump in, too.