Terps Trio: Nick Faust overseas, Under Armour's influence and a breakout football player

Parrish recites the usual litany of problems – agent scandal, summer craziness, unattractive excess –before reaching “heavy shoe-company influence.”

And then he wrote this:

Heavy shoe-company influence?

Check.

It's damn near impossible to watch the best prospects compete against the best prospects anymore because almost every elite prospect is aligned with either Nike, Adidas or Under Armour. So the Nike kids play in one place while the Adidas kids play in another and the Under Armour kids play in another. This often plays a role in recruiting, too. For instance, one of the interesting recruiting battles over the coming months will be for the services of twin brothers Aaron and Andrew Harrison, and most expect it to come down to Kentucky and Maryland.

Why Kentucky and Maryland?

Because Kentucky is Kentucky and John Calipari is John Calipari, and those two entities have a way of getting things done. And because Maryland is the alma mater of Kevin Plank, who is the CEO of Under Armour, which is the company that outfits Maryland's athletic department and this summer funded the Harrison twins, both of whom are consensus top-10 prospects.

"It's a legal way to help steer kids to Under Armour schools -- and it's genius, and it's not illegal," said college basketball analyst Doug Gottlieb, who is in the process of moving from ESPN to CBS Sports. "It's just copying the Adidas and Nike [format] -- and you can go back to the Converse/Sonny Vaccaro days -- and taking kind of that next step with it."

Exactly.

Perhaps the thing that the average college basketball fan comprehends least is the deft, powerful hand that shoe companies have in shaping the sport. On its face, the notion seems absurd: Oh, you mean Five-star Jimmy got some free Nike shoes when he was 15 and picked his college based on that? Sure.

It’s more complicated than that, of course. Five-star Jimmy gets the idea of going to a Nike school implanted by the free shoes, and then his AAU coach, who is being funneled money by Nike (through summer league sponsorships) and certain schools (they get paid to speak at camps), cultivates the idea.

This has long been a wildly successful business strategy for the shoe companies. Elite athletes have a way of establishing what counts as “cool.” Getting your shoes on their feet is like dropping a match in a drought-dry field. The product spreads quickly.

Under Armour has a sort of up-from-the-boot-straps appeal. Founder Kevin Plank has carefully cultivated the narrative around his business, but the story has retained its charm: seeking shirts that dried more quickly, Plank, then a football player at Maryland, began experimenting with different fabrics. Now he’s worth a billion dollars.

In many ways, Under Armour’s spread is a triumph of quality. Athletes of a certain age – say, 30ish – saw UA stuff pop up 10 years ago, tried it and liked it. But one of the company’s big breaks came through incidental marketing: quarterback Jeff George showed up on the cover of USA Today wearing a UA shirt.

When Under Armour began its push into the lucrative basketball market a few years ago, near-guerilla, grass-roots campaigns were launched at select high schools. One of them happened to be in the town where I used to live. The Bloomington (IN) South Panthers had just won a state title in the country’s most basketball-mad state, had at least four future Division I players on the roster and, one day, showed up wearing hundreds of dollars worth of Under Armour gear. The school board eventually had to discuss the matter to make sure that the “sponsorship” fit within the rules.

Meanwhile, every kid aged 5 to 14 who ever dreamed of playing for the Panthers was demanding his or her parents purchase Under Armour gear. You’d walk into stores that were otherwise well-stocked with shirts from Nike and Adidas and Reebok, and there’d be only oddly sized and strangely colored Under Armour stuff left on the rack.

Sponsoring a summer league team is a different tactic, of course. These kids play, as Parrish noted, in far-flung tournaments across the country. They’re not seen in front of big crowds, or covered routinely by newspapers. But hard-core basketball fans closely follow recruiting, and every kid with thoughts of playing high-level basketball knows those hopes must run through summer play. So having an Under Armour team do well creates a real currency among the early adopters of the basketball culture.