Washington has officially switched from Nike to Adidas in the apparel game. The university sent out a release on Tuesday acknowledging it had agreed to a 10-year partnership with the apparel company pending a Board of Regents approval. The deal would begin in 2019.
The significance of the deal is two-fold. First, it ends a 20-year partnership Washington had with Nike and gives Adidas its 12th licensed NCAA program. It also gives adidas a bigger presence in the Northwest and the Pacific in general; Arizona State is the only other Pac-12 program with an adidas deal.
Second, it's hella rich.
According to the Seattle Times, the $119 million deal is one of the 10 most valuable of its kind in college athletics and worth more per year than Adidas' recent $128 million deal with Nebraska. The Times notes that Adidas agreed to pay Washington "$5.275 million annually in cash, $5.58 million annually in product and $1.1 million annually for marketing." That's a little over three times what the school was making annually from its deal with Nike, per the paper.
In the financial arms race, those are significant numbers. Still, the crown jewel of apparel deals was Under Armour's 15-year, $280-million agreement with UCLA, the biggest in NCAA history.
