Won't You Take Me To . . . Niketown

Thanks to a Stanford connection, I was invited to go to a special event at Niketown San Francisco last weekend.  Being the dedicated sneaker freak that I am, I woke up at 5:30 AM to be at the store at 7:00 AM, a full three hours before store opening.  In exchange for my early rising, the reward was an employee discount of 40-50% off anything in the store.  Needless to say, I did some serious damage to my credit card bill; four pairs of sneakers and over $200 spent.

Aside from being an opportunity to get a great deal on some "kicks," the trip to Niketown was a great barometer for gauging which professional athletes are growing (and shrinking) in popularity.  I was last in a Niketown store in New York over the summer, and a lot has changed in the sports world since then.  Here's what I learned about the last half-year in sports on my most recent Niketown trip.

• LeBron James is DOWN.  Niketown confirmed what I already knew: The King's popularity has seriously dropped since he took his talents to South Beach.  The LJ23 logo has been swapped for an awkward looking lion's head, and LeBron's gear is now buried below tons of purple-and-gold Kobe stuff.  In fact, another Nike hoops stud seems to be quickly gaining groud on LeBron.  Kevin Durant is UP; it's the Durantula's shoes that sit alongside Kobe's on the racks, not LeBron's.

• Soccer is DOWN.  Last time I was in Niketown over the summer, the World Cup was in full swing and soccer gear (team U.S.A., Brazil and the Netherlands in particular) was all over the store.  Now, the soccer gear was relegated to a small area on the top floor, sandwiched in between tennis and golf.  Instead, Skateboarding and Paul Rodriguez, Jr. are UP.  The Mexican-American skateboarder has his green-and-gold, #84 apparel all over the store, much to my surprise.

• Manny Pacquiao is UP.  Pacman has his own line of blue-and-red gear and a weird-looking logo, now (see the back of the left shoe), and Nike seems to be trying to turn him into more than just a boxer.  He's essentially the go-to "workout" athlete right now, replacing some of the void left by Lance Armstrong's departure from cycling glory.  Perhaps not surprisingly, Pacquiao's stuff is taking over the real estate previously occupied by golf; Tiger Woods is WAY DOWN.  He still has a presence in the store, but he's not the Nike star child he once was.

There were other notable trends at Niketown, but those were the major ones.  I'll have to take another trip there before the school year is out to see how the trends change once again as winter turns into spring.  This will be my last post until after Christmas, as I'm headed out of the country for the next two weeks and likely wont have many / any opportunities to write.  Until then, Happy Holidays!

The Super America Conference: A Vision

By now you've surely heard that TCU will be joining the Big East for all sports starting with the 2012-2013 academic year, a move undoubtedly motivated solely by the cash-minting machine that is major college football.  The move gives TCU the BCS conference slot that it covets, while the Big East gains entry into the attractive Texas media and recruiting markets.  The Big East, however, isn't just a football conference.  In fact, it's barely a football conference at all right now.  As any East Coaster can tell you, the Big East is all about college hoops, and is filled with power programs that make it the nation's most dominant college basketball conference.

As competitive as schools like Syracuse, Louisville, Connecticut, Pittsburgh and Georgetown are on a national scale year after year, the conference's undisciplined approach to expansion has significantly diluted the Big East basketball talent pool.  While TCU will be the icing on the cake in this regard, it's far from the start of the problem; in addition to the Big East mainstays with hoops programs that have fallen apart in the 21st century (such as St. John's, Rutgers and Seton Hall), the Big East has acquired a handful of schools that have no business competing in a power basketball conference (including South Florida and DePaul).

Given that the Big East has clearly over-expanded (the conference will have 17 basketball-playing schools once TCU joins), there's only one logical thing to do: blow up the entire Big East system and start over.  Without further ado, I give you: The Super America Conference! (The name change is primarily motivated by the fact that no conference that includes schools from Texas, Wisconsin and Illinois should have the word "East" in it.)

You might be thinking that a Big East-to-Super America conversion would involve some league contraction, but you'd be wrong.  In fact, the proposal (flushed out earlier this evening with the help of one of Stanford's preeminent sports experts) would ideally involve adding three additional teams to get to a total of 20.  While I haven't fully thought out who might make sense to add, let's take three schools with strong basketball programs, relative geographic proximity to the bulk of the current Big East teams, and mediocre to non-existent football programs (to avoid further complications around the BCS system).  The Atlantic-10 seems ripe for pillaging, so let's move Temple, Xavier and Dayton into the Super America conference.

Now that we have 20 teams, let's split them into two divisions of 10.  Let's not do this randomly or geographically, though; let's split them by ability.  The 10 best teams go in to Division A, while the bottom 10 start off in Division B.  For the first Super America season, the split can be based on some sort of historical strength metric (average RPI over the last five years or something similar).  Going forward, though, the divisions will change year-to-year based on an English Premier League-style relegation system.  The bottom two teams from Division A (based on conference record) will drop down to Division B for the following season, while the two top Division B teams will take their place.  Conference games will only include matchups with the other nine teams within the Division, though teams will be permitted to schedule games with teams from the other Division as part of their non-conference schedules (to ensure that we can have a UConn vs. Syracuse game every year regardless of whether one of them is relegated to Division B for a season).

What about the Super America conference tournament, you ask?  Let's make it a 12-team event: the top four teams in Division A get first round byes.  The 5th through 8th best teams in Division A will host the 1st through 4th best teams from Division B in the first round, with the winners advancing to face the top four from A.  The bottom two teams from Division A (already scheduled for relegation down to Division B) and the bottom six teams from Division B don't make the conference tournament (and realistically, don't deserve to).  This way, relegation is based completely on regular season conference record (to emphasize the importance of conference games, even within Division B), but the automatic bid granted to the Super America conference tournament champion could conceivably go to one of the two teams that makes the tournament but isn't scheduled for promotion to Division A (in other words, Division B teams numbers three and four).

Admittedly there are a ton of details that I need to think through more, including the financial ramifications of this proposal.  All I know is this would add a lot more excitement to what we currently know as Big East basketball.  The relegation system allows us to see the cream of the crop of the Super America conference (as determined by current ability, not program reputation) play a home-and-home in a given season, rather than the current system which occasionally replaces a UConn vs. Pitt matchup for a UConn vs. Depaul one.  It provides incentive for Division B teams to compete throughout the season, not only for one of the two promotion slots, but also for one of the four conference tournament berths.  Even the cellar or Division A will be exciting as teams 7-10 battle to avoid being sent down.  Only the bottom of Division B will be boring, but let's be realistic - no system is going to make Rutgers versus TCU particularly exciting.

If the Big East wants to keep expanding, let's encourage it.  Rather than just diluting the best basketball conference in America, though, let's turn it into something that every college basketball fan can get excited about.