USF’s Under Armour Deal One of The Best Around

The Tampa Bay Business Journal is often a highly underrated resource for finding out what’s happening in Tampa, and today they published their annual ranking of the value of every apparel deal in college sports they can find.

Included is a searchable database, so you can check how each school is doing. and USF compares very favorably to peer schools. In the American, it stands like this:

AAC Schools:
Cinci: $4.695 million (Under Armour)
UConn: $4.475 million (Nike)
USF: $3.060 million (UA)
ECU: $1.725 million (Adidas)
Houston: $1.3 million (Nike)

The rest aren’t available through the database yet, including UCF’s new deal with Nike that runs through 2022, but is sheltered by UCF’s DSO for athletics.

The deal also compares very favorably among Florida FBS football schools:

FSU: $4.21 million (Nike)
UF: $3.2 million (Nike)
USF: $3.06 million (UA)
FIU: $373K (Adidas)
FAU: $295K (Adidas)

UCF has a DSO, and Miami is private.

USF has the third-largest deal listed amongst all schools in the Group of Five. Here’s each conference with their best deal:

La. Tech: C-USA. $690K (Adidas)
Kent State: MAC. $350K (Under Armour)
Boise State: Mountain West. $1.275 million (Nike)
Louisiana Lafayette: Sun Belt. $295K (Adidas)

USF is sixth amongst the nine UA schools listed, and ahead of P5 members Utah ($2.541 million) and Texas Tech ($2.55 mil) for the brand. Part of this is probably the timing of contracts, but some of it is the value UA sees in the Bulls.

The full details of USF’s deal are here as they linked the contract, which expires June 30th, 2018. Mark Harlan has said before he thinks the apparel deal is an opportunity for increased revenue for the Bulls, so we’ll see what kind of a deal he can work out before this one expires.

USF cannot negotiate with any other apparel supplier until October 1st, 2017. Under Armour also has right of first refusal on an offer from another supplier after this deal expires, so they can match whatever Nike and Adidas put out when the negotiating window opens.

We bag on Doug Woolard a lot around here but the relationship he forged with Under Armour in 2008, at a time when that wasn’t as popular a thing to do, has been a real win for USF. And if you ask USF coaches, managers, and equipment people, they overwhelmingly love the relationship the school has with UA.

Score this one as a win for the Bulls, and we’ll see how apparel revenue is affected next year by what could be a very successful football season.