The hoops ideology report (cont.)

About shoe deals ...

33. Nike is dominating the college hoops shoe war. Its market share was 72.1 percent, with 217 of our 301 respondents wearing the Swoosh.

34. Adidas came in a distant second, with a market share of 26.2 percent. Seventy-nine of our 301 respondents reported wearing three-striped kicks.

35. Under Armour -- which sponsors Brandon Jennings -- has entered into deals with Auburn, Loyola (Md.) and Maryland, although all three teams only wear Under Armour jerseys. Their sneakers come from Nike.

36. The market share for Reebok, which was purchased by Adidas in 2005, was just 0.6 percent, or two of 301 teams.

37. The two Reebok teams are Boston College -- whose campus is 17 miles from Reebok's U.S. headquarters in Canton, Mass. -- and La Salle.

38. Converse (which is owned by Nike) had a market share in the survey of just 0.3 percent. The only school to report wearing Cons was Marquette, which entered into the deal to strengthen its ties to alum (and recruiting selling point) Dwyane Wade, a Cons spokesman.

39. New Balance actually has a market share equal to Reebok's, at 0.6 percent. The two surveyed schools who reported rocking New Balances were Mount St. Mary's and Lafayette. (Dartmouth wears New Balance jerseys, but Nike shoes). A New Balance spokesperson explained the deals as such: "The schools are purchasing the shoes from New Balance at a discounted rate -- that is true across the board. Some teams also receive assistance with their summer camp programs or donations to the programs or coaches charity, etc." That's a far cry from the $46 million deal UConn has with Nike ... but still, it's something.

40. Lafayette coach Fran O'Hanlon is believed to be the first to get on board with New Balance. "When I took over [in 1995] our team had two wins, so there was not a deluge of people at my door looking to sign Lafayette," he said. "There was a guy named Paul Heffernan who went to Villanova [O'Hanlon's alma mater] and was working at New Balance. He wasn't in basketball. He was in golf. A friend of mine called him and said, 'Would be you be interested in helping out Lafeyette?' Early on they gave us mostly just shoes. We were the first ones. I thought everybody would follow us, you know, 'Be like Mike.'"

About spending ...

41. Basketball budget data from the Office of Postsecondary Education shows that only 14 schools spent more than $6 million on their programs in 2006-07 (which is the most recent season available). Of those 14 schools, four were from the SEC (including Nos. 1 and 2, Kentucky and Florida), four were from the Big East and four were from the Big 12.

42. The Pac-10 is a cost-effective league. It managed to be the strongest conference in '07-08 despite not having a single team even in the top 20 in spending. The entire West Coast, in fact, does it on the cheap: None of the top 20 was even located west of Lubbock, Texas. The top 20 basketball budgets are plotted on the Google Map below:

View Larger Map

43. The lowest-budgeted, BCS-conference basketball program in that 2007 data was South Florida, at $2,058,038. The Bulls ranked 104th nationally in spending. The second-lowest budget for a BCS-conference basketball program was Mississippi State, which spent $2,224,925 in '07 and ranked 96th in the country.*

(* An original report stating that West Virginia and Stanford were the two lowest-budgeted BCS-conference programs was incorrect. Those figures referred to the teams' operating expenses for '07 rather than their overall expenses.)

44. The highest-budgeted basketball program outside of a BCS conference was at the University of Memphis, which spent $4,705,097 and ranked 28th nationally. The second-highest non-BCS-conference basketball budget was at TCU, which spent $3,590,513 and was ranked 55th.

About hiring ...

45. The most likely way to land a head-coaching job at a D-I school ... is to already be a head coach at a different D-I school. We were able to gather data for all 341 teams, which showed that 41.6 percent of coaches (142) were hired from other head-coaching positions.

46. The most likely way to land a head-coaching gig if you're an assistant ... is to jump ship to a different program. Our data shows that 37.5 percent (128-of-341) of head coaches were previously an assistant for a different team.

47. Being promoted from within is less than half as likely to happen: Only 17.0 percent of head coaches (58-of-341) climbed the ranks in that manner.

48. A much smaller group -- 13-of-341, or 3.8 percent -- came from either outside or the unemployment line. This list includes McKillop, who was a high-school coach at Long Island Lutheran (but also a former Davidson assistant) when he was hired by the Wildcats; NC State's Sidney Lowe, who was an assistant with the Detroit Pistons; and guys such as Florida Atlantic's Mike Jarvis, Coastal Carolina's Cliff Ellis and Texas A&M Corpus-Christi's Perry Clark, who came out of purgatory to land new gigs, after being fired from their previous ones.

49. If you're an assistant eyeing a jump to a lead job, the league where it's most likely to happen is the America East, where every coach was hired out of the assistant ranks. Six came from outside their respective programs, and three came from inside.

50. The league where it's not going to happen is the SEC, where only one head coach was an assistant directly prior to landing his gig: Mississippi State's Rick Stansbury, who was serving as head-coach designate there under Richard Williams in 1998. It's become a conference where everyone's looking for their own Bruce Pearl ... and not the second coming of Rick Stansbury.