USC Athletics and Nike signed a ten-year extension running through 2036, preserving a relationship that dates to 1995 but offering no public indication of annual value. The announcement came seventeen months after USC joined the Big Ten, a move that repositioned the school's media income and sponsorship ceiling but left its apparel economics opaque.
The deal covers uniforms, footwear, and training gear for all 21 varsity programs. Nike will continue outfitting teams in Jordan Brand football kits, a sub-label assignment the company reserves for marquee programs. USC becomes one of 13 schools wearing Jordan on Saturdays, alongside Michigan, Florida, and North Carolina. The extension was signed in March 2025 and announced publicly in April, standard sequencing for deals negotiated outside renewal windows.
What matters is the silence around dollars. Peer institutions have published figures: Ohio State signed $252 million over ten years in 2016, Texas agreed to $250 million over fifteen years in 2020, and Michigan recently reset to roughly $15 million annually. USC disclosed nothing, suggesting either a negotiated non-disclosure or a value the school prefers not to benchmark. Athletic director Jennifer Cohen, who arrived from Washington in 2023, has overseen revenue projects including premium seating and NIL structures but has not publicly tied apparel income to those efforts.
The timing also sits inside USC's broader revenue recalibration. Big Ten media rights delivered an estimated $60 million to $70 million in new annual television money starting in 2024, raising the school's total athletics revenue past $200 million. That lift changes sponsor math: brands now pay partly for exposure on Fox and CBS primetime, not just Rose Bowl tradition. USC's previous Nike agreement, signed in 2016, predated that shift and ran through 2026. Extending four years early suggests Nike valued certainty over waiting to test the market, or that USC valued locked economics over risking a bidding process against Adidas or Under Armour.
Jordan Brand football remains the signaling layer. Only schools Nike views as culturally leverageable receive the Jumpman, and USC has leaned into the Los Angeles creator economy harder than most athletic departments. The football program's NIL collective, Student Body Right, pays linemen and skill players through donor pools, but the program's Instagram account—780,000 followers—monetizes separately through brand integrations. Jordan product drops tied to USC games have previously sold through StockX and GOSEEK, creating secondary-market value Nike can track. Extending the deal preserves that channel.
What to watch: Whether Cohen negotiates a future amendment with performance escalators tied to College Football Playoff appearances or conference titles, structures Ohio State and Texas built into their contracts. Also whether Nike assigns dedicated design resources to USC similar to Oregon's model, where the brand tests materials and colorways before national releases. USC opens its 2025 season against LSU at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas on September 6, a neutral-site matchup that will debut whatever Jordan Brand uniform the extension contractually required.
The deal runs exactly as long as Lincoln Riley's contract, which expires after the 2029 season with options. Riley's recruiting has lifted USC's roster but not yet delivered a Big Ten title, and athletic departments typically align coaching and apparel cycles only when both sides expect continuity. The extension implies USC and Nike expect the Riley era—and the revenue model it anchors—to outlast his current deal.
The takeaway
USC locked Nike through 2036 without disclosing value, prioritizing Jordan Brand continuity over public benchmarking in its first Big Ten apparel cycle.
Want the 60-second program for your specific event?
Enter your event and email — we build it and send the branded proposal before lunch. No obligation.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — your name imprinted on real authorized stock, your pick of 200+ brands and 70,000 products, shipped from one accountable house. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign.
200+authorized brands
70,000products · virtual proof on each
9 deskspublishing daily
1997one house, since
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori Press · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.