Love alternate jerseys, hate them. To one of biggest apparel lines, IU basketball still matters.

BLOOMINGTON – IU basketball’s season reached a familiar mile marker at the end of this week. A moment that passes as surely as the Purdue doubleheader.

I am, of course, talking about the annual return of The Uniform Discourse.

This time, it came via an announcement from Adidas the company would introduce bespoke black jerseys with red numerals from its Fear of God brand line for Indiana’s upcoming games this week.

You can guess what ensued.

Even beyond the arguments for tradition or familiarity, there were understandable questions why IU might wear black jerseys against Iowa, for example, an opponent with black in its regular color wheel, on a night when the women’s program planned a white-out of Assembly Hall.

Arguments for the defense (uniforms) were equally familiar. Players love them. The younger generation digs them. They’re typically one-off arrangements that help justify multimillion-dollar relationships between apparel companies and athletic departments.

Each misses a fundamental point, perhaps the most compelling argument in favor: Adidas isn’t doing this for everyone.

Indiana fans cling tightly to their traditions. Why shouldn’t they? When a program is struggling for solid ground, those constants provide balance.

Uniforms don’t win games, but they do help cement perceptions. When IU put five stars on the back of its shorts, it spoke a message into existence. When — under the current staff and administration, it should be noted — the Hoosiers returned to trim and piping more consistent with their historical look, they did so for good reasons.

Conversely, anyone who points to the cultural-appeal aspect of this has a fair point as well. The athletes themselves tend to favor alternate jerseys. Younger fans, less anchored to long-standing traditions, like fresher looks, not just in the arena but when they take their money to fan stores where this stuff eventually shows up in the form of product.

And, to borrow from Don Draper, that’s what the money is for. Years ago, the soccer club I follow, Liverpool, added an Expedia logo to its shirt sleeves. Fans complained until it got around the logo was worth more than $10 million per season. It didn’t seem so intrusive then.

The actual financial impact of apparel deals is beginning to wane. The days of arms races over who can siphon the most money annually out of Adidas or Nike or Under Armour are probably behind us for most schools. But these are still seven-figure line items on annual budgets. There has to be more mutual benefit in these relationships than simply “give us what we want, period.”

Everybody’s got a point. Nobody’s really wrong.

And that’s not why it matters to Indiana, right now.

In its late-week confirmation of these admittedly rather … unorthodox designs, Adidas announced the Fear of God threads would go to IU and Miami. Fear of God is a high-end, exclusive arm of Adidas’ apparel arm.

This is driven by cultural and aesthetic motivations. Everybody wants this in the discourse. It’s the reason for attaching this stuff to Adidas’ bigger brands.

And for Indiana, that’s what matters. Adidas isn’t doing this with Kansas, or Louisville. Nor is it consigning it to secondary brands like Georgia Tech, North Carolina State or Texas A&M.

In the buildup to both of IU’s games against Purdue this season (as well as the Kansas game, to an extent), there was discussion of the Hoosiers’ current relevance. Where does Indiana stand in modern college basketball, relative to programs with much more recent success, when the Hoosiers can’t seem to recapture their best?

When IU’s trip to Purdue made Fox’s main channel, in primetime, it suggested that relevance remains strong, even if results aren’t consistent. Like it or not, so does stuff like this.

When Adidas announces exclusive NIL deals for four men’s basketball players, and two of them are Hoosiers, it says the company still sees real cultural agency in IU basketball. And when the company makes Indiana a target for this kind of exclusive-line apparel partnership — on, it should be said, a weekend when the eyes of an entire sport are trained on the state, because of the NBA All-Star Game — that suggests the same.

Like the jerseys. Love the jerseys. Hate the jerseys. Be jersey agnostic. Pray nobody has to play wearing a mask (they won’t).

Just remember what it says loudest when IU takes the floor in these Sunday and Thursday: To one of the world’s biggest apparel lines, Indiana basketball still matters. Fear the day such companies decide that’s no longer the case.

Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.