Many people laughed at me last week when we did the business of Tony Romo. Too early to talk about a guy who was 4 and 1 as a starter for the Dallas Cowboys. Well, with a victory over the Giants on Sunday, the legend of Romo grows. And we were talking about it before anyone. Romo signed his first major marketing deal with GT Sports Marketing. They'll be the exclusive company that will handle Romo's autograph deal, his CAA agent RJ Gonser confirmed. GTSM has surely been spending a lot of money of late on securing football players. It counts Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart as exclusives as well as Troy Aikman, which you can imagine how they will utilize him if Romo keeps it up.
In other sports chatter - Under Armour Blows Up Baseball Cleat Business: Earlier this year, many were shocked when Under Armour came into the football cleat business and immediately became a huge market force. Many thought that they were stepping into tough territory because the apparel branding was finally daring to tread where Nike had made their name. Well, a memo from my friend Matt Powell at SportsOneSource surprised me this morning. Under Armour, which unveiled its baseball cleats last month, had apparently achieved 18 percent market share in a week. Now that's absolutely amazing. Especially since I didn't see any of the rollout that they did with the football cleats in those "Click Clack" ads with Vernon Davis, A.J. Hawk and Jeremy Bloom. What other niches will Under Armour attack? Will it dare go into hockey skates next? By the way, if the stock goes to $50 this week, don't credit me. My boy Cramer did a whole schpiel on it on "Mad Money" on Monday.
The other really great stat from the SportsOneSource report was that basketball shoes that retail for less than $40 were down for the month of November in the mid single digits. I'm not so sure SportsOneSource tracks Steve and Barry's where the retail giant has been blowing out of the Starbury shoes at $14.98, but it nonetheless shows that while every columnist in the world wants to anoint the basketball value shoe as the new way of doing business, the fact is that the majority of the influential American tweens want to buy the LeBrons and the Jordans that retail for over $100. That market, SportsOneSource reports, is up.
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