Consider the following:

-collectively, thousands of college basketball players have played in hundreds of thousands of minutes in Nike shoes all season long and not a single similar incident has been reported by another player wearing Nike shoes this season.

-the shoes worn by Duke were special edition for last nights game - a game that millions across the country would be watching.

-Zion’s brand new shoe exploded within the first 36 seconds of the game, meaning the shoe was defective from the start. It’s not like the shoes wore down and weakened throughout the course of an intense game or season. After surviving light pre-game warmups, the shoe exploded during the first normal action of the game.

-to consider all of the thousands of Nike shoe-wearing college basketball players this could have happened to, and it just happens to occur with the most popular, highly visible college athlete in the most anticipated college game of the year?! To a player that will be offered a significant Nike shoe deal once he enters the NBA?

-the way the shoe exploded is not normal. That just doesn’t happen, whether it’s Nike or Wilson or Payless shoes. The craftsmanship of Zion’s shoe was so faulty that you almost have to assume someone tampered with the shoe before packaging it in the box. Zion is the only player on Duke’s team that wears his size of shoe, meaning if someone did tamper with the shoe, they knew he would be the one wearing them.

-we’ve already seen the great lengths that stakeholders at Adidas went through to build up their brand by paying college players to go to Adidas sponsored colleges. What’s to say a competitor of Nike didn’t pay a Nike employee to package a faulty shoe for Zion’s big game last night? We’ve seen an NBA ref arrested for fixing games, we’ve seen a NFL QB pay an equipment manager to deflate balls, etc. It’s not far fetched to imagine a scenario involving someone tampering with a shoe.