When Mateen Cleaves and Tom Izzo were cutting down the nets after MSU basketball’s last national championship in 2000, they were doing it in Reebok apparel.

Times have changed for MSU athletics, as they now wear the Nike swoosh on their uniforms. The partnership with Nike is one that MSU has been proud of, and athletic director Mark Hollis said the reason MSU went with Nike before the 2000-2001 sports season was to benefit the student-athletes, but also because Nike has been doing the most in terms of research.

“We look at it from a research standpoint,” he said. “They’re a leader in ... the industry.”

Hollis said Reebok was slowly starting to follow a different business model, which caused MSU to make the change to Nike.

“They (Reebok) started to stray away from the business,” he said. “We looked at who was the best in the industry, and the conversations we had with Nike went well. We’ve developed a great relationship with them that has continued to benefit our student-athletes.”

Nike currently has a contract with many schools in college athletics, and one thing a lot of those schools do is wear alternate uniforms for big games. MSU has done this more than once and for more than one sport. Hollis said it’s a combination of factors that go into him deciding which games will have alternate uniforms and what they will look like.

“It’s done with marketing, the coaching staff and I get pretty hands-on in that experience,” he said. “Most of the time that we’ve gone with an alternative uniform it has been something that was proposed by a student-athlete.”

Hollis said the pro-combat uniforms with a darker green shirt color and a bronze helmet were one of the ideas that the football team helped come up with themselves.

Lately the men’s basketball team has been wearing the same uniforms that Earvin “Magic” Johnson wore in 1979 when he guided the Spartans to their first national championship in basketball. Hollis said those have been his favorite alternate uniforms the basketball team was worn.

“I like the throwback to ‘79 because that’s my era,” he said. “That team with Magic is one of the reasons I decided to come to this school.”

Hollis also said, however, that he does prefer the standard green and white to alternate uniforms.

“My favorite ones overall have to be the green and white,” he said. “That hasn’t changed.”