I recently spent some time at the Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon to cover “The Opening” — a Nike Football event to gather the country’s top 150 high school prospects for 7-on-7 challenges and lineman drills. There’ll be more on that in the coming days. What I didn’t get to do while there, was discuss the decision process behind Nike’s color identification. I wanted to find the person responsible, pick their brain, and learn everything about it.

Such questions came to me before, most recently when I purchased Nike’s AW77 hoody in “Ink,” thinking it was a deep navy blue. Fooled by my monitor, perhaps; turns out “Ink” was actually purple.

There’s a joke I like to use regarding extravagant colors, which receives anything from a blank stare to a brief chuckle, where I exaggerate my poverty-stricken childhood and correlate it to my appreciation for simpler hues. There’s no punchline. I just sarcastically say, “My family could only afford the Crayola box with eight crayons when I was a kid.” (I think I actually had the 32-crayon box, but envied the kids with 128.)

Knowing how vast, and seemingly endless, the color spectrum is, I can appreciate that Nike can’t just identify sneakers as grey, white, navy blue, or black. My “Entourage” LeBron 8s are “photo blue” and “tour yellow.” My other LeBron 8s are considered the “Cool Grey” pair.

And this is where my confusion lies. My “Cool Grey” Jordan 11 Retro is a light grey, very similar to the “Wolf Grey” LeBron 8 v2 Low I’m sharing here today. When I think of “Wolf Grey,” I think of the Jordan 5 Retro that released this past May. If a grey is going to be cool, I imagine it being lighter, smoother — just as I think of darkness and forestry when presented with “wolf” in a single-player game of word association.

It feels backwards, is what I’m saying. The “Wolf Grey” v2 Low is to the “Cool Grey” Jordan 11 as the “Cool Grey” V2 is to the “Wolf Grey” Jordan 5.

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I might as well throw this out there while I compare the color schemes: What if the contrasting definitions are a calculated effort to create another battle in the James-versus-Jordan debate?

It feels logical enough for me to not dismiss it as a reach. I don’t think it’s an insult or jab to King James from the brains at Beaverton, but just another way to illustrate how drastically Jordan and James differ from one another despite all the forced comparisons. There are no conspiracy theories here… yet!

But at the end of the day, though, b </Killa Cam>, we really need actual definitions for what makes a grey cool, wolf, neutral, oxidized, or anything else that might get printed on a sticker.