I would guess that they were looking at our new kits for this coming season, and it was probably another generic piece or cr4p, NC probably said, if you're not going to put any effort in, then we'll go somewhere else. And then things happen and NC left. Then the new board came in, and thought '"sh1t, we have no kit for next year" tried to sort it out with Adidas, and they weren't interested/weren't able to produce this years kit in time.
I would expect if Cortese was still here we'd have just got a different supplier of kit for this year and it would have been sorted out by now.