The WNBA draft is not an annual event circled on many calendars. Heck, women’s basketball is not even a topic many of us usually talk about. But with college basketball superstars Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese now officially heading to the W, the draft has become a topic as hot as these stars themselves. Tickets to attend sold out in 15 minutes.
During the pandemic the NCAA gave a no-strings attached extra year of eligibility to all student athletes, which has enabled the possibility of an extra year of college playing time. This in turn has led to big decisions for college basketball’s biggest stars: declare for the draft or stay in college for that extra year? The WNBA is a famously difficult league to crack into, with only 144 total roster spots on offer, and the choice hasn’t been an easy one in past years. But the “will she won’t she” conversation has reached new heights this year in the glow of Caitlin Clark’s halo. One of the hottest topics within this topic is the question of money. There is a popular belief (found anywhere an average male basketball fan has access to X), that these college stars will be taking a massive pay cut as they move to play professionally in a league that draws in far fewer fans and revenue compared with the collegiate circuit.
Will celestial stars like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese make less money moving away from the college game, or more? How will their endorsement deals change? Why has the college game become more valuable, and how can the WNBA follow? Finally, what can other sports and leagues learn from the meteoric rise of women’s college basketball?
In order to understand the argument of the Twitter Chads, it’s important to first understand not only how much money these women are making, but how they are making it. To continue to use our two superstars as examples, Clark’s endorsement portfolio is valued at over $3 million, while Reese’s is just under $2 million. That’s a lot of money, especially when compared with a rookie salary in the WNBA, which, at the max, is $77,000. Comparing those two numbers it’s easy to see why staying in college seems like the better bet, but this argument overlooks a fundamental misunderstanding about how these women are getting their bag.
In 2021, NIL took the college sports landscape by storm, allowing athletes to make money off of their Name, Image, and Likeness. This created two primary payment pathways for college student athletes. The first type is NIL deals that look and operate like professional sponsorship or endorsement deals, cloaked beneath the NIL label. Think Caitlin Clark and State Farm. State Farm pays Caitlin Clark to be a State Farm Athlete, and she participates in commercials and events for them, and posts about insurance on her social media. Deals like this are purely between Caitlin Clark and State Farm. They have nothing to do with the University of Iowa, and so deals like this aren’t going anywhere as Caitlin moves to the next level. In fact, she inked two new NIL deals with huge brands right when she announced that she would be moving to the WNBA. Caitlin Clark’s endorsement portfolio (and Reese’s and many others) is hers alone.
The second major pathway for NIL money to find its way into athletes’ pockets is through NIL collectives. An NIL collective is essentially an organization set up on behalf of a university to provide money and brand partnerships to athletes attending that specific college/university or program. It’s become a powerful recruiting tool, with schools with more powerful NIL collectives able to entice higher profile recruits. Any NIL collective money is tied to participation in a college program, and won’t follow athletes to the next level. This type of NIL deal is much more common in men’s sports, especially football and basketball (think donor-funded opportunities that benefit all the guys), and therefore it makes sense why the Twitter Chads would expect Caitlin Clark’s college money to disappear when she leaves Iowa. But this is not the type of money she is making. All her NIL money is hers, not Iowa’s.
So. One more time for the people in the back. All of the biggest women’s college basketball stars will keep their NIL deals and add a rookie salary on top of that, should they make a roster. They’ll be paid to play for the first time in their lives (and won’t have to go to economics 101 with Chad anymore!). They definitely won’t be taking a pay cut.
But what happens to Caitlin Clark after a few years of playing in the WNBA? There is no denying that women’s college basketball outstrips the W in popularity. Will the shine that currently sparkles around her dim? She might not take a pay cut immediately as she continues to ride the waves of collegiate fandom, but will her marketability eventually wane as she joins a league with lower attendance and viewership than the college landscape?
There are a lot of arguments and theories about why the W lacks popularity. It lacks the tribalism that draws fans to college sports, its teams operate in metropolitan areas already oversaturated with professional men’s teams, the league doesn’t market its players well, etc. I think all of the arguments have legs, some longer and stronger than others. However, I think there’s a simpler argument staring us in the face. The hype has arrived, and we’re standing on a precipice. People are excited to watch the game, and if the WNBA is on primetime, accessible TV, we are going to immediately start to see the types of changes that have revolutionized the women’s collegiate game. If the WNBA is promoted and marketed appropriately, rookies will never question whether their worth will rise or fall in the league. I believe this because we’ve seen it already: in the rise of the college game.
The women’s Final Four this year was the exhilarating homecoming and “I told you so” that women’s basketball fans have been praying for. Caitlin Clark dazzled, UCONN kept up with the very best, LSU continued to build their reputation as a title contender and South Carolina was perfection itself. Every round set a new record, with the title game drawing 24 million viewers at its peak: the most watched sporting event (excluding football and the Olympics) since 2019. In preparation for this article, I was reading up on past viewership records, and the records we were breaking this weekend surprised me: the last time we saw these numbers wasn’t since the 1980s, when the games were on CBS and 11.8 million viewers tuned in to see the dazzling Cheryl Miller play for USC.
ESPN took over the rights for women’s college basketball in the early 1990s, making the women’s game far less accessible to the casual fan. In 1996, ESPN aired a total of 281 men’s games and 22 women’s games. With fewer games shown and virtually no media coverage of story lines, it’s no wonder that fewer people tuned in to the tournament, when more coverage was available. ESPN and other sports media outlets have not accurately valued the women’s game, and its popularity has suffered as a result.
A few years ago, things started to change. Paige Bueckers became a media darling, Sedona Prince exposed the glaring inequities of the women’s NCAA playing conditions, and the NCAA finally allowed the women’s tournament to use the official March madness branding. Due in large part to the changing culture around the women’s game, in 2021 ESPN decided to nationally televise all the tournament games in their entirety for the first time, and not feature “whiparound” coverage which switches to covering whichever game is “interesting” or “close.” They began to run stories about female hoopers, and the country paid attention. The women’s games were put on cable TV for the first time since 1995.
So. When people tweet out “no one watches women’s sports” it is largely because, in the past (and sometimes still in the present) it was impossible to watch. And when ESPN tweets out how excited they are that viewership numbers are up, it is important to acknowledge that if they had decided to shine more light on the women’s game, the numbers would have been higher earlier. “If you build it they will come” needs to be changed to “if you make it accessible, people will access it.”
Investment is a choice, and there’s a big return to be gained for that choice right now. This choice has to be made in the WNBA. The media deal problems that have plagued college women’s basketball still plague the WNBA. Last year some of the league’s most anticipated match ups aired on Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime!! Watching games isn’t always easy or accessible, they aren’t during prime time and good highlight reels are stupidly sparse. The coverage and marketing of the WNBA is so far behind the product, we’re just repeating the same history of the college game over again. In order to capitalize on the public interest in the women’s games, and ensure financial investment stays high, it’s crucial that the WNBA can keep investment in its players rolling forward through access and coverage of the games this season.
Lots of fans of the WNBA have set massive expectations on the remarkably small shoulders of Caitlin Clark. They are hoping that the nation that watched her bring Iowa to back to back Final Fours will follow her into the W, and set viewership records ablaze. I think it’s a big ask, and it’s unfair to the young woman of whom we’ve already asked so much. The W is an excellent product. It’s thrilling to watch. Every game is elite. Perhaps most importantly, the fans that have come to the table for the college feast are hungry for more. But it is up to the WNBA to capitalize on this moment and advocate for media deals that showcase and value the talent at its true worth. Once they do that, people will watch because it’s too good to look away. Sponsors will come calling because the viewership numbers will be up. And the money will follow, and the Twitter Chads will have to find a different, tired take to push onto our timelines.
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Written by Skyler Espinoza
Photo Credit to IndyStar
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