Caitlin Clark is one of the biggest stars in college basketball. She is just 51 points away from setting the all-time scoring record in Division I history — for men or women. Peter Maravich currently holds the record with 3,667 points.
Clark will likely be the No. 1 overall pick in the WNBA draft when she turns pro, but will she leave the Iowa Hawkeyes after this season, or stay in college for another year?
She's a senior, but has a fifth year of NCAA eligibility remaining because of an extra year given to many athletes who missed time during their college careers due to the COVID pandemic. So Clark must decide whether going super big or declaring for the WNBA draft would be better for her — and her money.
“The answer has changed a lot in the last three years because the NCAA dropped its ban on nothing,” Victor Matheson, an economics professor at College of the Holy Cross who specializes in sports, told MarketWatch. “Three years ago, if she decided to come back for another year, she would get a year of high-quality education at Iowa State and the love and adulation of everyone in Iowa. But she wouldn't be able to get any money from it. Moving to the WNBA made sense.”
But times have changed.
The NCAA began allowing college athletes to earn money off their name, image and likeness in 2021 — when student-athletes won a decades-long debate over the fairness of receiving no reward for the use of their NIL, even with the creation of the games they played. Millions of dollars to the institutions they joined.
Clark will make an estimated $910,000 from NIL deals this season, according to On3's NIL algorithm, which is based on NIL deal data, performance, impact and exposure. It has deals with brands including Gatorade, State Farm, Nike NK,
Buick, Tops, H&R Block HRB,
If she turns pro and is one of the top few picks, she will earn a salary of $76,535, so she will likely earn the majority of her income from off-field employment opportunities.
As MarketWatch wrote last fall, 10 college athletes made more than $1 million last season on nothing deals. They included two women, including LSU basketball player Angel Reese, who made $1.7 million.
For many high-achieving college athletes with no college eligibility remaining, the question of whether they should turn pro is an easier one. This is because the NBA, NFL, and MLB pay much more than the money they earn, which is nothing.
See also: Super Bowl quarterback Brock Purdy earned $870,000 this season – 16 college football players earned more via NIL
“I think it should stay,” Tim Dierdinger, assistant professor of marketing and strategy at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business, told MarketWatch. “The spotlight will be bigger when she comes back and her nothing deals will be bigger, especially if she wins the championship. Financially, I think she's making more money in college…it's crazy to say that.
Part of the reason is because of how big women's college basketball is now.
TV viewership for the average WNBA game rose from 379,000 in 2022 to 505,000 in 2023, a solid increase, but interest in women's college basketball is on a different level. Viewership for women's college basketball regular-season games was routinely estimated at more than 1 million, and Peacock even launched the “Caitlin Cast,” a broadcast that followed Clark's pursuit of the women's scoring record. This broadcast was sponsored by one of our sponsors, State Farm.
Plus there's the hugely popular March Madness game; Last year's women's championship match reached 9.9 million viewers. The WNBA Finals averaged 728,000 viewers, according to ESPN PR.
“Is her brand more valuable in college, or as a professional? That's the simplest way to frame this,” Dierdinger said. “$76,000 is not a lot of money to play in the WNBA, right or wrong. College basketball is bigger now than the WNBA.
Viewership isn't everything and some unique opportunities will likely await Clark once she turns pro, such as theoretical three-point shootouts with Sabrina Ionescu and Steph Curry.
But the potential decrease in TV exposure and fan eyeballs for Clark if she joins the WNBA could translate into less money in off-court endorsements.
“You could argue she'll probably have fewer deals,” NIL attorney Mette Winter of Kennyhertz Perry LLC told MarketWatch, while also noting that it's not as if brands like Nike and State Farm will suddenly stop working with them after they… I became a professional. .
Some NIL experts see Clarke's move to the professional ranks as a potential risk.
“The longer Clark stays at the school, the less risk there is in terms of diluting the brand that seems to be growing by the day,” Darren Hytner, an attorney who brokers nothing deals for student-athletes, told MarketWatch.
Even Las Vegas Ice star Kelsey Bloom, whose NCAA women's all-time scoring record was broken by Clark in February, believes Iowa State should do everything it can to make Clark stay another year.
“Everyone is trying to figure out if it's going to come out or stay in, but if I was from Iowa, I would definitely throw the kitchen sink at her.” Plum said.
Of course, such a big decision for a student-athlete will likely take into consideration a variety of factors, not just money. Maybe Clark wants to stay another year at Iowa State to get her master's degree, or maybe she doesn't want to live in Indianapolis and play for the Indiana Fever, the WNBA's top pick in 2024. Money isn't always a factor in the decision.
But of course it's possible that Clark, widely considered one of the best women's basketball prospects ever, will excel in the college game and the professional game. Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College and a sports business expert, believes that whatever team Clark is on, eyeballs will follow.
“The size of the stage will change depending on which stage Caitlin Clark will be on.”
See also: EA's upcoming college football game is “taking advantage” of players with a $600 payout, an expert says
