Why Caitlin Clark might earn more money staying in faculty — than going to the WNBA

She’s a senior, however has a fifth 12 months of NCAA eligibility remaining as a result of an extra 12 months granted to many athletes who misplaced time throughout their faculty careers as a result of COVID pandemic. So Clark should resolve if turning into a super-senior or declaring for the WNBA Draft will likely be higher for her – and her funds.

“The answer has changed a ton in the last three years because the NCAA dropped its ban on NIL,” Victor Matheson, an economics professor on the College of the Holy Cross who focuses on sports activities, instructed MarketWatch. “Three years ago if she had decided to come back for another year she’d get a year of high-quality Iowa education and the love and adulation of every person in Iowa. But she wouldn’t be able to get any cash out of it. A move to the WNBA would have made sense.”

But instances have modified.

The NCAA started permitting faculty athletes to earn cash off their title, picture and likeness in 2021 — when student-athletes gained a decades-long argument over the equity of receiving no remuneration to be used of their NIL, even because the video games they performed in generated hundreds of thousands of {dollars} for the establishments by which they had been enrolled.

Clark will make an estimated $910,000 from NIL offers this season, based on On3’s proprietary NIL algorithm, which is predicated on NIL-deal information, efficiency, affect and publicity. She has offers with manufacturers together with Gatorade, State Farm, Nike
NKE,
-0.30%,
Buick, Topps and H&R Block
HRB,
+1.48%.

If she turns professional and is likely one of the high few picks, she is going to earn $76,535 in wage, so she would possible earn a majority of her earnings from off-court enterprise alternatives.

As MarketWatch wrote final fall, 10 faculty athletes remodeled $1 million final season from NIL offers. Two of them had been girls, together with basketball participant Angel Reese of LSU, who made $1.7 million.

For most of the high faculty male athletes who’ve faculty eligibility left, the query of whether or not to go professional is less complicated. That’s as a result of the NBA, NFL and MLB pay high picks much more than the NIL cash they earn. 

See additionally: Super Bowl quarterback Brock Purdy made $870,000 this season — 16 faculty soccer gamers made extra through NIL

“I think she should stay,” Tim Derdenger, affiliate professor of selling and technique at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, instructed MarketWatch. “The spotlight will be even bigger for her coming back and her NIL deals will be larger, especially if she wins the championship. From a financial standpoint I think she makes more money in college … it’s crazy to say.”

Part of the reasoning is the massive following that girls’s faculty basketball now has.

TV viewership for a median WNBA recreation is up from 379,000 in 2022 to 505,000 in 2023, a robust enhance, however girls’s faculty basketball curiosity is on a distinct degree. Viewership for girls’s faculty basketball common season video games have routinely rated over a million, and Peacock even launched a “Caitlin Cast,” a broadcast that adopted Clark’s pursuit of the ladies’s scoring document. That broadcast was sponsored by one in every of her sponsors, State Farm.

Plus there may be the immensely standard March Madness; the ladies’s championship recreation final 12 months reached 9.9 million viewers. The WNBA Finals averaged 728,000 viewers, based on ESPN PR.

“Is her brand more valuable in college, or as a pro – that’s the simplest way to frame this,” Derdenger mentioned. “$76K is not a lot of money to go play in the WNBA, rightly or wrongly. College basketball right now is bigger than the WNBA.”

Game viewership isn’t every little thing and a few distinctive alternatives will possible be ready for Clark as soon as she turns professional, like a theoretical 3-point shootout with Sabrina Ionescu and Steph Curry.

But the potential lower in TV publicity and fan eyeballs for Clark if she joins the WNBA could translate to much less cash in off-court endorsements.

“You could say that maybe she would have fewer deals,” NIL legal professional Mit Winter, from Kennyhertz Perry LLC, instructed MarketWatch, whereas additionally noting that it’s not as if manufacturers like Nike and State Farm would all of the sudden cease working along with her after she turns skilled.

And some NIL specialists see Clark shifting to the skilled ranks as a possible threat.

“The longer Clark remains in school, the less risk that exists with respect to diluting a brand that appears to only be growing by the day,” Darren Heitner, a lawyer who brokers NIL offers for pupil athletes, instructed MarketWatch.

Even Las Vegas Aces star Kelsey Plum, whose girls’s NCAA scoring document Clark broke in February, thinks Iowa ought to do every little thing it might probably to make Clark keep one other 12 months.

“Everyone’s trying to figure out if she’s coming out or staying put, but if I’m Iowa, I’m gonna throw the kitchen sink at her, for sure,” Plum mentioned.

Of course, such a serious determination for a student-athlete will possible think about a wide range of components, and never simply cash. Maybe Clark needs to remain one other 12 months in Iowa to acquire her grasp’s diploma, or maybe she is just not eager on residing in Indianapolis and taking part in for the Indiana Fever, the holder of the highest WNBA Draft choice in 2024. Money isn’t all the time the deciding issue.

But in fact it’s doable that Clark, broadly thought-about among the best girls’s basketball prospects of all time, will transcend the school and professional recreation. Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College and a sports-business knowledgeable, thinks no matter crew Clark is on, eyeballs will observe.

“The stage size will shift depending on which stage Caitlin Clark is on.”

See additionally: EA’s upcoming college-football recreation ‘taking advantage’ of gamers with $600 cost, knowledgeable says