Why Caitlin Clark could make more money staying in college — instead of the WNBA

She’s a senior, but has a fifth year of NCAA eligibility remaining due to an additional year granted to many athletes who lost time during their college careers due to the COVID pandemic. So Clark must decide if becoming a super-senior or declaring for the WNBA Draft will be better for her – and her finances.

“The answer has changed a ton in the last three years because the NCAA dropped its ban on NIL,” Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross who specializes in sports, told 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 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 argument over the fairness of receiving no remuneration for use of their NIL, even as the games they played in generated millions of dollars for the institutions in which they were enrolled.

Clark will make an estimated $910,000 from NIL deals this season, according to On3’s proprietary NIL algorithm, which is based on NIL-deal data, performance, influence and exposure. She has deals with brands including Gatorade, State Farm, Nike
NKE,
-0.35%,
Buick, Topps and H&R Block
HRB,
+1.42%.

If she turns pro and is one of the top few picks, she will earn $76,535 in salary, so she would likely earn a majority of her income from off-court business opportunities.

As MarketWatch wrote last fall, 10 college athletes made over $1 million last season from NIL deals. Two of them were women, including basketball player Angel Reese of LSU, who made $1.7 million.

For many of the top college male athletes who have college eligibility left, the question of whether to go pro is easier. That’s because the NBA, NFL and MLB pay top picks a lot more than the NIL money they earn. 

See also: Super Bowl quarterback Brock Purdy made $870,000 this season — 16 college football players made more via NIL

“I think she should stay,” Tim Derdenger, associate professor of marketing and strategy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, told 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 huge following that women’s college basketball now has.

TV viewership for an average WNBA game is up from 379,000 in 2022 to 505,000 in 2023, a strong increase, but women’s college basketball interest is on a different level. Viewership for women’s college basketball regular season games have routinely rated over one million, and Peacock even launched a “Caitlin Cast,” a broadcast that followed Clark’s pursuit of the women’s scoring record. That broadcast was sponsored by one of her sponsors, State Farm.

Plus there is the immensely popular March Madness; the women’s championship game last year 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 pro – that’s the simplest way to frame this,” Derdenger said. “$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 everything and some unique opportunities will likely be waiting for Clark once she turns pro, like a theoretical 3-point shootout with Sabrina Ionescu and Steph Curry.

But the potential decrease in TV exposure and fan eyeballs for Clark if she joins the WNBA may translate to less money in off-court endorsements.

“You could say that maybe she would have fewer deals,” NIL attorney Mit Winter, from Kennyhertz Perry LLC, told MarketWatch, while also noting that it’s not as if brands like Nike and State Farm would suddenly stop working with her after she turns professional.

And some NIL experts see Clark moving to the professional ranks as a potential risk.

“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 deals for student athletes, told MarketWatch.

Even Las Vegas Aces star Kelsey Plum, whose women’s NCAA scoring record Clark broke in February, thinks Iowa should do everything it can to make Clark stay another year.

“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 said.

Of course, such a major decision for a student-athlete will likely take into consideration a variety of factors, and not just money. Maybe Clark wants to stay another year in Iowa to obtain her master’s degree, or perhaps she is not keen on living in Indianapolis and playing for the Indiana Fever, the holder of the top WNBA Draft selection in 2024. Money isn’t always the deciding factor.

But of course it’s possible that Clark, widely considered one of the best women’s basketball prospects of all time, will transcend the college and pro game. Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College and a sports-business expert, thinks whatever team Clark is on, eyeballs will follow.

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

See also: EA’s upcoming college-football game ‘taking advantage’ of players with $600 payment, expert says