NCAA BASKETBALL
How much does Caitlin Clark make in NIL deals?
The all-time scoring queen of college hoops has made some money in college, but she could make a whole lot more if she stayed.
With the news that Caitlin Clark is going to forego her final year of eligibility for the WNBA, where she will most certainly be the number one draft pick, comes talk of contract salaries. When you are talking about the NBA, these can be almost limitless, but with the WNBA, it is a whole different ball game.
As the top draft pick in the WNBA, Caitlin Clark will be in line for a whopping $76,535 per year salary. That is right, a paltry 20% above the national average. For one of the greatest college athletes ever, this is hardly a gold mine route to take.
Her NIL deals this season will have made her an estimated $910,000 already. And if she opted to stay in college for one more year? Those estimates shoot up to around $3.1 million. In this strange case, it looks like college would be far more lucrative than going pro for Clark.
To be clear on the matter, her NIL contracts wouldn’t just evaporate upon going pro. They would simply become endorsement deals, so it is likely that Clark would still be in line for that $3.1 million in any case.
Last season, only ten college athletes, of which two were women, made over $1 million from NIL deals. One of those was LSU basketball player Angel Reese, who made $1.7 million. The other was LSU gymnast Livvy Dunne who made $3.5 million.
Tim Derdenger, associate professor of marketing and strategy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business in Pittsburgh, thinks that she should stay in college. “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.”
When you look at a modern athlete, you have to think of them as a brand. And Caitlin Clark’s brand is bigger in college than in the WNBA. Part of that is to do with the fanbase. TV viewership for the WNBA has ben averaging just over half a million pairs of eyeballs per game. That is great. But NCAA hoops, even on the women’s side, routinely gets over a million viewers.
And then you have March Madness. The women’s championships last year touched 9.9 million viewers. When sponsors come knocking, that is what they are concerned with: how many of our potential customers can you reach? Those numbers translate to dollars.
Derdenger continued, “$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.”
The world is open to Caitlin Clark right now, and everyone is rooting for her to make the right choice. Not just about money, but for herself. After all, opportunities like this come but once in life.