Star Power
Last month, Amazon Prime announced a new docuseries, The Money Game, about the LSU athletic department. According to the press release about the series, it “follows, in real time, a historic turning point in the NCAA upon policy changes on name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights—guaranteed to shape the trajectory of college sports forever—highlighted by the surreal experiences of LSU's top players, coaches, and administrators.” In other words, this is going to be an advertisement for LSU, exploring all the ways it helps its student-athletes get rich.
And look, I’m happy these athletes are getting paid, and I’ll probably watch this series, but stuff like this really heightens my ambivalence about the new NIL rules. Because for as good as LSU’s athletic department is, this is really going to be about stars making commercials. For example, later in the same press release, Amazon refers to Angel Reese, one of LSU’s basketball stars, as “the Bayou Barbie” — the nickname she has trademarked for the purpose of selling merch.
Reese has actually had a weird season — she was mysteriously benched for several games back in November, for reasons her coach would not explain. Players like Aneesah Morrow and Hailey Van Lith — who both also transferred to LSU, like Reese, presumably attracted by those very same NIL opportunities — picked up the slack in her absence, and Reese has been good since her return. But the Tigers have lost three of their last five games, and the preseason #1 team in the country has fallen to #9, and is currently 2.5 games back in the SEC, with only eight games left to play.
None of this is to say that Reese is unworthy of the attention or focus — she’s still one of the best players in the country. But I think much of her marketability stems from things besides her on-court performance. It comes, instead, from her star power.
A big moment for Reese’s star power came in last year’s National Championship game, when she taunted Iowa’s Caitlin Clark in the final seconds of LSU’s victory. The whole thing sparked a ridiculous, occasionally racist debate about who is allowed to talk trash and who is not. Reese ended up trading words with Jill Biden, and the controversy attracted enough attention to make its way to Saturday Night Live.
It was all pretty stupid, but it helped launch Reese to stardom. Since then, she appeared in a Cardi B music video and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. In the end, the exchange with Clark (which, it should be said, Clark had no problem with) helped catalyze an emerging rivalry between two of the biggest stars in college sports. Since then, Clark, who already dominated all the individual awards last season, has taken her own stardom to another level. Just last night she moved into second place on the all-time scoring list, and by the end of this month she will likely pass Kelsey Plum for the #1 spot.
And as she’s moved up the list, she has crossed over into mainstream stardom in a way few college athletes ever have. You can tell because now she’s in State Farm commercials…
The emergence of stars like Reese and Clark has been hailed as a watershed moment for women’s college basketball, which broke TV ratings records in last year’s tournament. In December, Sporting News named the two of them Athletes of the Year, citing their star power as the driving force behind the growing success of their sport:
When they met last April for the national title, it wasn’t so much the big names nearby as the millions who watched at home on television that made it such an astonishing occasion. The average audience for the game telecast registered just under 10 million people, about the same as last year’s Rose Bowl or Game 4 of the NBA Finals -- and nearly double the record since ESPN began broadcasting the event in 1996.
Caitlin vs. Angel, Iowa vs. LSU, was an occasion.
And that continued well beyond the final buzzer.
This focus on star power feels particularly self-conscious when it involves women’s sports, which are often overlooked compared to men’s sports. When Clark appears in a State Farm commercial alongside Jimmy Butler — and gets top billing over him! — there’s an excitement over the implication that Clark is already a bigger star than an NBA veteran. You can sense that in the Sporting News article, which mentions Clark’s State Farm commercials before her quest for the scoring record. The mainstream stardom of Clark (and Reese) is a validation for a sport that often gets disrespected by fans and the media.
Obviously this is a common trap. Modern liberalism has gotten into a lot of trouble by equating the ascendance of stars or elite members of a vulnerable group with gains made by that group in general. But sports show why this trap is understandable. Fans LIKE their sports’ stars. It’s exciting to follow Clark’s pursuit of Plum’s record (although, honestly, it’s become a little boring since her scoring average is SO HIGH that she’s sucked most of the suspense out of the chase), just as it’s exciting to see if Reese can lead LSU to another title.
And in sports, the stars often DO control the brand. The stardom of a sport’s most famous athlete — often measured in endorsement deals — is usually good for the sport as a whole. Ask other baseball players how they feel about Shohei Ohtani, or remember how Michael Jordan’s ascendance as a commercial icon was linked to the international growth of the NBA. More stars mean more fans which means more revenue which means higher salaries.
Except: The NIL rules complicate this. Clark and Reese, though they are earning money, are not making it from revenues tied to their sports’ growth. Clark is making it from State Farm (and Gatorade, and Nike, and probably a bunch of others). Reese is making it from Reebok and McDonald’s. Their earning power is not really tied to the growth of their sport, but to the growth of their brands. This is why there is something discomfiting about the “Bayou Barbie” nickname, or the fact that the other big star of the upcoming Amazon Prime series is Olivia Dunne — who is a gymnast but is really more of a TikTok influencer.
My concern is that NIL will ultimately cleave the interests of stars from the interests of players as a whole. The rising tide of professionals like Jordan and Ohtani lifts the boats of all players, but I’m not sure how Clark and Reese getting sponsorship deals is supposed to help less famous players. In fact, it might hurt them if star players’ personal brands become detached from their actual in-game performance.
This is why class consciousness is so important. It’s not enough to simply let players earn what they are “worth” — that way lies the madness of influencers and brand development. They have to be able to bargain as a group to preserve the value of their work.