The NCAA has a ‘Hot Girl’ problem

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This afternoon, the Twins are debating how they should announce their new agreement with Bucked Up, which sells energy boosters like Woke AF dietary supplement and Rocket Pop (which “tastes like America,” according to the company website).
“We could just do a TikTok,” Haley says to Hanna, “like, ‘Just finished a workout with our Bucked Up.’ ” She pauses. “Or we could make it organic?”
Hanna chimes in: “Brainstorm!”
The Twins’ attorney, Darren Heitner, calls their stratospheric rise a “blueprint” for other college athletes trying to cash in on the new, multibillion-dollar market. That market is the result of a 2021 Supreme Court ruling that led the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the 117-year-old organization that governs college sports, with roughly 1,100 member schools nationwide, to change its name, image, and likeness (or NIL) policy—enabling student athletes to cash in on their athletic prowess.
Before then, student athletes could generate enormous amounts of money for their schools—in 2019, the year before the pandemic, top-tier schools earned nearly $16 billion in media rights, tickets sales, licensing, and so forth from their athletes—while making nothing for themselves.
Thing is, the athletes now profiting are not necessarily the ones with the most athletic prowess. Or at least that’s the case when it comes to female athletes.

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“If you look at the NIL girls, the first ones who were getting deals were the blonde girls,” Louis Moore, a sports historian at Grand Valley State University, told The Free Press. The Cavinder Twins, Moore said, have benefited handsomely from “their very blonde, girl-next-door looks,” posting videos of themselves in bikinis and tight-fitting dresses. Lots of their videos hint at the possibility of one twin having a boyfriend. Others wink at the male fantasy of group sex with identical sisters, featuring captions like “when he asks for blonde twins for Christmas” and “I want a girl with a twin sister.”
The Twins get their appeal. And even though they think it’s unfair that the mostly black top scorers in women’s college basketball make less than they do—including Louisiana State University’s Angel Reese and Flau’jae Johnson—that’s not stopping them.
“Obviously, everyone brings something different to the table. I think that all women should be empowered in a male-dominant world, especially minorities,” Haley says.
Hanna adds: “I mean, obviously, yes, this is a touchy subject, but I think that we are privileged, in a way. Obviously, we don’t deal with the same things that other women deal with or other people deal with, and that’s just how our world is, and it’s awful.”
Meanwhile, the NCAA is extra-sensitive to the optics. The organization made a point of singling out the Cavinder Twins when, in February, it announced that for the first time in the NIL era, it was fining a member school, the University of Miami, and putting the university on probation for a year—despite men’s college sports being rife with more serious improprieties, and widespread uncertainty about what is permissible.

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