There are three players with more than 20,000 Instagram followers from this year’s men’s Final Four teams combined. There are six such players on the South Carolina women’s team’s bench.
The 36-0 Gamecocks were favored over the field heading into the NCAA tournament, and have backed up the hype by advancing to the semifinals. Their social media following is almost cult-like in its devotion, but plenty of other women’s college basketball stars have large online fanbases. Of the 20 players in the Final Four with the most social media followers, 16 are women, including the entire top seven.
That group is led by LSU’s Flau’jae Johnson, who is a rap artist in addition to averaging 11.1 points per game on the court; she has 879,000 followers. Her teammate Angel Reese, who averaged 23.2 points and 15.7 rebounds per game this season, ranks second with 533,000 followers. Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, who posted a historic 40-point triple-double in the Elite Eight, is far below them with 230,000 followers, which is still five times more than any player in the men’s national semifinals.
Some of the disparity is due to the number of upsets in the men’s bracket, which knocked out many high-profile teams. The combined seeds of the Final Four teams sum to 23, the second-highest total in tournament history, and it is the first semifinals with no top three seeds. UConn is still a powerhouse program, though, with the third-largest men’s basketball budget in the country, and yet its leading scorer, Adama Sanogo, has fewer Instagram followers than a dozen South Carolina women.
Zoom out to include other schools, and the results are the same. Among the four No. 1 seeds in the men’s and women’s draws, six of the top 10 players with the most Instagram followers are women. Comparing semifinalists for the 2023 Naismith College Player of the Year award of both genders, Stanford’s Cameron Brink and South Carolina’s Aaliyah Boston, along with Clark and Reese, all have larger followings than any man in consideration for the trophy.
Deep March Madness runs lead to large bumps in social media followers. Reese, for example, started the tournament with 447,000 Instagram followers and has increased that total by nearly 20% in less than two weeks. Over the past two days, since her team advanced to the Final Four, she has picked up roughly 14 new followers per minute, according to Social Blade.
In the NIL era, college athletes can leverage social media followers into substantial sponsorship deals. Clark, for instance, had reportedly already made $1 million in endorsement income before this season. Reese has more NIL deals than any men’s college basketball player, per a Sponsor United report. Athletes who aren’t nearly as famous can still make some money from paid social media posts.
Earning potential isn’t directly correlated with social media following, though—according to On3’s NIL valuations, seven of the top 10 college basketball players with the most sponsorship value are still men. Publicly available data from Opendorse, representing a slice of the national landscape, suggest that women’s college basketball players earn approximately half as much as their male counterparts on the whole.
The number of social media stars in women’s college basketball this season, however, is an indicator of the sport’s growing popularity, as are growth in local ticket sales and national TV viewership. And unlike the most of the best-known men’s players in the country, many of them will get to showcase their skills on the court this weekend.
