The CaneSport On3: The return of the Cavinder twins

Everything in sports goes in cycles, pretty much without exception. Championship runs in sports come and go in amazing fashion. One day the Miami Hurricanes were on the top of the football world. The next they were not, and the disappearance is into its third decade now. It will happen again with Alabama and Georgia, too.

Right now women’s basketball and sports in general, fueled by the emergence of NIL deals, is having its moment.

The men still get the majority of NIL deals, but the women are matching or exceeding them at times in the amount they can earn.

Prior to the start of March Madness, the top 50 most followed men’s basketball players on Instagram averaged 230,000 followers while the top women averaged 132,000. But Opendorse values a post from a top followed women’s player at $6,773 while a men’s post sits at $4,555. That’s because women have a more engaged audience.

It didn’t take Miami’s famed Cavinder twins long to figure out that they were better off capitalizing on all of this by returning for a fifth year of college basketball than traveling around the country making TikTok videos. In case you forgot, they were part of the Miami team that went to the Elite Eight in 2023 as their social media following continued to explode.

So Haley and Hanna are back in the 305, back advertising The U brand to their 5 million followers and making the women’s program relevant again.

Caitlin Clark is as responsible as anyone, because in the year that the Cavinder twins were gone, she literally joined LSU gymnast Livvy Dunne in putting NCAA women on their backs.

Clark is part of the WNBA now, learning how much different it is to be a pro with rock star status. The  WNBA is already more physical than college. An example came ealry-on in the Indiana Fever’s third game of the season when Breanna Stewart set a screen for one of her shooters, Courtney Vandersloot, that Clark didn’t see. Stewart didn’t move an inch. Clark looked like she suffered whiplash as she went straight to the ground.

Let’s just say all those millions she is making now didn’t matter very much at that moment.

Ironically, while they were away for a year the Cavinders even tried the WWE, which initially signed them to an NIL deal back in 2021. But that didn’t work out. They started to train at the WWE Performance Center, and the duo appeared on the June 6 episode of WWE NXT. The next month they went on the signature show, Smackdown. But by October they were headed back to college basketball. Haley first transferred to TCU, then returned to Miami with Hanna.

“My last season of basketball was one of the most successful & challenging yrs of my life but it helped me grow immensely,” Hanna wrote on Twitter. “The past few months I have been itching to get back to the game that I thought I lost the passion for. With that being said, I am returning for one more szn”

Haley followed with her transfer from TCU.

“Given the news yesterday that my sister was returning to play ball at Miami and after careful consideration and thought, I’ve decided to return to the University of Miami and play with Hanna for our final and 5th year,” Haley Cavinder wrote on Instagram. “There is nothing more important than family and the bond I share with my twin sister.”

This phenomenon happened very quickly. During Covid in 2020, like all other athletes, Caitlin Clark and all other female athletes were playing in empty gyms. Four years later, 14,000 people were watching Clark’s Iowa team play against LSU along with 12.3 million viewers on television. The wildly popular University of Nebraska women’s volleyball team, which regularly sells out its home arena of 8,000, broke the attendance record for a women’s college sporting event when more than 80,000 fans attended a match at the university’s football stadium last year.

“NIL, being able to use your own name to have your own basketball camp or do a commercial, whatever it is you want to do, why not have that opportunity?” Iowa women’s coach Lisa Bluder said. “Our players have learned so many great, valuable lessons business-wise, marketing-wise, PR-wise. I mean, it’s been a class in itself what these young athletes have learned at an early age about financial management and about business.”

The Cavinder Twins announced their first NIL deal with Boost Mobile in Times Square on the first day of college sports’ new era on July 1, 2021. From there, they’ve used their combined social media to sign with brands like Raising Cane’s, Victoria’s Secret PINK and Champs Sports.

The Caitlin Clark impact on the women’s game was on full display last season as she turned casual viewers into diehards, and now WNBA games have a larger audience because of it. That doesn’t mean she won’t get knocked on her butt by hard screens, but women’s basketball is getting better TV exposure and overall media coverage now.

One of the most influential companies in the digital age is continuing to invest in the college athlete name, image, and likeness space. Meta has launched the second iteration of its NIL program with 30 women’s sports athletes getting career coaching, social media education, and connections with brands.

So the Cavinder twins are back at Miami with a deal with the Miami collective, Canes Connection.

Real talk, Miami will get greater brand exposure for The U through the girls than from any other athlete in the  program not named Cam Ward.

This is NIL in its truest form.

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