SORRY, NOT THIS VALUE PROPOSITION.

I'm going to have to revise some previous remarks.  "The only thing worse than not being able to trade on your image as a college athlete is being able to trade on your image, and nobody is interested."  No, the only thing worse than nobody being interested is the wrong people being interested.  "The NCAA Has a ‘Hot Girl’ Problem."  Really?  "The Cavinder Twins, the emerging oligarchs of women’s college basketball, aren’t the best players. But they might be the best-looking."  To my eye, they're a little thin, but on social media, who knows?

While the Twins are accomplished basketball players—until recently, they played for Division I University of Miami—they’re nowhere near the top of the women’s basketball totem pole. The top players in college women’s basketball—like Keishana Washington at Drexel University or Caitlin Clark at University of Iowa—score close to 30 points per game. In her final year at Miami, Haley Cavinder scored just over 12 points per game; Hanna, just under 4 points. They were good, but not WNBA good.

The twins played for Miami of Florida, which is notorious for college sports scandals, and the WNBA has a different sort of hot girl problem, but the political economy of trading on your image is what's being contested here.

“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.

I found this story on Twitchy, where "justmindy" concludes, "Let's be real. This 'problem' seems like not much of a problem. If this is all the NCAA has to worry about, they must not have many worries."  That sounds about right.  The twins have gone on from Miami basketball to show business and making advertisements.  File this story along with the report on five-cheese penne.