IT’S ONLY A PROBLEM IF YOU WANT IT TO BE: The NCAA Has a ‘Hot Girl’ Problem: The Cavinder Twins, the emerging oligarchs of women’s college basketball, aren’t the best players. But they might be the best-looking.

“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. . . .

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.

“The Miami (Florida) women’s basketball head coach violated NCAA rules when she facilitated impermissible contact between two prospects and a booster,” the NCAA declared in a statement explaining the $5,000 fine.
NCAA spokeswoman Meghan Durham declined to comment.

This didn’t sit well with the Twins, who posted a video February 25 using Chris Brown’s song “Look at Me Now.”
The video featured the Twins, apparently in a public restroom, looking confused. But the important thing was the caption beneath the video: “dear NCAA, scared that female athletes have value?”

In good, second-wave feminist fashion, the NCAA, by targeting Miami, seemed to be saying it didn’t like women athletes being objectified—and the Twins, being the body-positive twentysomethings they are, replied: Actually, that’s our business model.

The thing is, the women will never match the athletic performance of the men. And since ultimately it’s about pleasing the crowd, you’ve got to give the crowd something it likes. This was inevitable once the NIL stuff began.

What makes it a problem is just that, once again, the public wants what it wants, not what the stuffed shirts want it to want.