March Madness may be over, but brands aren’t done with college hoops.
The five women’s college athletes with the most NIL deals from March 2024 to March 2025 were all basketball players, and athletes from that sport filled two of the top five spots on the men’s side, too, according to sponsorship intelligence platform SponsorUnited’s 2024-25 NIL report, which analyzed 3,000 deals across more than 1,700 brands.
While tech and non-alcoholic beverage brands increased their NIL activity in the past year, apparel and retail brands pulled back, meaning there was relatively little change in the total number of NIL deals year over year. That suggests a “quality-over-quantity approach” to the space, SponsorUnited wrote.
Queens of the court: JuJu Watkins, the sophomore basketball sensation out of the University of Southern California who tore her ACL during March Madness, had 20 NIL deals, including Nike, Fanatics, and Taco Bell, the most of any women’s college athlete, per the report.
- Twin hoopers Haley and Hanna Cavinder from the University of Miami followed Watkins with 18 combined deals with brands like Under Armour and Boost Mobile.
- Paige Bueckers, the projected No. 1 WNBA draft pick who led UConn to the NCAA championship and the first college athlete to ink a deal with Gatorade, had 16 deals, as does the University of Oregon’s Deja Kelly.
- Louisiana State University’s Flau’jae Johnson rounded out the top five, with 15 deals across brands including Powerade, Experian, and Puma.
The most-endorsed male college athletes included two basketball stars: UNC’s RJ Davis, who led with 25 deals, and LSU’s Trace Young, who had 17 deals. Football players rounded out the rest of the top five: Cash Peterman from the University of Arizona had 21 deals, University of Colorado junior Travis Hunter had 19, and University of Texas senior Quinn Ewers had 17.
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In and out: Apparel and accessory brands accounted for the most NIL deals, per SponsorUnited, with more than 400 across the category. Still, that number was down 20%, with 100 brands moving out of the college athletics space in the past year, SponsorUnited found. On the other hand, about 60 new apparel and accessory brands got into NIL, as major players like Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour “refined their approach…with longer-term deals,” according to the report.
The technology category had the second-highest number of NIL deals at more than 350, a share that increased by 29% year over year. Gaming companies like EA Sports, Nintendo, and Epic Games, as well as Amazon, helped support that growth.
Non-alcoholic beverage brands upped their collective number of NIL deals by 19% to more than 275, while retail brand NIL deals saw a 9% decline.
Clock is ticking: Instagram had the highest percentage of branded posts from college athletes, per SponsorUnited, which analyzed 4,000 posts, though TikTok drove the highest percentage of engagements with those posts for categories like food and consumer products. Instagram posts accounted for the largest share of engagements across apparel and accessories, non-alcoholic beverages, and consumer electronics, but SponsorUnited still found that TikTok, whose future in the US remains uncertain, “remains underutilized despite its potential for engagement.”