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LOS ANGELES — In fall 2023, representatives from NBC and Peacock approached the Big Ten’s annual TV-network draft with one goal in mind: haggle for as many games featuring Iowa women’s basketball and Caitlin Clark as they possibly could.
They had brokered a landmark partnership with the Big Ten a year earlier, trying to establish Peacock in the live-sports streaming business. Women’s basketball, quickly, had become a massive draw for the conference behind Clark’s exploits with the Hawkeyes. And network executives came away ecstatic last year, landing eight total Clark appearances on NBC and Peacock that paid massive dividends: an Iowa-Nebraska Big Ten Tournament championship game in March peaked at 3 million viewers in overtime, according to NBC Sports coordinating producer Mark Bellotti.
So this fall, with Clark graduating to the WNBA and NBC entering the third year of its Big Ten partnership, the network approached 2024’s network draft with a new emphasis: haggle for as many games featuring USC’s JuJu Watkins as it possibly could.
Sure, these were two different situations. Two different players. But, Bellotti readily admitted, Peacock hoped Watkins would be the heir to the reverence that Clark drew last season. And Peacock jockeyed with Fox in September’s draft for USC games, each emphasizing the program’s value: Fox has placed three USC games in its Saturday night primetime windows, while Peacock came away with eight USC games on its schedule, the same number it held for Iowa last season.
“When we realized that these four new programs would be part of the Big Ten and we would have the ability and access to those games,” Bellotti told the Southern California News Group, “our feeling is – JuJu’s a superstar in this space.”
Exactly five games into her sophomore season, the 19-year-old Watkins has assumed the torch from Clark as the most visible face in women’s college basketball, her NIL enterprise growing from kingdom to empire. She has inked massive deals with Gatorade and most recently State Farm, and re-upped with Nike. She has partnered with NYX Professional Makeup, and released her own Funko Pop doll. And she’s become the very ethos of Peacock’s push for live-streaming growth through Big Ten women’s basketball.
Watkins’ profile, simply, has exploded by design. It’s been charted since the first meeting the young All-American and her family took with agency Klutch Sports, back when Watkins was simply a high school player with a bun in her hair and a burgeoning two-syllable nickname. Her story is grounded in Los Angeles, and Watts, the roots that drew Watkins to USC and the chance to sprout a legacy from her own backyard. Her portfolio is grounded in the same roots, structured carefully around long-term partnerships with brands that specifically champion that L.A. journey.
But the goal for her brand, as her camp details, is much grander than Los Angeles – or any women’s basketball narrative that has come before.
“I would say, to make her a transcendent athlete, person, global, all of those things,” agent Jade-Li English told the Southern California News Group. “What she’s becoming, there aren’t many.”
“And I think also, as a Black female, it’s very important,” she continued. “Like, it’s JuJu’s time. And it’s important for the world to see that.”
‘JUJU IS CULTURE’
In early September, USC women’s basketball coach Lindsay Gottlieb was out eating with her family at the Grove when a nearby man started staring at her. Gottlieb was confused. Did I spill something? she thought.
The stranger approached, and spoke.
“How tall is JuJu?” he asked.
Six-foot-1, or 6-foot-2-ish, Gottlieb responded. The man asked why she wasn’t on the Olympic team. Watkins was young, Gottlieb responded; maybe in 2028. Eventually, he left, and Gottlieb started laughing, taking out her phone to text Watkins about what on earth had just happened.
“I can’t get away from it,” Gottlieb reflected to SCNG, sitting in her office in September. “And imagine what it’s like for her.”
Watkins has become a hometown draw, unlike few others, singular to Los Angeles. In May, Gottlieb accompanied Watkins to a fundraiser hosted by the Dodgers, USC’s head coach marveling that Watkins drew as much attention as any Dodger. She was L.A. culture, Gottlieb mused.
“I think it’s really important that a young, African-American female from Watts is the face of women’s college basketball, I think that’s important,” Gottlieb told reporters last week. “We haven’t had that. But she has not had to change who she is.”
Her journey is unique, a local kid with a family tree embedded deep in the very history of Los Angeles, one who turned away South Carolina and Stanford and the top programs in the nation for the chance to build a dynasty in her own community. It is Watkins’ essence, and it has become the essence of her brand, companies targeting and investing heavily into Watkins’ story specifically for her Los Angeles story.
Marc Siegel, the senior vice president of Funko brand merchandising, pointed in part to Watkins’ “authenticity” when asked what made her an ideal partner. Yasmin Dastmalchi, NYX’s senior VP of marketing, told SCNG that Watkins’ first shoot with the makeup company felt very “at-home” – in large part because she had brought her parents to set.
Danny Barton, one of the executive producers of Watkins’ newly-premiered NBC Sports docuseries “On the Rise,” said he had the idea to turn cameras on Watkins all the way back to her days at Sierra Canyon High because of that “homegrown” narrative. State Farm, too, is a partner on the documentary.
“They, too, felt what we felt,” Barton said of State Farm, “which is that JuJu’s story and her Los Angeles roots and how she got to where she is now – and where she’s going to continue to go – is something that they really wanted to get behind.”
All partnerships have been carefully targeted, and filtered, by Klutch. Watkins’ portfolio has been built on long-term investments with such companies, her team largely eschewing any one-off deals in order to protect her brand and not “over-saturate” the marketplace, as Klutch VP of basketball marketing Brittany McCallum said. At the same time, her team has carefully emphasized and promoted a variety of firsts: first college athlete to executive produce her own docuseries, first women’s college basketball player to partner with a makeup brand (NYX), first active NCAA athlete to have her own Funko figure.
None of this, too, has come as an overwhelm that Watkins hasn’t asked for. She was “heavily involved,” even, in the mock-up process for her Funko Pop, as McCallum detailed; Watkins has long had an interest in design and sketching, and painstakingly reviewed the details on the figurine in edges of her hairline and bun.
“JuJu is culture,” McCallum said, asked how she would define Watkins’ brand. “She’s culture, if we had to put it in its simplest form. She is cool. She is authentic.”
“She is the leader.”
‘MINDSET IS STILL THE SAME’
She is the leader, too, around USC, a delicate fact that could cause a locker room imbalance in a different ecosystem.
Watkins’ camp is hardly shy, ultimately, to emphasize her value. She had helped turn around a USC program that was “down in the dumps,” as agent English put it, since the glory days of the 1980s and Cheryl Miller. Even after a 74-61 loss to Notre Dame in a much-anticipated showdown on Saturday, USC (4-1) is currently ranked sixth in the nation in the encore to an Elite Eight season.
“And it’s because of JuJu,” English said.
Watkins, though, has a partner in Gottlieb who isn’t shy herself about wanting the most – in any context – for her young star.
“I’m a crazy kind of thinker, too,” Gottlieb told reporters in late October. “I want her to own something one day. Not just play in the WNBA – own a team.”
Gottlieb and her program understood Watkins’ sheer worth to USC as a university, something she emphasized to the Southern California News Group. The program was being targeted by networks like Peacock, the head coach acknowledged, because of Watkins’ impact. Gottlieb isn’t afraid to say it. Neither is the rest of the Trojans’ locker room.
“I think it’s really cool for her, obviously,” freshman guard Avery Howell said, when asked about the growth of Watkins’ profile, “but then it’s also cool for our team, because it just draws this attention and spotlight to all of us.”
Watkins’ work ethic on the hardwood, through her camp’s pursuit of mogul status, has remained unquestioned. A few nights before that docuseries premiered ahead of the game against Notre Dame, she was back on a Galen Center practice court getting shots up, as center Rayah Marshall detailed. And Watkins put the program, Gottlieb said, “above anything individual.”
On-court growth and growing pains, alike, have emerged early in Watkins’ sophomore season. Her playmaking and defensive instincts have taken a leap. Her shot has yet to warm up, sitting at 18% from 3-point range, notably forcing a number of looks against ranked programs like Ole Miss and Notre Dame. But the last thing Gottlieb worries about, she has expressed, is Watkins’ ability to handle it all – the attention that comes her way from swarming defenses, from TV networks, from brands and endorsements and a social media melting pot.
“Mindset is still the same,” Watkins said in late October. “Regardless of everything that’s coming.”
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