Caitlin Clark, Iowa-LSU, and a landmark moment for women's sports
A college basketball game on a Monday night was the biggest story in sports. The big question is where it goes from here
Early last week I had some time in the evening to do something I hadn’t done much before: watch women’s NCAA basketball.
It was Iowa-West Virginia in the second round of March Madness, with supernova Caitlin Clark playing her last game on her home court. A box-office game, as they say.
And it kind of sucked. Neither team could make a shot, especially in a second quarter that West Virginia won by the hilarious score of 9-6. Iowa was up by the almost-as-funny score of 26-24 at the half.
Ah, well. Sometimes the hotly anticipated games don’t pan out as expected. Iowa would go on to win by a more normal 64-54 scoreline, padded mostly by a stretch of closing free throws. Clark had 32 points, but on 36 per cent shooting. She looked a lot like someone trying to do too much.
The Hawkeyes were better in the Round of 16, blitzing Colorado 89-68 as Clark piled up 15 assists to go with her 29 points, punishing the inevitable double-teams. This set up Monday’s Elite Eight game against LSU, a rematch of last year’s title final that the Tigers won rather easily. There was even public beef between Clark and LSU star Angel Reese. It was, as they say, box-office.
And sometimes the hotly anticipated games pan out even better than expected. Clark hit bombs from all over the court, exploiting LSU coach Kim Mulkey’s extremely weird plan of letting the most prolific college shooter of all time shoot from wherever she liked. She finished with 41 points, 12 assists, and a host of records. Reese, slowed by a mid-game ankle injury, still managed 17 points and 20 rebounds, but it wasn’t enough to stop a 94-87 Iowa win.
It felt in the moment like a sea-change kind of game. Massive interest in a women’s mid-round matchup, and a massive performance.
On Tuesday came the ratings numbers: a massive audience.12.3 million viewers in the United States, which isn’t just a record for women’s basketball but these days is a bigger audience than almost any sporting event that doesn’t involve the National Football League. (Canadian viewership numbers are famously opaque, with the networks guarding them like nuclear codes, but it would have been a record number for the sport here, too.)
It was a landmark moment. It was just three years ago that the women’s tournament gained attention for the comically sparse workout facilities provided to their athletes relative to the men, kicking off a round of stories about how women’s sport was been historically underfunded and ignored. And now here was Iowa-LSU drawing an audience, on cable on Monday night, that rivalled those of the men’s game on Sunday on network television. One player dedicated the night to all those girls before her who played in empty gyms.
Writing about women’s sports over the years has reliably brought at least a comment or two from some reader who just had to point out that the women in question couldn’t compete with men.
These were, obviously, pointless observations from people who likely spent a lot of time getting ignored by women, but they did hint at the eternal challenge for women’s sports: if the sports audience is mostly male, and it is, and a chunk of that audience is comprised of dudes who will simply turn their noses up at women’s hockey or soccer or basketball, and it is, were these events always doomed to be under-appreciated?
The counter to that was my own experience in covering some of these events. At the last two Olympics, in China and Japan, nothing caught the interest of people back home more than the gold-medal runs of the Canadian women in hockey and soccer. These were huge deals, and the medal-round games were one of the very few times at either Olympics that there was a real sense, way over on the other side of the world, that Canadians were both awake at odd times and really into it. Give women’s sports a proper platform and real stakes, and people would not just watch, but hang and suffer on every moment just like any other big-time event. Bianca Andreescu, Brooke Henderson, Leylah Fernandez, all of them providing signature Canadian athletic moments in recent years in which, for a time, pushed everything else aside.
And then I would write something about, say, the IIHF Women’s World Championship and someone would respond to say that players in the OHL were faster and stronger. Like, OK? Enjoy your internet, fella.
It’s impossible to know at this point what kind of lasting impact the Clark effect will have not just on basketball, but on women’s sport in general. But there will have to be some impact. Clark will play in the Final Four this weekend, where no doubt more ratings history will be made, and will then move on to a pro career in the WNBA. That league has not been without its problems, but it’s never had an incoming rookie with the profile of Clark. She also leaves star power behind in the NCAA, with players like freshman JuJu Watkins at USC ready to step into the void.
The bigger question is whether the decision-makers at broadcasters and in other positions of power see the interest in the women’s tournament this year and wonder if perhaps they should have paid attention to the possibilities of women’s sport sooner. In Canada, the same thing is playing out, on a smaller scale, with the nascent Professional Women’s Hockey League. For years, the same players who drew huge television audiences at the Olympics insisted that there was a market for a viable professional women’s league, if only enough people in a position of influence came to support it. Eventually they did, although it took several years, and so far all the PWHL has done is keep setting new attendance records.
Women’s sports drawing significant audiences?
They have every right to say I-told-you-so.