Caitlin Clark's Greatness Is Not Up for Debate
CLEVELAND — For as much noise — and that's what it was, noise — has been generated by pundits and former players about Caitlin Clark's legacy, she needed little time Sunday reminding the world one last time that nothing speaks louder than a bucket.
Clark scored an NCAA Tournament championship game record 18 points in the first quarter, staking the Hawkeyes to a 27-20 lead after the first frame. Clark couldn't keep that pace up as the game wore on and South Carolina's defense locked in, especially at the hands of guard Raven Johnson. But there's only one player in the history of the sport who could be "held" to 30 points in a national championship game, and it's Caitlin Clark.
As a team, South Carolina was simply too much for the Hawkeyes Sunday. Too tall, too deep, too strong, too good. The Gamecocks were the best team in college basketball this season, wire-to-wire, and basketball is a team sport.
"That is a tremendous basketball team," Iowa head coach Lisa Bluder said after the game. "Coach Staley obviously, congratulations to them. I'm proud of my team, though. Finishing national runner-up two years in a row is an amazing feat. Nobody thought we were going to be here at the beginning of the year, so that makes it pretty special."
"I mean, South Carolina is so good," Clark said. "There's only so much you can do. I'm just proud of our group. We never backed down, and we gave it everything we've got."
Clark finished her Hawkeye career with every individual award imaginable, usually multiple copies of them, and her Division I career scoring record of 3,951 points is a full 424 points clear of Kelsey Plum in second place for NCAA scoring. Her Wikipedia page is as cluttered with accolades as her trophy room.
Clark's greatest impact on the game, though, is with the fans.
This will likely be the first and only time anybody compares Clark to rapper/country artist Lil Nas X, but hear us out.
Mr. Nas X's 2019 single "Old Town Road" caused great consternation among the country music elite. It's an impossibly catchy earworm, but a young, queer Black man with no history in the genre was as much a lightning rod for controversy as for airplay. The success spawned a veritable cottage industry of thinkpieces — many in good faith, many not — but the song persisted on the charts for months.
A 2019 appearance at an elementary school, at the height of the song's popularity, illustrated its appeal in its most distilled form: kids LOVE the song.
Similarly, kids LOVE Caitlin Clark. Kids don't watch contrived debates about her legacy. Kids don't care that adults want her to be more political. Kids don't listen to debates about the WNBA's historical profitability or popularity.
They see her for what she is: a hooper.
They see her game for what it is: singularly great and damned fun to watch.
They love Caitlin for Caitlin.
There are obvious limitations to the above comparison, so it's not worth lingering on. Clark is a team athlete, and her team soared to heights previously unseen with her on board — just as Clark had predicted.
"When she came in as a freshman and she said, we're going to the Final Four, a lot of people laughed at her and maybe even laughed at her for coming to Iowa, quite honestly," said Bluder. "But she believed, we believed, and she got everybody else in that locker room to believe. And that is not an easy thing to do."
Clark's teammates shared Bluder's sentiments and adoration.
"She's the greatest of all time," said sophomore forward Hannah Stuelke. "Maybe I'm biased because I love her so much. But, I think just the fact that she brought us all the way here — she put us in the position to win a national championship. I think that's really hard to do without being a big name [school], and I'm proud of her."
Thanks to Clark's heroics and astonishingly consistent performance on the biggest stages, Iowa routinely drew record-breaking ratings, regardless of opponent or channel. By the end of the season, Iowa had set all-time ratings records for women's basketball on seven different networks:
Beginning last season, the magnetic appeal of Clark turned into television ratings that started to climb. And climb. And climb. Iowa-Louisville made headlines in last year's Elite Eight for drawing 2.5 million viewers. That was enough to break records. The 9.9 million in the National Championship dropped jaws.
One more season of greatness later, and Iowa's Elite Eight numbers topped 12 million. The Final Four victory over UConn — late on a Friday night — cruised past 14 million. Lord only knows what heights Sunday's national championship's ratings will reach; 20 million is not implausible.
That stratospheric bump in ratings means new fans are finding the sport. Self-avowed sports fans (mainly dudes) admitting in varying shades of sheepishness that they were late on the bandwagon, but fully committed to what they've witnessed.
"I don't really get offended when people say I never watched women's basketball before," Clark said. "I think, one, you're a little late to the party, yes. But, two, that's cool. We're changing the game. We're attracting more people to it."
If Clark's "legacy" needs any finer line of delineation — if she needs to be the greatest something of all time — it's beyond serious debate that she is the greatest ambassador women's college basketball has ever had. Where seemingly nobody could break the sport through the modern national consciousness (perhaps unfairly so), Clark could — and did — through her unmatchable combination of talent, drive, joy and dedication to her team.
She not only commands attention, she consistently rewards it, more than any player who has ever come before.
"To attract so many people to watching women's basketball is so special," Clark said. "I think people didn't love us for our wins. I think they loved us for the way we carried ourselves every single day, for the way we played for one another, the joy we played with, the passion we played with, the competitive spirit we had, the way we high-fived and celebrated our teammates' success. That's the reason people loved turning on Iowa women's basketball."
Even on the championship stage, South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley — the reigning three-time coach of the year and someone Bluder described as "the leader of women's basketball right now" — left no doubt about her respect for Clark's career and impact on the game.
"I have to congratulate Iowa on an incredible season," Staley said amid a roar of applause from the fans still in attendance. "Awesome, awesome. And I want to personally thank Caitlin Clark for lifting up our sport. She carried a heavy load for our sport. And it just is not going to stop here on the collegiate tour. But when she is the #1 pick in the WNBA Draft, she is going to lift that league up as well. So Caitlin Clark, if you're out there: you are one of the GOATs of our game. And we appreciate you."
Clark has earned whatever free time she can finagle in the coming days, but it won't be much; the WNBA Draft, where Clark is universally expected to be taken #1 overall by the Indiana Fever, takes place on April 15, just eight days from now. From there, there'll be press, practice, the whole thing before that regular season starts on May 14, as the Fever take on the Connecticut Sun.
That'll be a brand new era for Clark, a brand new opportunity to show the professionals how special she is — and to show fans how special the WNBA is too.
Her Hawkeye era has officially ended now, though, as all eras do. And it has been the greatest career we've ever seen.