ALBANY — Never accuse Caitlin Clark of not living up to the hype.
Iowa's 94-87 win over LSU in Monday night's Elite Eight drew a record-breaking average of 12 million viewers, and peaked with a high of 16 million viewers. The previous high came all the way back in 1983, when USC and Cheryl Miller defeated Louisiana Tech*, according to Sports Media Watch.
*Go ahead and look up who the point guard was on that '83 Lady Techsters team.
Clark's "legacy" as a college basketball player has become a talking point for ESPN's more — and this is being polite — superficially informed talking heads. Televised barbershop aside, her legacy seems unimpeachable: Caitlin Clark is, by any conceivable metric, the most popular women's college basketball player ever.
There's no backhand to that compliment either, because Clark's popularity stems virtually entirely from her greatness on the basketball court.
Clark owns too many college basketball records to count, including all-time season and career marks in scoring and three-pointers. She's mere days away from becoming a two-time National Player of the Year, she has led Iowa to its second straight Final Four after a 30-year absence, and she puts up mammoth performances on the biggest stage, time and time again.
Quite simply: fans keep tuning in because they know she's going to keep balling.
The Big Ten will need to update its ratings graphic from February, when Clark and the Hawkeyes owned six networks' most-watched women's basketball games ever; ESPN makes seven, and plausibly the biggest of the bunch. She's a ticket like no other.
How does the viewership for Iowa-LSU compare to some other notable sporting events? Take a look:
One other detail worth noting: the common refrain that Clark is commanding too much media attention took a heavy body blow with the night's next game, when Paige Bueckers and UConn outlasted JuJu Watkins and USC, punching the Huskies' ticket to Cleveland to face the Hawkeyes.
Per Richard Deitsch of The Athletic:
UConn’s win over USC in Monday’s other Elite Eight matchup drew 6.7 million viewers, which would have surpassed every title game viewership since 1996 except for last year’s championship.
And if you thought Iowa's ratings against LSU were gigantic, Iowa-UConn with a shot at the natty on the line is likely to obliterate anything Clark and the Hawkeyes have done yet. Records were made to be broken, after all, so the Hawkeyes might as well break their own.
So we'd tell you all to tune in to ESPN at approximately 8:30 PM CT on Friday, but you already know, and you already will. And odds are, Clark will make sure it's worth your while.
