Hawkeyes secure first-round win in NCAA Women's Tournament

Iowa has surged ahead of Holy Cross 20-11 with a 10-0 run — including this Gabbie Marshall 3-pointer.

An up-and-down start for Iowa, which trails 16th-seeded Holy Cross 11-10 midway through the first quarter. Caitlin Clark has four turnovers already and the Crusaders have capitalized. While Holy Cross is 1-of-5 from 3-point range, it has 12 shot attempts to Iowa's seven.

A Gabbie Marshall 3-pointer gets the scoring started for Iowa.

Carver-Hawkeye Arena is jumping. Pregame lineups hit 114 decibels for Hannah Stuelke.

Team in 16 words: The Crusaders are making consecutive appearances in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2000-2001.

Record: 20-12

Coach: Maureen Magarity

Player to watch: Bronagh Power-Cassidy

Strengths: Holy Cross is going dancing again, and it’s in large part to the play of Bronagh Power-Cassidy, who not only has improved her scoring average from 13.5 points last season to 16.6 this season, but her 24.2 PER and 26 percent usage rate are high-water marks in her four-year career.

Weaknesses: Holy Cross plays at an exceptionally slow pace, averaging 65.9 possessions per 40 minutes. Though it has a solid overall defensive rating and holds opponents off of the scoreboard, it’s one of the worst teams in the country (No. 351) in steals per game with just 4.9.

Outlook: Back-to-back years in the tournament out of the Patriot League is a fantastic accomplishment.

You guys know where I live, right? I’m not sure I’d pick against No. 22 under any circumstance. But the NCAA gave Iowa a gauntlet, no matter who it ends up playing. Should the Hawkeyes reach the Sweet 16, they could face Kansas State for the third time this year (they split) or Colorado, which Iowa beat in the same round last year. If the Hawkeyes advance to the regional final, there’s LSU or UCLA. All of those teams have more size, but if the Hawkeyes can run the floor and consistently drill 3-pointers in transition, nobody will stop them. So I’ll say a second national title game trip just to ensure I won’t have toilet paper in my trees.

Fun side note on Iowa guard Kylie Feuerbach. Her longtime boyfriend is Yale’s John Poulakidas, who scored 28 points in the Bulldogs' upset of Auburn. Feuerbach is one of Caitlin Clark's roommates and she has a name, image and likeness deal with the Chicago White Sox.

I talked to Holy Cross' Janelle Allen, who is the older sister of Iowa defensive end Brian Allen Jr. It was a thrill, she said, when she found out her team would play in the NCAA Tournament at Iowa City. She averaged 10.2 points per game.

"It was so exciting. I mean, I honestly haven't seen Junior in months, just because of our schedules being so hectic; me being all the way at Boston, him being a little closer to where we grew up," Janelle said. "I texted him immediately. I was like, 'Junior, watch out, we're coming!' We were very happy."

They watched the Iowa-Kansas State NIT game together at Carver and Brian gave her a tour of the football complex and Kinnick Stadium. Janelle said, "He's my best friend." She couldn't stop smiling when talking about seeing him for a few days.

"I'm very happy that it worked out that way," she said. "I mean, the universe did something great."

Man, Iowa’s region is brutal. One of my friends who has spent her whole career covering women’s college basketball said she’s never seen a region this difficult. Partly, it’s because of the sport’s increased parity. But also … this is just a loaded region. Not that the selection committee cares about perception, but it does show they did not give Caitlin Clark and Co. a cakewalk to Cleveland. I’ll also say the Elite Eight, but not at the hands of LSU — as much as I’d love to see a title game rematch. I’m going to predict that UCLA spoils that storyline, and the Bruins’ inside size advantage takes out the Hawkeyes.

Caitlin Clark is the most exciting player of this generation and we’ve all seen how she can single-handedly take over at any moment. But I worry about Iowa’s size down the stretch — especially with how absolutely stacked its side of the bracket is. It seemed like the Hawkeyes had a little more balance last season with Monika Czinano and McKenna Warnock down low. Hannah Stuelke has been great with 14.6 points per game, but I’d feel better about Iowa’s chances in a potential rematch with LSU and Reese if the Hawkeyes had more post size.

IOWA CITY — The joke about Iowa is that there’s nothing here.

It’s boring. It’s flyover country. It’s so flat that if a breeze comes off the Missouri River, which carves out most of the Western border of the state, you feel it on the Eastern abutting Mississippi River.

They say that there are more cows than people (OK, that one is true).

But here’s what you don’t know if you didn’t grow up here, if you didn’t spend countless weekend mornings driving across this state to gymnasiums scattered around the Midwest: There’s no sunrise in the country quite like an Iowa sunrise. When a state is this flat and you can see this far, your perspective changes. You might be focused on the exit ahead of you, but 20 miles ahead, you see that first bulb of orange peek over the horizon as the rest of the sky somehow fades from black to dark purple. And then, with increasing speed, it all bursts into a gradient of yellows and pinks and blues. You see the full sky, no distractions, while the mile markers whoosh past.

It was on these roads, in the middle of nowhere, that Caitlin Clark spent many mornings of her adolescent life riding with her parents to basketball tournaments and practices. From West Des Moines to Wisconsin to Illinois to Nebraska and back again.

Anything within seven hours?

“Yep,” says Clark’s dad Brent, with real Midwestern dad energy, “that’s drivable.”

She texted friends and listened to music. They talked about Caitlin’s game and dreamed about her goal of getting to the WNBA, discussing what it would take to get there. It was all hypothetical then.

The beauty of this place is that it feels like you can see for a hundred miles. That’s also the thing that can drive you mad. Because when you’re on these roads and one silo replaces the next, it’s natural to question if you’re getting anywhere until you’ve arrived.

So it’s fitting that this place — the boring, flat, cow-riddled Midwest — became the epicenter of one of the biggest shows college basketball has ever seen. In the dark and cold of a typically dreary Iowa winter, it was Clark who filled every seat in Carver-Hawkeye Arena. Never mind the freezing temps or the 17 hours of darkness that descend upon this place in the peak of winter, Clark chose here. This winter, she made Iowa the most exciting show on hardwood.

Anywhere around the state, people can tell you when they knew. When they knew Clark was going to be big. When they knew she was going to be great. With the benefit of hindsight, everyone is prophetic.

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It’s a good time to be Sara Gaiero. Responsible for strategic oversight and management of ESPN’s NCAA women’s basketball coverage, Gaiero presides over a property with massive viewership momentum. And her enthusiasm is as palpable as that of USC star JuJu Watkins seeing no defenders in front of her in the open court.

Two of the four most-watched regular-season women’s college basketball games since 1999 have happened this month, including Caitlin Clark and Iowa’s win over Ohio State (which drew 3.39 million viewers on Fox) and Iowa’s win over Nebraska in the Big Ten tournament final (which averaged 3.02 million viewers on CBS). Two other high-profile women’s games on March 10 also drew tremendous viewership in the non-Clark category: ESPN averaged 1.96 million viewers for a feisty South Carolina-LSU matchup and 1.44 million viewers for USC’s win over Stanford. Sports Media Watch said that day was the largest women’s regular-season audience on the ESPN networks since 2010.

Overall, the season-long ratings story was sensational. ESPN platforms aired 13 games that surpassed 500,000 viewers, the most on record in a regular season. Games on ABC and ESPN have averaged 476,000 viewers in 2023-24, the most-watched regular season on ESPN platforms since 2008-09. Fox, NBC, CBS and the Big Ten Network also experienced growth.

“This moment feels different,” said ESPN’s Holly Rowe, assigned to cover Clark throughout the tournament. “The public interest in (Clark) is epic. … I don’t think I have ever seen such interest in a player. But then there are other storylines and players who are generating as much excitement.”

Gaiero, who previously oversaw the network’s WNBA coverage, said that other ESPN properties, from SportsCenter to digital and social media entities, are now coming to her staff to request women’s basketball content. That is a sea change.

“Honestly, four years ago when I was suggesting to my colleagues that we should talk about the WNBA and cover those stories from the Wubble,” Gaiero said of the 2020 season that was played entirely in Bradenton, Fla., due to the coronavirus pandemic, “there was a lot of pushing and negotiations from me and a lot of convincing people that this is a great story to tell. Now people are coming to me and saying, ‘Hey, what do you guys have on Caitlin Clark, (Stanford’s) Cameron Brink, JuJu Watkins and others?’ … It’s almost a reverse.”

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On his shot that broke his school’s career scoring record, Northwestern guard Boo Buie launched a 30-foot 3-pointer near a sideline logo at Ryan Arena. It hit nothing but net and the crowd’s eruption on that Feb. 22 evening said everything about its importance.

To the fans in Evanston, it was a historical accomplishment. To Buie, he was just channeling the league’s biggest superstar in that moment.

“I watch her (Caitlin Clark) whenever I can when we’re not playing,” he told The Athletic at the Big Ten tournament. “I don’t know if you remember when we played Michigan; I hit a deep 3 for my record-breaking shot. I told myself before the game and my family, ‘I’m going to shoot it from the logo like Caitlin Clark.’ So that was for her.”

Buie considers himself a Caitlin Clark fan. So does Purdue’s Mason Gillis, Michigan State’s A.J. Hoggard, Penn State’s Ace Baldwin and plenty of other men’s basketball players in the Big Ten Conference. Clark’s admirers come from everywhere, and among Big Ten men’s basketball players their sincerity was as obvious in tone as it was from their rhetoric.

Gillis, who was voted the Big Ten’s sixth man of the year, joined several Purdue teammates to watch Clark compete in West Lafayette, Ind., earlier this year. Clark scored 26 points that night before a sold-out crowd and knocked down six 3-pointers in a 96-71 Iowa victory. Clark added 10 assists and 10 rebounds for a triple-double.

“She’s a generational player. She can do everything,” Gillis said. “She can score on all three levels. She’s got energy whenever she’s playing. She roots on her teammates. She’s just cool. She’s a good person and you can tell that through the media, how she handles all the tension and all of the pressure. She’s a great player. There’s nobody like her.”

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Caitlin Clark is relaxed and running through the guard shooting drills with the Hawkeyes. In between shots, she has been peeking up at a video board that's showing the Indiana-Fairfield game (Hoosiers lead by four at the half). Fans that I've talked to are fairly confident in a 40-plus point win, but I'm confident Clark is going to come out like Iowa is an underdog in this one.