Caitlin Clark, Iowa hang on 64-54 win for trip to the Sweet 16: Highlights and reaction

Caitlin Clark going with black-and-gold Nikes tonight in her Carver finale. She often wears the Air Grinches, a Kobe Bryant shoe.

This will be the finale time we see a No. 22 Iowa basketball jersey at Carver. The No. 22 on the men’s side is retired for Bill Seaberg, who played for Iowa's back-to-back Final Four teams in the 1950s. Patrick McCaffery requested permission to wear No. 22 to honor his friend Austin Schroeder, also known as Flash, who died of cancer a few years ago. Obviously, no Iowa women's basketball player will wear No. 22 again.

When Larry Silverberg and his colleague Chau Tran began studying the science of the basketball shot in the early 2000s, Iowa star Caitlin Clark was just a toddler but had yet to walk to the 3-point line, let alone pull up from 5 feet behind the arc. But even with Clark, Stephen Curry and the explosion of the 3 still years away, the jump shot became among the academic focuses for Silverberg and Tran, both of whom are basketball fans and professors in North Carolina State’s mechanical and aerospace engineering department. “Basketball,” Silverberg says, “is highly predictable.”

Formulas that predict whether a pull-up will go through a 10-foot hoop with an 18-inch diameter take into account factors such as release height, launch angle, release speed and backspin. It’s why for years now, robots capable of shooting like top-tier basketball players have developed. Although Clark is no Cue6, her proficiency from deep often looks automatic.

In dissecting the shooting skills of Clark, who broke the women’s Big Ten, NCAA and major-college career scoring records this season, Tran picks up on the 6-foot guard’s high release point. Silverberg notices the arc on her jumper and how her 3-pointer appears to travel on an ideal trajectory. “She’s shooting an optimal shot,” Silverberg says.

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Molly Davis is not warming up with Iowa and isn't listed as a starter on the pre-game probable lineups sheet. So, it seems safe to assume that Davis — a veteran point guard who injured her knee in the regular season finale — wasn't quite ready to go for the second round game. She hasn't come out of the tunnel yet, either. So, it's unclear if she will suit up just to be on the bench with her teammates, but as of now, it looks like Iowa will be without The Headband.

An unreal stretch of warm-up 3-pointers by Caitlin Clark. Shocking, in fact.

IOWA CITY, Iowa — On any given game day inside Carver-Hawkeye Arena, black-and-gold T-shirts for nearly every Iowa women’s basketball player are as visible as the No. 22 that reigns supreme throughout the college sports landscape.

Midwest T-shirt company RayGun mass produces athlete-specific apparel, but it doesn’t touch superstar Caitlin Clark — except for her “Damn It” quip that got her T’ed up last season. Arguably, no collegiate athlete has more appeal nationally than Clark, who has her shirts manufactured through her Nike contract. RayGun markets the rest of Iowa’s women’s basketball players, from which players also profit, and sales have soared beyond any rational expectation.

“We’ve worked with other teams that (have) great basketball players or great sports players in general,” RayGun owner Mike Draper said. “But there’s not the same level of charisma, which isn’t a requirement, obviously, to be good at basketball, but charisma, I think, helps for selling merchandise. … Women’s basketball at Iowa has been by far our best NIL project of all the teams we worked.”

Women, meet moment. Business, meet product. The top-seeded Iowa women’s basketball team is more than just Clark, and that was proven again in a 91-65 win against Holy Cross in Saturday’s NCAA Tournament first-round game. Clark recorded her typical productive line of 27 points, 10 assists and eight rebounds, but it was her teammates who provided the backbone in victory.

Kate Martin had 15 points and 14 rebounds. Addison O’Grady scored 14 points off the bench, subbing for an ill Hannah Stuelke. Gabbie Marshall drilled the game’s first basket on a 3-pointer that nearly took the roof off Carver-Hawkeye Arena. Sydney Affolter battled for 9 points and seven rebounds while replacing injured guard Molly Davis, who hopes to play Monday.

The loudest ovation Saturday came on Marshall’s 3-pointer. The eruption hit 118 decibels, the second-loudest of any event in recent Carver-Hawkeye history. Only Clark’s buzzer-beating 3-pointer against Indiana was a shade louder (119 decibels).

When Marshall heard about the sound meter, she responded, “Are you serious?” It’s not surprising for the ear-piercing crowd salvo; Marshall herself is one of the fan favorites and generates some of RayGun’s most popular T-shirts. The latest one called “Gabbie March-all” welcomed her to the arena.

“It’s cool to see in the shirts that people have,” Marshall said. “I think there (were) like four ladies in the front row tonight that had all matching shirts with that on it.”

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Eighty-four-year-old Roberta Burkholder, her white parka zipped to her neck, stands alongside her 81-year-old husband, Orval. She arrived here, at the back doors of Indiana University’s Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall, around 7 a.m. It’s now pushing 5:30 in the evening. To their left are Trenton Kemp and his 13-year-old son, Maguire. They flew into town two days prior from Boise, Idaho, and planted at this particular spot around 6:30. Another gentleman, Josh Kennedy, flew in from Norman, Okla., before parking here before dawn.

Chris Coats, a kindly white-haired gentleman dressed head-to-toe in Hoosier gear, came comparatively late, around 8 a.m., but has since become the de facto mayor of this pop-up community. He knows everyone’s backstories, if not all of their names. The lady behind him, Coats explains, was smart enough to pack chicken salad sandwiches, and that fella over there, the one in the overalls? He bought four pizzas and some Wendy’s and generously shared them with everyone.

This cross-section of Americana — young, old, male, female — forms the head of a line that snakes in all directions; so many people in line a 10-year veteran of the security team at IU prays that they all have a ticket to get in the building. They have collected here, at the backdoors of a basketball temple in a basketball-fervent state, to get a glimpse of a basketball shooting star.

Caitlin Clark is no longer merely a basketball player. She is an experience, an outrageously talented athlete swaddled in NIL, social media and female empowerment who encapsulates the zeitgeist of college athletics. Clark shoots, literally and figuratively, into March, trailed by young girls who react to her shots like Swifties to a favorite song, by girl dads giddy to find common ground with their daughters, by long-committed women’s hoops fans thrilled to finally get their long overdue attention, by ordinary hoops fans who simply want to see a good player perform, and by curiosity-seekers hoping to get a glimpse of a phenomenon.

“We came for Caitlin Clark,” says Roberta, the octogenarian, as she and Orval get swallowed by the masses when the Assembly Hall doors finally open. “I’ll do anything once.”

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Iowa women’s basketball fans scooped up every ticket to the NCAA Tournament’s first and second rounds at Carver-Hawkeye Arena in just 30 minutes, the school announced last week.

It’s a common occurrence for Iowa’s women’s basketball team to sell out its home NCAA Tournament games, which it now has done for three consecutive years. But to do it so quickly speaks to how beloved this team is by its fans.

Counting Monday, the top-seeded Hawkeyes (29-5) have sold out 34 of 36 possible games. The only two not sold out took place in an exempt Thanksgiving tournament in Florida.

Earlier this month, the entire Big Ten women’s basketball tournament was sold out in Minneapolis, something the men’s tournament was not close to doing this weekend. By most estimates, 90 percent of the women’s basketball attendees were Iowa fans.

“I feel like every game that we’ve played in this year has been that NCAA atmosphere,” Iowa coach Lisa Bluder said. “It’s been an unbelievable crowd. We’ve had our names circled on everybody’s schedule. I think that we’re prepared just because of what we’ve went through throughout the year, not just during the Big Ten tournament.”

As for the Sweet 16 and Elite 8 matchups, they will be held in Albany, N.Y., which will test the reach of the Caitlin Clark Effect. It’s too far for most Iowa fans to drive, so the majority of fans may need to come from the East Coast.

“If there’s any fans out east that want to come, we’ll take them,” Clark said. “Honestly, there was a lot when we played at Maryland and when we played at Rutgers. A lot of people showed up, and really wherever we go, I expect there to be a good amount of just basketball fans in general. And I’m expecting Iowa fans to travel really well. I don’t doubt them at this point — if we make it.”

As college basketball players head to NCAA Tournament arenas on their team buses, many will slip on headphones, zone out to a song and absorb the vibes. Coaches also sometimes take a small moment from poring over last-minute scouting reports to escape to a melody filtering through their airpods.

These soundtracks, perhaps subconsciously, serve an objective, too. Music can settle our nerves — or pump us up. A specific banger can provide a dose of confidence. A sentimental song might remind us of our grand purpose. “Music is the shorthand of emotion,” Leo Tolstoy once wrote.

So as March Madness gets underway, The Athletic wondered what these tournament-bound stars will be listening to before they compete in some of the most important games in their lives. We asked women’s and men’s tournament players and coaches to share their pre-game playlists. Players’ tastes ranged from Nicki Minaj to Veeze to even Elvis Presley. Coaches ranged from Gospel to AC/DC.

You won’t achieve the same jump shot as these athletes by listening to their hype music, but these playlists will get you ready (from your couch) for tip-off.

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It’s a little after 11 a.m. on an unnervingly cold December day, and Isaac Prewitt exhales. Hands on hips, cheeks puffed out, the whole deal. His morning had been relatively easy for a while: Play dummy defense against pick-and-rolls; needle his friend about an incoming shipment of Gatorade Fit drinks; run some zone offense. A graduate student, whiling away winter break in a gym, doing a job that’s never work.

For the last few minutes, though, his job stinks.

Because his job is Caitlin Clark.

He wears a blue scout-team pinnie and pursues his pal with the Gatorade hook-up during an Iowa women’s basketball practice, slaloming around bodies trying to bump him off course, doing what he can to prevent a generationally gifted scorer from, well, scoring. At one point, Prewitt challenges a Clark 3-pointer so aggressively that his fingers interlock with Clark’s on her follow-through. She makes it anyway. Prewitt laughs.

Male practice players have been around women’s basketball for at least a half-century, mimicking the opposition’s schemes and personnel. They’re generally in the gym to help, not to win, often getting nothing except cardio for their effort. But unfair fights are one thing. How about a 6-foot-4 Stanford forward with an impossible wingspan and deceptive speed? A teenage prodigy at USC with a bottomless bag of answers? The Iowa guard who might score more points than any player in college ever has?

What, in fact, do you do about all that?

For starters, you keep coming back for more. After that deep breath, Prewitt lines up across from Clark. “Talk to me, talk to me,” he calls out, wary of a screen. It comes. Help defense does not. He lunges at Clark as she hoists another 3-pointer. She cashes it. And Isaac Prewitt throws his hands in the air.

Iowa coach Lisa Bluder has seen this before, and seen enough. “Let’s let blue get a drink,” she says.

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Upset chance: 41.5 percent

Wait, what? At BetMGM, West Virginia is a 15.5-point underdog, making it the biggest underdog in Monday’s games. But our model suggests that’s backward — the tournament gap between the Hawkeyes and Mountaineers is actually not only narrower than most fans and analysts believe, but the smallest among the second group of second-round matchups.

Slingshot sees West Virginia as the 20th-best team in the country, outscoring opponents by 35.5 points per 100 possessions after adjusting for strength of schedule. It’s got plenty of company in that price range: WVU ranks 21st in NET, 27th at HerHoopStats and 25th in RPI. And it’s in a nicer house than Creighton (No. 25, according to our model), Mississippi (35) or Kansas (37). Further, while all four of these underdogs are facing top-10 giants on Monday, the difference between West Virginia and Iowa is 12.1 points per 100 possessions, the lowest among the matchups. By itself, that should make WVU worth a flyer. Even assuming a game played at Iowa’s very quick pace and adding in home-field advantage for Caitlin Clark & Co., we would expect the spread here to be something like 12 points, not north of 16.

Then there’s this: West Virginia leads the country with steals on a staggering 16.5 percent of opponent possessions. We’ve been studying the men’s game long enough to see team after team of elite disruptors, from VCU to Stephen F. Austin to Abilene Christian to Iowa State, come out of nowhere to topple Goliaths. We have learned that a forced turnover rate this high is something you cannot ignore. The Mountaineers’ pressure is relentless — they’ve had games where they have applied it for 40 minutes. And it’s brought them big wins against tough foes. Two days ago, West Virginia was down at halftime in the first round but aggravated Princeton into 10 turnovers during the first six minutes of the second half, and outscored the Tigers 18-7 in the third quarter, then won by 10. Led by their outstanding backcourt of JJ Quinerly (19.9 points per game) and Jordan Harrison (13.9 ppg, 5.1 assists per game), the Mountaineers have four players averaging 2.4 or more steals per game. The Morgantown media is even asking if “Press Virginia” is back, this time courtesy of the women’s game.

Iowa’s offense is fantastic. The Hawkeyes are shooting over 60 percent from inside, 38 percent from outside, and don’t need to get to the free-throw line much to generate a nation-leading 119.1 points per 100 possessions. Clark looks like the greatest player you’ve ever seen because she is. And the 4.8 turnovers per game she commits are largely a product of how often she touches the ball and how fast she plays. Iowa coughs it up on just 15.4 percent of possessions, ranking 21st in the country as a group. It’s no insult to point out that, now and then, Clark has games where she starts to fling increasingly difficult passes, which can lead to turnovers. It usually happens while she’s in the process of destroying an opponent, like against Louisville in the Elite Eight last year. We’d just advise against trying anything like that too early against West Virginia. Because this is a case where a famous, fast-flying (and therefore somewhat overvalued) favorite is about to run into an underappreciated underdog.

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.

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The Elite Eight? 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 Angel Reese if the Hawkeyes had more post size.

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Coaches weighed in on who’s the best player this season, the top freshman and who stood out on defense. Coaches couldn’t pick a player on their roster (some abstained).

One notable award — you can guess which — had a unanimous winner. Others were more contested.

Every coach we polled — more than 35 — said Clark deserved to be named Player of the Year. Here’s what they had to say:

• “You’re scheming for someone who is the greatest scorer in women’s college basketball history and is also top 10 in assists. She’s special.”
• “I just think she causes a lot of sleepless nights for coaches.”
• “Her mindset. … She is not fazed by anything, which sets her apart.”

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Last spring, I first noticed something special was happening when I couldn’t walk half a block in Dallas without running into large packs of Iowa or South Carolina fans. There were also my guy friends back home who, for the first time, were planning their weekend around the women’s NCAA Tournament games instead of the men’s. And all the sports talk radio channels were discussing Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. My spidey senses were tingling.

I could feel it in my bones that the sport was primed for a breakthrough moment, though I couldn’t have imagined that nearly 10 million people would tune in for the Iowa-LSU national title game, shattering the previous record for viewership of a women’s basketball game. But I could tell that the barrier of apathy had been broken; these women, that late-game taunting, the sport itself — it’d all be talked about for days and weeks and months to come.

I have the same feeling right now.

Another giant leap is coming for a sport that ought to be growing accustomed to these gains. As we head into March Madness, it is the women’s side of the tournament that is taking center stage. It is the women’s stars who shine the brightest. It is the women’s game with the most intriguing storylines.

And … that’s not even debatable!

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