Caitlin Clark and Iowa rout Colorado, advance to Elite 8 and rematch with LSU: Live updates

Who else, besides Caitlin Clark, will provide offense?

Clark scored half (32) of Iowa’s 64 points in her team’s 64-54 win over West Virginia on Monday night. That percentage alone, while high, isn’t as jarring as the fact that only three other Hawkeyes scored. Iowa received 0 bench points and only 14.6 points per game from its reserves over its last five games. That’s down from 21.3 per game on the season. Every non-Clark basket could be crucial, both from the reserves and starters. Kate Martin, Gabbie Marshall and Hannah Stuelke will all be forced to produce as alternative scoring options.

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Kate Martin has carried several nicknames over her six years with Iowa women’s basketball, but one description stands out above all to fellow senior Gabbie Marshall.

“She’s been my rock,” Marshall said. “I’ve never met a better leader than her.”

Every Iowa player says she leans on Martin throughout challenging moments or when she needs a dose of truth. She’s supportive, passionate and disciplined. They say nobody has worn the title “team captain” better than Martin, who has served in that role the last three seasons. No player has garnered as much trust from the coaching staff or has earned the respect of her teammates as Martin. That includes superstar batterymate Caitlin Clark.

“She’s somebody that’s wired the same way as me,” Clark said. “At times that means me and Kate butt heads, but at the end of the day, we know how much we love each other. We step off the court, and it doesn’t matter, we just make each other better.”

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It’s always fun when the committee plans a rematch. When it came to this specific game, there was a high chance that the Hawkeyes would’ve seen a familiar foe either way — they beat the Buffs last year in the Sweet 16 and split games with Kansas State this season. But that familiarity means we’ll likely see Iowa coach Lisa Bluder and Colorado coach JR Payne throw out some interesting looks as they head-fake one another and dive into each other’s (already understood) weaknesses.

Given how much Iowa struggled with West Virginia’s physical pressuring defense, it’s fair to expect Colorado to come out with a similar attack. The Buffs are in the top 25 nationally in steal percentage and that conversion fuels their offense — nearly one-fifth of their scoring comes on the fastbreak (15 points per game). Nearly half of their points come in the paint between guard Jaylyn Sherrod getting downhill (or pulling up in the midrange) and 6-3 forwards Aaronette Vonleh and Quay Miller.

Iowa, which is coming off one of its worst offensive performances of the season, will look to have a bounceback game after putting up just 64 points against West Virginia and tallying a season-low seven assists. Caitlin Clark is the headliner here, but it’ll be the committee around her that truly determines how much further Iowa goes in March (and maybe April). Outside of Clark, the Hawkeyes shot 0 of 17 on 3-pointers against the Mountaineers, but don’t expect that cold spell to last too long. Colorado has its own 3-point shooting weapons in Frida Formann and Maddie Nolan (who are both 42-plus percent long-range shooters), but that might not be enough against a Hawkeyes arsenal eager to prove they’re much better than their last outing.

Pick: Iowa

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?

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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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It’s a question that has been debated in arenas, in homes, on social media and TV as the 2023-24 women’s college basketball season has progressed: Is Iowa star Caitlin Clark the greatest women’s college basketball player of all time?

Clark will likely be a two-time national Player of the Year when the season concludes. As a senior, she enters the NCAA Tournament looking for a second consecutive Final Four berth, and she does so averaging a nation-leading 31.9 points and 8.9 assists per game. With her offensive dominance, she has re-written the record book at Iowa and nationally. Though she has yet to win a national championship, she still has been an accelerant for the sport’s growth more broadly. Those are just some of the foundational points in any argument touting the Iowa star. But how do those in the industry place her in a historic context?

Over the last month, The Athletic talked to more than 35 head coaches across women’s basketball to collect their candid opinions on an array of topics from the changing tides in the sport to the best coaches in the game to the greatest women’s college basketball player of all time. These coaches, who hail from power conferences and high mid-majors, were granted anonymity so they could speak openly without fear of retribution from their programs or the NCAA.

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IOWA CITY, Iowa — Let’s take a trip to a renovated Carver-Hawkeye Arena in the year 2044.

There’s a 20-year reunion planned for the current Iowa women’s basketball team. The stands are packed with women and men in their mid-30s who watched the Hawkeyes as teenagers. Can you picture it? The most beloved team and the greatest player in Iowa sports history walking out at halftime of a Big Ten women’s basketball game, and the videoboard flashes images to 2024. It’s not a specific victory that comes to the surface for those in attendance. Instead, it’s the memories that will flood their eyelids.

A chapter closed Monday night with the Hawkeyes’ 64-54 win against West Virginia in an NCAA Tournament second-round game. Iowa plays again Saturday against Colorado in the Sweet 16. There’s at least one game — and perhaps four — left for this group. But it never will compete together again in Iowa City. And neither will Caitlin Clark, the greatest Hawkeye of them all.

There’s a love affair between this team and its fan base like we’ve never experienced. Every home game was sold out by August. Then every road game filled up, as did the Big Ten tournament and two home NCAA Tournament games. The connection runs deeper than team success, although that plays a role. Iowans embrace this team the way a small town loves its high school sports. They refer to the players by their first names, almost like they’re family. That’s what makes this relationship special.

“It’s the personality of our team,” Clark said. “I think it’s the smiles. I think it’s the competitive fire. I think it’s everything but the basketball, honestly. I truly believe that. I think it’s the love we have for one another, the love we have for the game, but also the love we have for them. I think they can feel that we truly appreciate them, and we truly need them.”

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In a nearly empty arena in late November 2020, Caitlin Clark shot her first college 3-pointer. Time was ticking down in the first quarter of the Hawkeyes’ matchup against Northern Iowa. Clark forced a steal at midcourt and weaved her way to the right wing. With two defenders around her, she rose up. Her attempt was blocked.

That didn’t discourage her.

Now a senior, Clark is perhaps the biggest star across both men’s and women’s college basketball. She’s made more than 500 3-pointers throughout her college career and re-written the record book — at Iowa and nationally. “We see it every single day in practice, she hits one (shot) that amazes you or makes one pass that makes your jaw kind of drop,” Iowa assistant Abby Stamp says.

She passes with pin-point accuracy. Teammates and coaches alike laud her work ethic and improved leadership skills. But it’s Clark’s 3-point shooting which often immediately jumps out to viewers. She has been compared to some other recent greats in the basketball world — Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry, Milwaukee Bucks guard Damian Lillard and New York Liberty guard Sabrina Ionescu, to name a few. But how does Clark actually stack up when compared to such sharp-shooters?

Though the NBA and college 3-point line are different distances (the NBA is 23 feet, 9 inches at the top of the arc, and the college line and WNBA line are both 22 feet, 1 3/4 inches at the top), The Athletic dove into six categories to show just how prolific Clark really is and to explain how she’s become so lethal from behind the arc.

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Our “numbers guy,” Austin Mock, uses advanced statistical models and simulations to project the chances for each team to make it through each round of the tournament. Based on 1 million simulations of the women’s 2024 NCAA Tournament, here is our projected score:

Iowa: 86, Colorado 78

Last fall, representatives from Gainbridge, an Indiana-based annuities seller, reached out to Caitlin Clark’s marketing agents at Excel Sports Management to discuss a sponsorship deal. The company was launching a new product line and its executives believed Clark could help them reach younger customers.

Minji Ro, Gainbridge’s chief strategy officer, is also a longtime WNBA fan, and she knew that the Indiana Fever had a 44.2 percent chance of winning the WNBA lottery in December. Gainbridge holds the naming rights to the Fever’s arena, and Clark would be the presumptive No. 1 pick if she declared for the draft.

But Ro said that the company didn’t even discuss the decision with Clark during the months of negotiations that finally ended in February with a signed contract. Ultimately, Ro said, she didn’t care where Clark would play, whether it was in the WNBA or at the University of Iowa for one more season. She just wanted to be in the Caitlin Clark business.

“We were in no matter what,” Ro said. “Because that’s the power of Caitlin Clark. So she plays in Indiana, that’s great, but it doesn’t actually matter where she plays because she’s gonna sell out everywhere.”

When Clark finally declared for the draft, as had long been expected, she set an end date to her record-setting college career. The WNBA awaits, and the Fever won the No. 1 pick in December, putting them in prime position to land a player who is rising and who has shown herself to be a marketing powerhouse, with a sponsorship portfolio of blue chip companies and more than 1 million Instagram followers.

Laced throughout that lively conversation about what Clark can do for the league, there has also been fretful, speculative discussion of what the decision would mean for Clark financially, and if being in the WNBA would amount to a pay cut.

The consensus among a coterie of people involved in women’s basketball and involved with her directly is that Clark’s income, and her marketing potential, would not suffer once she jumps to the WNBA this summer. Instead, they say, she seems likely to surpass what she earned this season at Iowa.

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There’s always a sign.

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 continue 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!

“We’ve been on a steady incline,” USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb said during my SiriusXM show Sunday night. “You combine the star power in our game, the fact that you have some of these established stars that fans have really built a relationship with like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Cameron Brink — and then you add in this incredibly dynamic freshman class.

“What we’re seeing is that women’s basketball is a really marketable entity. People love it. We’re in a space where there’s an incredible amount of excitement around it. … It’s something that’s, really, a movement.”

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Caitlin Clark as a viewership draw just soared to a new level.

No. 1 Iowa’s 64-54 tension filled win over eighth-seeded West Virginia on Monday night — the final home game for Clark at Carver-Hawkeye Arena in Iowa City — averaged a massive 4.9 million viewers on ESPN. That viewership number shatters the record for the largest television audience for the women’s tournament prior to the Final Four. The previous record was set in — you guessed it — Iowa’s first-round win over Holy Cross on ABC Saturday afternoon. That game drew 3.23 million viewers.

These are truly astounding numbers. As Sports Media Watch noted, Iowa’s win over West Virginia is the third-largest audience for any women’s tournament game in the past 20 years behind last year’s national championship loss to LSU (9.92 million) and its national semifinal win over South Carolina two days earlier (5.60 million).

Sports Media Watch also reported that ESPN’s family of networks has seen other games top the 2-million viewership mark in the early rounds, which is a new frontier for the sport. Connecticut’s win over Syracuse on Tuesday night drew 2.05 million viewers while LSU’s win over Middle Tennessee on ABC on Sunday drew 2.01 million.

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All odds via BetMGM.

Spread: Iowa -7.5

Moneyline: Iowa -350, Colorado +260

Total: 157.5

No. 1 Iowa and No. 5 Colorado are facing off in the Sweet 16 in Albany, N.Y., five days after Caitlin Clark and the Hawkeyes fought off West Virginia in a close second-round matchup.

The Athletic is in the building — follow here for updates, analysis and perspective as the NCAA's all-time leading scorer attempts to extend her college career.

Related reading

• Caitlin Clark is a college basketball sensation. In Iowa, she’s much more
• Stop Caitlin Clark? Good luck. Coaches share their (often failed) strategies
• Live updates on the rest of the Sweet 16

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