March Madness is in full swing, and college basketball fans are fully immersed in the action. This is the time of year when future NBA and WNBA stars make their mark, and no player has captivated the spotlight more in recent years than Caitlin Clark. She’s been the talking point of the WNBA for a historic rookie season, but that’s still nothing compared to how revered she is in college basketball circles.
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CC had an unprecedented run in the NCAA. She is the NCAA Division I all-time leading scorer and has earned a place among the all-time greatest collegiate players. With her elite scoring, sharp playmaking, and ability to shoot the ball from long range, Clark helped popularize women’s college basketball globally.
The Caitlin Clark Effect continued after the point guard made her WNBA debut. As fans wait in anticipation for her sophomore season, an old clip of her talking about her abilities has resurfaced. In the clip from the 2023 NCAA Final Four press conference, CC can be heard giving a cheeky response over her scouting report.
The report had a lot of positives about her game listed on it, but the most perfect representation of her skill was the report on the Hawekeyes’ ‘read and react’ offense. Clark summed up why there was no stopping that in her press conference.
“If you just watch my games, not much ever changes. I like to step back, going to the left…The thing that makes it really hard is we run a read-and-react offense. You never know what’s going to happen. You can’t scout that,” Clark said.
Since the team mainly ran offenses based on open-ended interpretations of the opposition’s defensive schemes, there really was no set way to plan against that. Clark, the lynchpin in the whole system, was elevated by her ability to think on her feet and her exceptional basketball IQ.
Caitlin on her scouting report – “you can try all you want, but you can’t scout that” (read and react offense)….
Her basketball mind is elite! pic.twitter.com/K9E3u42hqv
— ericaf455 (@ericaf455) March 23, 2025
While some might consider her collegiate resume incomplete because she never won the national title, Clark’s dominance was undeniable. She led the Hawkeyes to back-to-back NCAA championship games in 2023 and 2024. They fell short against LSU (85-102) and South Carolina (75-87), but Clark still delivered spectacular performances.
She averaged 31.6 points, 8.9 assists, and 7.4 rebounds per game in her senior season and led D-1 in scoring and assists. The previous year, she averaged 27.8 points, 8.6 assists, and 7.1 rebounds per game and led the division in assists while being the second-best scorer.
Clark was the undeniably best player in the country for two straight years, and the hype she generated every time she stepped onto the court was a product of that.
The buzz around her name was such that she was being touted as the next face of basketball even before she made her WNBA debut, going to the Indiana Fever with the first pick. Since then, she has taken over the WNBA.
Last season’s astronomical boom in viewership has been attributed, in large part, to the Caitlin Clark effect, and that trend is going to continue into next season too. As announced a few days ago, the Indiana Fever have a WNBA record of 41 nationally televised games next season, out of a possible 44. To put into context just how insane a stat that is, the 2024-25 Los Angeles Lakers have 39 nationally televised games in the NBA, at 39.
