So...what is Caitlin Clark's final collegiate legacy? It's complicated.

As she heads off to the WNBA, how does one make sense of where the Iowa superstar falls among the collegiate greats?

I took a bit of a Twitter break during the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament. Mostly, because I felt myself too involved in my phone and ignoring the world around me. Who among us, right?

But in watching the Tournament divorced from the bubble of women’s basketball diehards, I learned quite a bit about how the outside world — the casuals, if you will — were ingesting the games, perceiving its’ stars and walking away with a different or even brand new appreciation of the women’s game.

Which brings me to Caitlin Clark.

My group chats are my guy friends. Either dudes I grew up with in metropolitan New York or guys I went to college with at CU Boulder. In past years, I’d talk about women’s basketball and it would be met with maybe a joke here or there but typically end in some type of campaigning for why this stuff was cool. My friends generally knew of Sabrina Ionescu but the way in which everyone, and I mean everyone, responded to Caitlin Clark and the Iowa - LSU rivalry was something I’d never seen before. Suddenly there was an awareness of multiple players, programs, a lot of ‘wow, she’s for real’, that I hadn’t seen or heard of up to that point. Did it radicalize everyone? Not particularly but you don’t need to make everyone a freedom fighter. Sometimes, in this world of sports and business, you just need someone to be compelled enough to turn on the TV. And it was clear, outside of the internet bubble of diehards in which I normally existed, Clark captivated people in a way that drew them into the larger women’s basketball world.

Fast forward about a month. At my morning pitch meeting, one of our screens in the corner of the conference room has the Today Show playing on mute. At around 10 am PST, right towards the top of the third hour in the ‘A Block’ of the show, I see Angel Reese. She’s chopping it up with Al Roker, Sheinelle Jones and Dylan Dreyer. A top ten pick of the WNBA Draft, in a lead spot of one of the biggest news shows on television. I could only guess that Clark, given that the WNBA is an ESPN property in terms of TV rights, did something similar on Good Morning America.

She was GMA’s ‘Cover Story’.

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So what exactly is Caitlin Clark’s legacy? Where is her place on Mt. Rushmore? At this moment, I’m not sure there’s an analog for her in any sport. Even the transformative collegiate athletes that never translated as good pros — the Christian Laettner’s and Tim Tebow’s of the world — had championships to their names. Lisa Leslie never won a title with USC but found her mainstream canonization as the WNBA’s first ever player to dunk.

The Larry Bird comparison, beyond the obvious implications of branding another ‘great white hope’, feels off because Bird’s rivalry with Magic Johnson had the transformational quality that lasted into the pros for almost the entirety of the 80’s.

Simply put, there has never been a player like her. And that’s what makes her so hard to assess.

What is the greatest? The best? The most talented? Or the most transformational? All have different criteria to different people at different times. And yes, I can absolutely understand the resistance to all things Clark. If you’re a longtime fan of the game, one can be forgiven if you see names like Maya Moore, Chamique Holdsclaw or Cheryl Miller seemingly erased behind the tsunami of Clark’s celebrity. One wonders if the same institutional support in media existed for those players if we would be seeing the same type of support for them culturally.

I’m not sure of that answer but it’s clear that Clark was the right confluence of factors that allowed for this all to happen.

Even though Iowa has a longstanding tradition of achievement in the women’s game, they found different success with Clark in their NCAA title game runs. It’s easy to forget now, but one of Clark’s first staunch defenders in the face of UConn’s overwhelming media coverage was South Carolina’s own Dawn Staley. Ironically, the next few years would be spent with discussions about Clark’s celebrity dwarfing a team that won over 100 games and lost just three in as many years.

Is it really true that Clark’s significance is singular? The national title game numbers do lend credence to the idea…

1997: Tennessee vs. Old Dominion (3.0 rating, 4.586m viewers)

1999: Purdue vs. Duke (3.3 rating, 5.137m viewers)

2002: UConn vs Oklahoma (3.3 rating, 5.681m viewers)

2004: UConn vs. Tennessee (3.5 rating, 5.583m viewers)

2021: Stanford vs. Arizona (2.0 rating, 4.128m viewers)

2022: South Carolina vs. UConn (2.7 rating, 4.850m viewers)

2023: LSU vs. Iowa (5.2 rating, 9.915m viewers)

2024: South Carolina vs. Iowa (9.3 rating, 18.882m viewers)

Whatever other variables exist to explain the rise of women’s basketball nationally, Clark (and Iowa’s) influence is undeniable.

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And so the word I land on is transformational. We may have seen players that are better or more suited to singlehandedly take teams to a championship by themselves. We may have seen greater players that won trophies year over year over year. We may have seen paradigm defining players — of which Clark herself is one — that have pushed the game forward on the floor.

But never before have we seen a player that’s managed to somehow capture the imagination of the country in this way. It was a perfect storm of factors: the familiarity of multiyear college basketball players juxtaposed against the men’s one-and-done culture, a statewide fanbase with a built-in tradition, a paradigm defining player that mimicked the Steph Curry three point revolution in the NBA and indeed the intersection of race and sports and how it positioned her story against her opposition. Because ultimately, you can’t tell Clark’s story without discussing Angel Reese and LSU last year as well as Dawn Staley and South Carolina this year.

So yes, the argument against her being the greatest or best exists and has merit. How could it not? One could argue her star shined so bright this year it obfuscated other teams and players that needed some light. But her importance, to me, is in what I saw offline. How people found her and then found others afterward. That was a new feature I hadn’t seen in the peak of the Ionescu and Stewie years. Clark’s importance wasn’t that she was a statue blocking out the sun. It’s that she, in reality, was a door that led new fans out of the darkness.

The morning after draft day, a fashion critic on TikTok with over 50,000 followers was raving about the looks on the WNBA red carpet. Commenters suggested Angel Reese be invited to the Met Gala. Paige Bueckers draft day support of her teammates became the latest sports meme to go viral (Bueckers, for her part, is one of the biggest athlete draws on TikTok as well). JuJu Watkins’ interview on Paul George’s podcast was shared far and wide with her positioned as the ‘next one up’ while Milaysia Fulwiley became the first collegiate athlete to sign an NIL deal with Red Bull. As Clark’s star moves into a new world, the others are preparing to shine through in her old one.

The winner in all this is women’s basketball. The casual fans with NBAMuse takes were going to come regardless of how the sport grew. And I can understand the frustration of dyed-in-the-wool women’s basketball fans having to do battle with people saying Clark is and has been better than anyone before. But while Clark may not be the best college player ever, or the greatest ever, she owns a unique position in the pantheon. The most transformational college basketball player that has ever lived, at least to this point. So yes, it’s complicated. The simplicity lies in one fact: when Caitlin Clark is on TV, people watch. And women’s basketball, at long last, gets the closeup it deserves.