It’s a disservice to Caitlin Clark and all the female athletes who excel at what they do.
It’s a disservice to Caitlin Clark and all the female athletes who excel at what they do.
E arlier this year, I paid $100 for a ticket to see University of Iowa phenomenon Caitlin Clark play a college basketball game. The seat was ten times what a normal ticket costs, but worth every cent. Clark is a cheetah in high-tops, darting around the court, dropping breathtaking passes to her teammates, and sinking jumpers so long and accurate you think NASA must have installed a GPS tracker in the ball.
In this, her final year in college basketball, she has become the highest-scoring woman ever to play in college. She is the most famous player in the nation, men included, and her games frequently garner higher ratings than some NBA telecasts. She is a phenomenon the likes of which American sports has never seen, pulling women’s basketball into national prominence. She is probably the greatest women’s collegiate player of all time.
One might think that such universal plaudits would be enough, but, of course, media organizations covering Clark have now pushed praise of her accomplishments past the point of plausibility. For example, a torrent of media accompanied Clark in February when she became the all-time college women’s scorer. But this past weekend, virtually every media outlet lavished praise on Clark for scoring the most points in college basketball history among both men and women, eclipsing the record set by “Pistol” Pete Maravich in 1970.
During Iowa’s game against Ohio State on Sunday, the telecast featured a permanent graphic telling viewers how many points Clark had to go to pass Maravich’s scoring mark. After the game, ESPN posted a graphic on X (formerly Twitter) depicting Maravich, in a photo from his day, handing a crown over to Clark in hers. Virtually every other news outlet breathlessly touted Clark’s passing Maravich as a historic achievement.
While it is technically true — Clark has now scored more career points than Maravich — nobody seriously believes the two marks are comparable. They were achieved in different eras, with different rules, against players with different abilities.
For example, when Pistol Pete played, freshmen were ineligible for varsity sports — so Maravich actually set the men’s scoring record in three years, while averaging a preposterous 44.2 points per game. Clark, meanwhile, has played for nearly four years, averaging (a still incredible) 28.3 points per game.
Further, Clark has set her record with the benefit of the three-point shot, which didn’t enter college basketball until the mid 1980s. Maravich set his record scoring two points at a time, while 41.4 percent of Clark’s points have been via the three-point shot.
Thankfully, we don’t do such apples-to-apples comparisons for any other sports in which males and females compete on separate tracks. Nobody compares the number of grand-slam events that Serena Williams has won to the number Novak Djokovic has won. Katie Ledecky’s dominance in swimming is never questioned because she has less than a third of the Olympic gold medals earned by Michael Phelps. They are all considered legendary without consideration of the relative excellence of the different sexes.
In fact, recognizing differences in scoring records isn’t even a particularly “gendered” endeavor. Do the names Antoine Davis, Freeman Williams, Chris Clemons, Alphonso Ford, Mike Daum, Harry Kelly, and Keydren Clark roll off the tongue when you think of history’s great collegiate scorers? Probably not, because they all played at lower-level Division I schools against inferior competition. And yet they are all in the top-ten of men’s career collegiate scoring.
Remember when Davis (who played at Detroit Mercy) passed previous women’s record-holder Kelsey Plum in career points? Neither do I. Because until ten minutes ago, nobody in the media thought the men’s and women’s records were interchangeable.
Again, this doesn’t discount Clark’s achievement at all. She is the most dominant career scorer in history. When assessing how great a player is, all you can do is measure that player against his or her peers. And by this standard, she is at the top of the women’s game. And people rightly love her for it.
But the media, both to juice their own ratings (the game in which Clark “broke” Maravich’s record had the highest television rating for a regular-season women’s game since 1999) and to pretend sex differences in sports don’t matter, have simply tried to speak equity into existence.
The Caitlin Clark saga isn’t even the most notable example of this phenomenon this year. In January, the national media breathlessly celebrated Stanford women’s head coach Tara VanDerveer for passing former Duke men’s head coach Mike Krzyzewski in total wins, with 1,203. At the time, University of Connecticut women’s coach Geno Auriemma was only nine wins behind VanDerveer.
There is no question VanDerveer and Auriemma are, along with former Tennessee coach Pat Summitt, the best coaches in the history of women’s basketball. But once again, the comparison to Duke’s “Coach K” lacks important context.
Most notably, when VanDerveer began coaching, nearly 40 years ago, participation in women’s basketball was drastically less than it is today. This is the result of a number of factors — high schools didn’t adequately fund their girls’ teams, there weren’t a lot of women’s coaches, participation in sports wasn’t seen as “feminine,” and the like.
But the factors depressing participation had the effect of pooling virtually all the talent in women’s basketball near the top of the sport. With so many more men playing basketball, the talent is more widespread in the men’s college game; with so few women’s players, the elite talent concentrates in a handful of dominant schools. And if you are the coach of one of those schools, it is an immense benefit.
The numbers bear all this out. In 1980, for instance, only 34 percent of high-school athletes were female, according to the National High School Sports Participation Survey. By 2010, that number had increased only to 41 percent.
So colleges with serious women’s basketball teams at the time could load themselves up with the limited talent out there. And it showed.
Since 1987, three schools — Connecticut (UConn), Tennessee, and Stanford — have won 61 percent of all the women’s basketball national championships. UConn alone won eleven of those championships, including one stretch between 2014 and 2017 in which they won 111 games in a row.
There is nothing comparable on the men’s side, where the talent is more diluted throughout programs. During the same period, Duke has won five championships, the UConn men have won five, and North Carolina has won four. The Tennessee women, meanwhile, won eight, and Stanford won three.
We can also measure the talent pooling at the top in women’s basketball by looking at how many All-American players each team had. In the men’s game, since 1994, it has happened only 43 times that two or more college teammates were named All-Americans. But in women’s basketball, it has happened 62 times over the same time span. Further, three men’s teammates have made a single All-American team only three times (Duke 2002, Illinois 2005, and Gonzaga 2021). Yet it has happened 13 times in women’s basketball, including the preposterous 2001–02 season in which UConn had four players named All-Americans.
So UConn has had 15 seasons in which they had multiple All-Americans, compared to Duke’s eight. It’s not even close — and yet at no point has anyone said, “Why can’t Duke be more like the UConn women’s team?”
To his credit, UConn’s Auriemma has said he is tired of the comparison of women to men in sports, because he knows it unnecessarily downgrades his players. Why can’t they just be great female athletes, as Simone Biles is in gymnastics?
In fact, it is the women’s sports that don’t really have a direct male analog that are thriving the most. Women’s college volleyball saw sellout matches across the country last year, including a night in which 92,000 fans packed Nebraska’s football stadium to watch their team play. A few weeks later, 17,000 fans showed up to watch Wisconsin take on Marquette, a record for a women’s athletic event in the state.
Volleyball is thriving in large part because there really isn’t any men’s college version to speak of. Currently there are over 330 Division I women’s volleyball teams, while there are only 21 men’s volleyball teams. The women have the stage all to themselves, and they are making the most of it. (In fact, women’s basketball is losing players to volleyball at an increasing rate.)
When compared with the men, the women are going to fall short, especially among male fans fond of pointing out differences in abilities between the sexes. But the women should be more famous in their own right. There is plenty of room in the media-sphere these days — we ought to reward people with attention who actually deserve it.
So stop trying to compare men and women in sports. We can celebrate one sport without confusing it with another. Let Caitlin Clark be the best women’s player in a sport that, because of her contribution, is now gaining in popularity. Because that is pretty damn awesome.