The NCAA's March Madness account put out a social post celebrating former women's college basketball stars who have gone on to set records in the WNBA, and one of the longest-tenured anchors at ESPN saw the same thing everybody else saw: no Caitlin Clark. Her reaction, per the reporting, was some version of you got to be kidding me. Hard to argue with the sentiment. When the NCAA ignores Caitlin Clark in a post built specifically around college-to-pro record setters, that is not a rounding error. That is a choice, or a very unlucky oversight.
I don't have the full list of names in that post in front of me, so I'm not going to pretend I know who made the cut. What I do know is why the omission scans as strange. Clark is the all-time leading scorer in Division I basketball, men's or women's, and she got there in an Iowa uniform in front of the largest audiences the women's college game has ever drawn. Whatever you think of the discourse that follows her around like a second shadow, the ledger is the ledger.
checked the almanac: she passed Pete Maravich's 3,667 on March 3, 2024, against Ohio State, and finished at 3,951. Fifty-plus years that number sat there. Then back to business.
Here is the part that actually bugs me. The NCAA has spent two years cashing checks written by the 2023 and 2024 women's tournaments, ratings that outdrew the men's final, arenas that sold out for a regular-season game in Iowa City. You do not have to make Clark the whole story. You do have to include her when the story is literally record setters. Leaving her out to seem balanced is its own kind of imbalance.
The counterpoint, and it is fair: a graphic is a graphic, somebody in a social media chair had four slots and made four calls, and this becomes a two-day argument that tells us nothing about basketball. Fine. But the WNBA is deep into its season and the audience the college game handed it is still watching. Small stuff like this is how a governing body signals what it values.
What I'm watching next: whether the account revises or adds, and how loud the Fever fanbase stays about it heading into Connecticut's visit to Indiana on Friday night.