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Caitlin Clark’s record-breaking game on Fox on Sunday where the Iowa Hawkeyes star passed Pete Maravich for the all-time Division I scoring record marked a 25-year TV ratings high.
According to Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch, “Sunday’s Ohio State-Iowa women’s college basketball game averaged a 1.9 rating and 3.39 million viewers on Fox, marking the largest audience for a regular season women’s game on any network since UConn-Tennessee in January 1999 (3.88M).”
Viewership of the game on Fox peaked at 4.42 million, more than doubling the previous season high of 1.86 million, which also happened to be a game between the Iowa Hawkeyes and Ohio State.
Sunday’s game featuring Caitlin Clark was the second highest-rated college basketball games all season, men or women. And the only game the beat it had an NFL game as its lead-in.
In fact, it was the sixth most-watched basketball game of any kind, including the NBA so far this season.
All of which is a big reason why, according to John Ourand at Puck, Fox actually considered giving Caitlin Clark a NIL deal in an attempt to keep her in college and out of the WNBA for one more year.
“Clark is such ratings gold, in fact, that Fox executives contemplated reaching out to other networks to see if they could come up with an enticing NIL offer that would convince her to stay in the college ranks for one more season,” Ourand wrote.
“Alas, talks never materialized (nobody ever approached Clark), and ended before they could get going last week, when the superstar formally announced that she was headed to the WNBA next season. She is the overwhelming favorite to be the top overall pick.”
Ourand also pointed out that games this season involving Caitlin Clark on ABC, Fox, NBC, Big Ten Network, FS1, and Peacock were the most-watched games of all time on those channels.
Little wonder Fox Sports president Mike Mulvihill even took to X (formerly Twitter) to try and sway Clark to stay in school and get her MBA.
Caitlin, it’s not too late to go for your MBA! You can never have too much education! https://t.co/eN9O2jo5x5
— Michael Mulvihill (@mulvihill79) March 5, 2024
Naturally, such a deal would be a troublesome conflict of interest and would probably be against the NIL rules, but if it were offered to Clark today and she accepted, who would be able to stop it?