Last Saturday night’s Iowa Hawkeyes-Maryland Terrapins NCAA women’s basketball broadcast set a record for Fox, averaging 1.578 million viewers. A big part of that was around Iowa star Caitlin Clark. And Fox deployed a “Caitlin Clark Cam” focused on her on TikTok for that game, and said it got more than 800,000 views (although without specifying how long viewers watched). And now, they’re set to bring that back for Sunday’s game featuring No. 2 Iowa against the Nebraska Cornhuskers:
https://twitter.com/CBBonFOX/status/1755756990872305686
This certainly makes some sense for Fox. Sunday is the most likely time for Clark to break the all-time NCAA women’s basketball scoring record of 3,527 points, set by Kelsey Plum with Washington from 2013-17. Clark entered Thursday’s game against Penn State with 3,462 points, so if she records a solid performance against the Nittany Lions, Plum’s mark should be in her sights Sunday. (It should be noted, however, that former Kansas star Lynette Woodard put up 3,649 points over four seasons with the Jayhawks from 1978-81, a time before the NCAA oversaw women’s basketball, and many consider Woodard’s mark to still be the women’s college basketball record to beat.)
And the Iowa-Maryland broadcast last Saturday drew great numbers for Fox overall (their best-ever for women’s college basketball), and for their Clark cam on TikTok. And it added to a recent remarkable run of good numbers for women’s college basketball. So it definitely feels logical for them to not just broadcast one of her next games (and one where she may break Plum’s record) on their main broadcast network, but also deploy the isocam on her on TikTok again. We’ll see how this turns out, but it’s notable to see Fox again investing these resources in covering Clark.
[CBB on Fox on Twitter]
About Andrew Bucholtz
Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.