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Colin Cowherd discussed how the WNBA would fare if Caitlin Clark were no longer playing during Thursday’s episode of his eponymous podcast. Speaking with Michael Mulvihill, Fox Sports’ president of insights and analytics, Cowherd called the 2024 Rookie of the Year a once-in-a-generation prospect.
Given Clark’s superstar power, which Cowherd even compared to Taylor Swift, he asked Mulvihill whether the WNBA is truly a good product or if it’s simply benefiting from what many call the “Caitlin Clark effect.”
“The league was growing, as a whole in the last 10 years has improved dramatically,” Cowherd said. “Caitlin Clark is Taylor Swift in tennis shoes. It’s a once-in-a-generation — it’s Tiger Woods to golf, it’s Shohei Ohtani [to baseball]. Is the WNBA a viable TV product or is it, ‘we have a once-in-a-generation talent’?”
Mulvihill acknowledged that it was a combination of both, noting Clark’s massive impact on the league but also emphasizing that the WNBA was already on an upward trajectory before the Indiana Fever star entered the league.
“It’s both those things. The WNBA is something that was growing and viable and becoming more viable by the year and then you injected into that a once-in-a-lifetime talent, who I think is very obviously the overwhelming No. 1 factor in the grow of WNBA viewership,” Mulvihill said.
“But, at the same time, if Caitlin Clark was taken out of the equation, I still think the WNBA would be on a grow trajectory. And it wouldn’t be the kind of exponential growth that we saw last year, but this is a product that was moving forward very steadly prior to Caitlin.”
Mulvihill added that with college stars Paige Bueckers and JuJu Watkins set to enter the league in the coming seasons, the WNBA would still be in good hands, even without Clark.
Caitlin Clark broke multiple viewership, attendance records during rookie season
Since her college days, Caitlin Clark has been a ratings magnet. Her final college game, the 2024 NCAA women’s national championship between Iowa and South Carolina, drew more viewers than the men’s title game for the first time ever.
Clark’s star power also forced teams like the Atlanta Dream and Washington Mystics to move their home games against the Indiana Fever to larger arenas to accommodate increased demand. Additionally, her games set viewership records across networks, including ESPN/ABC, ION and other platforms.
final game of the 2024 WNBA season, a matchup against the Connecticut Sun, attracted 2.5 million viewers on ESPN, making it the largest cable audience in WNBA history.
Clark’s impact even rivaled NBA games, as her average 2024 viewership (1.18 million across all networks) outpaced Victor Wembanyama’s 1.08 million.
Her jersey retirement game between Iowa and USC drew 1.1 million viewers on FOX, far surpassing the 622,000 viewers who watched Kobe Bryant’s jersey retirement on NBA TV in 2017.
Edited by John Ezekiel Hirro
