On Thursday, in front of a completely sold-out audience at Indiana’s Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall, Iowa standout Caitlin Clark may have occasionally felt as though the majority of the 17,222 spectators were watching her. The No. 14 Hoosiers put a lot of pressure on Clark and the No. 4 Hawkeyes in their 86-69 victory.
This season’s 17-point loss to LSU in the national championship game was Iowa’s largest margin of defeat since that game’s outcome. Clark scored 24 points, which was eight fewer than her average and her lowest since she scored 24 in a win against Bowling Green on December 2. It’s her second-lowest total of the year after she scored just 21 against Florida Gulf Coast on November 25.
A week prior, in Iowa City, Clark broke the career scoring mark for women’s basketball in the NCAA with a school-record 49 points. Since then, the Hawkeyes had not played until Thursday, while the Hoosiers were coming off a Monday 86-66 defeat at Illinois.
Teri Moren, the Indiana coach, admitted that the Hoosiers “laid an egg” on the Illini. They felt going into Thursday’s match that they needed to defeat Iowa in order to bolster their chances of being selected among the top 16 seeds in the NCAA tournament. In women’s basketball, this is particularly crucial since such teams get to host games in the early rounds.
“You lose a game like Illinois, and you think, ‘Oh, wow, our backs are against the wall,'” said Moren. “Tonight was a step in the right direction to help secure that [host seed] for our fans.
“We made everything very difficult for Caitlin Clark tonight, and that’s hard to do. She’s a phenomenal player.”
Despite being 8-of-26 overall and 3-of-16 from 3-point range, Clark claimed that Indiana’s defense was among the hardest that Iowa had faced this year.
“Being physical, face-guarding me, denying me the ball, threw a lot of different people at me,” Clark stated. “Kind of pushed me off my spots, got me a little deeper than I wanted to be. Threw a little box-and-one at us.
“Once you get down, you kind of have to start taking some shots that maybe you wouldn’t [normally] take necessarily. I thought we maybe could have drove to the basket more. I wouldn’t say we’re really a team that plays from behind very much. We fought, but they always responded and had an answer.”
For the second time this season, the Hawkeyes were behind at the half, this time by 11 points.
The defeat occurred nearly a year to the day after Iowa’s season-ending 28-point loss to Maryland on February 21, 2023. In response, Iowa won the Big Ten tournament and went on to win without losing until the NCAA championship.
The Hawkeyes’ chances of capturing the Big Ten regular-season championship in 2024 are significantly slimmer after their loss on Thursday; they are currently 12-3 in the league, behind Ohio State (14-1) and Indiana (13-3). There are three games remaining in the regular season for Iowa: on Sunday at home against Illinois, on February 28 at Minnesota, and on March 3 at home against Ohio State.
With 3,593 career points, Clark has nearly surpassed two other marks. On February 15, she overtook former Washington standout Kelsey Plum for the NCAA scoring record. Pete Maravich of LSU has the NCAA men’s record with 3,667 points, while Lynette Woodard of Kansas holds the AIAW women’s major-college mark with 3,649 points. With 3,884, Pearl Moore of Francis Marion owns the AIAW women’s small-school record.
Clark is on pace to pass Maravich on March 3 against the Buckeyes, only 75 points short of the feat. However, she stated that getting Iowa (23-4) back on the winning track is her current concern.
“This is a great environment to come in and play basketball,” Clark stated. “It’s competitive, that’s what it’s all about. Every battle is heated when you’re playing against the top teams in the Big Ten. You know, one loss, one win could switch up the standings [in] battling for a regular-season title. That’s exactly how it should be.”
