These Are Written That You May Believe
Turning Caitlin Clark into a sustainable program might be more difficult than beating South Carolina.
I was sitting in church, three hours before tipoff of yesterday’s national championship game, thinking how fitting it was that the 2023-24 Iowa women’s basketball team was playing its final game on Doubting Thomas Sunday. After all, just about everyone — both the program’s own fans and the legion of outsiders who felt the need to comment on it — had serious doubts about what Caitlin Clark and her team could do without two graduated seniors and help from the transfer portal. It came after the losses to Kansas State, and Indiana, and Ohio State. Hell, it came after a win over West Virginia in the NCAA Tournament. It was everywhere this year, glowing respect for Clark followed by the planet’s biggest “HOWEVER”: The shooting wasn’t consistent enough. Stuekle wasn’t assertive enough in the post. Marshall had lost a step and her jumper.
In the end, Clark showed us her hands and her side, and we all found that our doubts were pretty silly. This was still the highest-scoring offense in college basketball, with the most transcendent player we’ve ever seen running it, and those things that looked like weaknesses suddenly became strengths: Stuelke’s lack of out-and-out size allowing her to become the consummate weapon as a fast break big; Marshall’s role moving almost exclusively to the defensive end out of necessity when Martin found her range and Affolter became the slasher they needed. We didn’t need to have faith. It was right there in front of us the whole time.1
I grew up Catholic, which meant we didn’t really have a Bible to read in church. The archdiocese put out a little pamphlet of Bible stuff every month, and that served as the reading material for mass. That certainly made following along easier. But now that I’m no longer Catholic, there are certain parts of the Bible I’m only hearing in church for the first time. The Gospel of John got its turn for Doubting Thomas Sunday this year at my church, and the minister today left in the last two lines, the conclusion of the entire gospel:
Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
There are other gospel writers who explain what they’re doing, but nobody is this overt about it: We’re trying to get you to buy in, so that the acts of this person who is long since gone may get you to believe and follow.
Because it’s a relatively young sport, and because it’s played in college where players graduate and rosters regenerate with regularity, women’s college basketball has been driven by a cult of personality around certain coaches. Following the NCAA takeover 40 years ago, the first great coach was Pat Summit at Tennessee. Summit stepped into the head coaching role straight out of college, almost by accident: She was hired as a graduate assistant, and the coach quit, so they just promoted Summit. By her third year, Tennessee was a legitimate contender in a sport that had been dominated by schools around Philadelphia and Louisiana, and when they moved to the NCAA in her eighth season, she promptly took the Vols to the Final Four. Over the next 31 seasons, Summit made the Sweet Sixteen 30 times, and the Final Four 18 times. She won eight championships, including a run of three consecutive titles in the mid-90s and back-to-back wins in 2007 and 2008. Tennessee would recruit nationally on reputation and restock with legends annually — Tanya Haave first, but Bridgette Gordon, Tonya Edwards, Daedra Edwards, Nikki McCray, Chamique Holdsclaw, Tamika Catchings, Kara Lawson, and Candace Parker later. And when Summit left, the mystique of Tennessee went with her.
Geno Auriemma took over at UConn in 1986, and took three years to build his program. By 1989, Connecticut was winning conference titles; by 1994, they were a wrecking crew. UConn has finished in the AP Top 10 every year since. He’s won eleven national championships , 30 conference titles, and made 23 Final Fours. Like Summit — probably even moreso than Summit — Auriemma has a list of absolute all-timers who came through his program. UConn has had Maya Moore, Breanna Stewart, Diana Taurasi, Kara Wolters, Nykesha Sales, Napheesa Collier, and now Paige Bueckers all walk through the doors. The constant has been Geno and the aura he has created around playing at UConn. In the ESPN profile of Caitlin Clark from a few weeks ago, Clark admits she was desperate for Geno just to pay attention to her in recruiting, and would have gone to UConn if offered.
It was obvious years ago, but yesterday cemented Dawn Staley as a member of that club. Staley’s run hasn’t been as long, but three titles in eight years, with six Final Fours, seven one seeds, and eleven SEC championships puts her on Mount Rushmore already. Staley was famous as a player, which only helps with recruiting, but the only evidence one needs of her ability to reload her program is yesterday’s game: South Carolina lost five starters on a team that went undefeated until the Final Four, including the reigning National Player of the Year, and still went undefeated again and took the title. Staley built the culture, but she is also the pivot from which that culture works. The program is hers.
All three of those tentpole programs were built on the personality of the coach. The players matter, of course, but they also come and go. The success continues, even as greats graduate.
What Iowa saw this year was not 1980s Tennessee, or 1990s UConn, or 2010s South Carolina. Lisa Bluder is an excellent coach, but she was a head coach for 39 years, and at Iowa for 22, before her first Final Four appearance. Prior to Caitlin Clark, Bluder’s teams had been to one regional final and one other Sweet Sixteen. In 20 years at Iowa, she had won one regular season Big Ten title and a couple of conference tournaments. She does not have the pure gravitas of Summit or Auriemma or Staley.
The Iowa program’s newfound success was not built on the personality of Bluder, but on the transcendent performance of one player. It is the cult of personality around that player that packed 15,500 into Carver Hawkeye Arena every night and brought millions to their televisions. Everyone came to Iowa City because of Caitlin Clark. The discussion of Iowa basketball is a discussion of Caitlin Clark. Every word written about this team has, directly or tangentially, been about Caitlin Clark. And it is Caitlin Clark’s legacy on which Iowa will try to build a program to rival those. Initial returns are positive — recruiting is at an all-time peak, with players from around the country lining up to play for that coach, and that crowd, and that school — but nobody has ever tried to do it this way before.
Bluder is asking everyone — recruits, fans, boosters — to believe, that the acts of Clark can create the momentum to build something greater here than has ever been done before. It’s a bold gamble, and if it pays off, Iowa basketball will be on a higher plane than anything since the Dan Gable heyday of wrestling, just as women’s college basketball blossoms into its own.
If Iowa is going to turn these two seasons of unabashed success into a permanent spot near the top of college basketball, it will need to keep the memory of Caitlin Clark alive for a few more years. It will have to pack Carver Hawkeye Arena off the legend of Caitlin. It will have to recruit those who want to be the next Caitlin. It will have to cash in on the ad campaigns and free publicity she created. It will have to tell of her exploits, over and over, until we all believe and follow for good.
It also struck me that I wrote basically the same thing after the 2016 Rose Bowl. If I don’t think hard about the last 17 years of writing about this stuff, I quickly fall into reruns.
An interesting question to me would be, "Does Clark come to Iowa without Gustafson's NPOTY?" I doubt Iowa has the Guytons and Deals committing without Caitlin. So while other powers rely on the coach's cachet or the $ize of their NIL accounts can Iowa build on a resume of players becoming stars built on culture and coaching? McCaffrey hasn't turned that corner but Bluder might. Hard to see another road to perennial contention.
Isn't this part of the overall issue with WBB? If you're not a fan of the top handful of programs, why even both paying more than passing attention? If you filled out a WBB as pure chalk, as near as I can tell, you would have missed 8 games, and that obviously includes things like 5 over 4 "upsets". The bar on being admitted to this club is very, very high, driven by coaches that are able to hoard the talent in the game. It's getting better, but it's still a long ways away from parity. Iowa's got some great classes coming in. I hope they do well and I hope the program is able to keep them. But they're likely never going to get enough of the top players to get into that club. The game is better, and more fun, when teams not in that club can get there.