The Caitlin Clark discourse is something else. Especially from people who didn't give a **** about the WNBA or women's hoops in general.
It's been pretty interesting (insane?) to observe from where I sit.
The media at large is obviously unpredictable, nothing they do should surprise any longer because they essentially cannibalize each other's headlines. It's all one pot of slop all day long starting at 6 AM on our TVs.
But when something gets through like this (such as a women's basketball player) it's truly eye-opening. Clark is now on the LeBron coverage tier, which means every few hours we get a new story about her. So.....the women's USA hoops team gets announced (big story and honor). That's not the news, for any single media entity. The news is Clark (a rookie) was left off. Then give that a day and it's now "Clark is definitely pissed off so watch out." This of course was after one full week of wall to wall coverage of Clark taking a hard foul in a regular season game. Which then led to the same media critiquing themselves on how they cover Clark and women athletes. Which then leads to "debate." Which was all after a full year (and obviously more) of the Caitlyn Clark tracker where her every Iowa move was covered more than the rest of college basketball (mens and womens) combined.
And now it's bled into national politics.
They've essentially for the first time created the A1 tier for a woman. Which in many ways is groundbreaking (I think Serena Williams was close - but tennis is only cared about 4 times a year). Lebron James has been on it for 25 years. Tiger. Favre. Cowboys. Tebow for a while. It's an exclusive club where all the algorithms point to this specific person gets wall to wall coverage, every day. Tomorrow we will likely get a new update on what she ate for breakfast and god knows what else.
Players are going to notice this stuff. The WNBA certainly has, because a lot of these ladies played when WNBA didn't get a single sniff of coverage. Clark and her attention has become the villian, and this plays out exactly as these TV execs want.