Three seasons into her WNBA career, Geno Auriemma is now questioning whether the league managed Clark's arrival as well as it could have. The Caitlin Clark Effect has brought the WNBA the audience it spent years trying to attract, but as her rise helped transform the league's visibility, it also placed extraordinary attention on one player.
"When Caitlin was a freshman, she didn't capture anybody's imagination," Auriemma said on Front Office Sports Tonight . The segment was then posted to FOS Tonight's X account.
"Then, all of a sudden, two years later, you have all these new fans, and she's making shots from the logo, and Caitlin became their connection to women's basketball. That's a tough thing for her to live through, and I think she's managed it pretty well."
His comments highlight how dramatically Clark's popularity shifted during her college career. Clark's long-range shooting and Iowa's two March Madness runs to the national championship game helped introduce women's basketball to many who hadn't followed the sport before, and that attention carried over to her professional career.
The 2024 season, Clark's rookie year, saw 54 million unique viewers, with ESPN platforms averaging nearly 1.2 million viewers per game in the regular season, an increase of 170% from the previous year. On top of that, total attendance for the league also shot up to 2.35 million, an increase of 48%. Clark's team, the Indiana Fever, recorded 340,715 fans at home games, a franchise record, as the guard turned Indianapolis into one of the league's biggest attractions.
That impact wasn't limited to Clark's rookie year either. ESPN networks reported averages of 1.3 million viewers per game in the regular season in 2025, marking continued growth over previous record-setting seasons. On top of that, the WNBA also landed partnerships with Disney, Amazon, and NBCUniversal, showing the growing interest in the league.
However, that spotlight has also brought some difficult conversations. One of the first prominent challenges was in June 2024, when Chennedy Carter shoulder-checked Clark during a game against the Chicago Sky. The incident sparked debate about physicality, leading Clark herself to acknowledge how opposing teams played her.
"I think everybody is physical with me, they get away with things that probably other people don't get away with," Clark said back then.
"It's tough, but that's just the fact of the matter. This is a very physical game, and you're going to get pressure, this is professional basketball. It is what it is, honestly."
This attention on Clark came up more recently when Alyssa Thomas was suspended for making contact with Clark's throat during a game. Although officials initially missed the call, the league subsequently upgraded it to a flagrant 2. The incidents also led to threats and racial abuse directed at Thomas, prompting Clark to condemn the harassment.
This isn't the first time Geno Auriemma has spoken about the expectations placed on Clark before she entered the league. Back in June 2024, he argued that she had been "set up for failure" during an appearance on the Dan Patrick Show.
"If you're a college player and you're a great college player like Caitlin was, the delusional fan base that follows her disrespected the WNBA players by saying she's going to go in that league and tear it apart," he said.
"There were actually odds … like she's third or fourth in betting odds of being MVP in the WNBA. These people are so disrespectful and so unknowledgeable and so stupid, and it gives women's basketball a bad name. So the kid was set up for failure right from the beginning."
Geno Auriemma's latest comments offer a new perspective on that transition. Instead of focusing on the on-court adjustment, Auriemma highlighted the pressure of becoming the connection between women's basketball and millions of new fans.
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