Caitlin Clark’s Final Collegiate Game Drew Nearly 100,000 More Viewers than Dodgers-Yankees Game 5

The Los Angeles Dodgers won their eighth World Series title by defeating the New York Yankees in five games in a highly anticipated East Coast-West Coast battle between two of the best teams in the league. After the series ended, it was revealed that the concluding Game 5 was top-rated with an average audience of 18.6 million.

However, it wasn’t long before fans realized that the viewership numbers for one of the best games played in the MLB’s recent history fell short of the audience Caitlin Clark was able to draw during the final game of her college career.

The NCAA Championship game between the Iowa Hawkeyes and South Carolina Gamecocks recorded an average viewership of 18.7 million. The viewership numbers peaked at 24 million. The Iowa superstar was able to pull off better numbers than the biggest MLB game while she was still in college.

That indicates how much star power Clark has in American sports.

The viewership of 18.6 million in Game 5 has set a league record for being the most-watched game in the last seven years. Additionally, the Dodgers were riding the waves of Shohei Ohtani’s success. The 30-year-old became the first baseball player in the history of the game to register 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in one season.

However, baseball fans would probably not be happy with the fact that despite all the hype around the Dodgers and Yankees Finals matchup, Clark’s final college game had 100,000 more viewers.

The Caitlin Clark effect during March Madness was bigger than the Shohei Ohtani effect in the MLB.

Caitlin Clark gave the WNBA a historic run in terms of viewership

Six different networks set rating records in the last WNBA season. Five of them clocked over 1.6 million viewers while NBA TV peaked at 678k. One common thing between all those records was the fact that they all featured Clark’s Indiana Fever. A total of 23 games garnered over a million viewers, Clark played in 20 of them.

CC also broke the viewership record for the WNBA Draft. The previous record was set in 2004 when Diana Taurasi joined the league. Over 600k people watched that draft. This year when Clark was gearing up to join the league, the draft drew over 2.45 million viewers. Clark’s first WNBA game also set a record with 3.44 million viewers, wiping out the previous record of 1.44 million viewers in 2003.

Clark is arguably one of the most popular athletes on the planet today, going beyond every standard previously set by a WNBA athlete. Even though she’s far behind in salary as compared to people like Ohtani, Clark has been putting up big numbers before she even joined the league.