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While the official Nielsen ratings data for the NCAA Women’s Final Four won’t be available until after Sunday’s championship game, the raw impressions data for Friday night’s doubleheader suggests that a record is in the offing for the LSU-Iowa tilt.

For that, ESPN and its advertisers can thank Iowa junior guard/human cheat code Caitlin Clark, winner of the 2023 Naismith Trophy and an absolute assassin on the court. Clark rang up 41 points, eight assists and six rebounds against the mighty South Carolina Gamecocks to lead the Hawkeyes to a 77-73 upset and end a 42-game winning streak by the defending national champs.

According to iSpot.tv estimates, Clark’s performance helped the ESPN family of networks scare up 342.5 million adult impressions in primetime, more than doubling the 155.6 million impressions notched by last year’s analogous UConn-Stanford telecast. (Impressions are a measurement of the cumulative number of viewers watching across any given telecast.) While impressions data is directional at best, if the iSpot numbers are proportionate to the final Nielsen tally, Iowa’s victory will have eclipsed the all-time women’s hoops record of 5.68 million viewers, set by Diana Taurasi and Sue Bird’s UConn squad back in the 2002 title tilt.

As it happens, Taurasi and Bird are anchoring ESPN2’s sidecar simulcast of Sunday’s LSU-Iowa championship, which will be broadcast for the first time on Bristol’s sibling over-the-air network, ABC. If Clark’s wizardry isn’t reason enough to expect a huge turnout tomorrow afternoon, the impact of shifting the title game from basic cable to network TV should not be underestimated. According to Nielsen’s cable universe estimates for April, the ESPN flagship now reaches 73.3 million U.S. TV households, which when compared to ABC’s distribution makes for a deficit of around 24 million fewer homes.

With a bigger TV stage on which to perform, Clark could put on one hell of a show for all the diehard fans and curiosity seekers who want to see what the fuss is all about. If Friday night’s game was a revelation for first-time viewers—in a Nietzschean demonstration of the will to power, Clark steamrolled the Hawkeyes to the championship by scoring 53% of Iowa’s total points, a tear which included sewing up the final 11—it didn’t quite match her best performance of the tournament. In Iowa’s 97-83 win over Louisville in the Elite Eight, Clark notched the first 40-point triple-double in the history of college basketball, racking up 41 points, 12 assists and 10 rebounds.

That game averaged 2.5 million viewers on ESPN. By way of comparison, the network’s most-watched NBA game of the 2022-23 season was the March 5 Knicks-Celtics overtime thriller, which averaged 2.15 million viewers.

In February, Clark said she may play two more years in Iowa City, which is music to Disney’s ears. In an appearance on the Dan Patrick Show, Clark said she was COVID-eligible for a bonus season after her senior year. “I probably will have to make a decision on that sometime next year,” Clark told Patrick. “I really have no clue [if I’ll] stay for an extra year or leave after next year.”

Should Clark delay her transition to the WNBA, she could shatter some of the all-time scoring records in women’s college hoops. Former Washington Huskies standout Kelsey Plum put up an all-time high 3,527 points over her four-year career; as of Friday night, Clark has cranked out 2,687 points at Iowa.

If Clark sticks it out for another two seasons, the impact on the TV ratings may be just the thing to put the women’s game on more equal footing with the men’s. If Twitter’s anything to go by, some of the nation’s top athletes have been helping ESPN to move the Nielsen dial; among the pros who tweeted their support for Clark on Friday night were Patrick Mahomes, Dez Bryant, CJ McCollum and George Kittle.