Iowa’s Caitlin Clark on record-breaking moment: ‘I hope they don’t stop the game. We can’t be wasting timeouts on that’

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Iowa head coach Lisa Bluder initially intended to honor the gravity of the moment with a timeout. Then she heard word of her superstar point guard’s feelings on the matter and second-thought it.

“I hope they don’t stop the game,” Caitlin Clark, ever a competitor, told a group of reporters on Wednesday. “We can’t be wasting timeouts on that, come on now.”

For the Hawkeyes, their meeting with Michigan on Thursday night is an opportunity to bounce back from a late collapse against Nebraska with bigger goals in mind. There’s a heated three-team race for the Big Ten title with only five regular season contests left and pivotal seeding repercussions in the NCAA tournament.

[Watch Caitlin Clark’s record-breaking attempt here at 8 p.m. ET Thursday]

For the 15,000-plus at Carver-Hawkeye Arena and the millions more watching on TV (8 p.m. ET, Peacock), it’s a chance to experience history. Clark is eight points away from setting the NCAA Division I women’s scoring record set by Kelsey Plum in 2017, a moment she said she has never focused on, but rather “come along with how my four years have gone.”

“I’m not anxious about it really at all,” Clark said. “I’m just really excited. It’s going to be a special night.”

The sporting world’s attention laser-focused on Clark weeks ago after she pulled into second place on the list, passing Kelsey Mitchell’s Big Ten mark of 3,402 points at Ohio State. Scoring 39 points against Nebraska for the record as a lead-in to Super Bowl Sunday festivities was highly probable. It seemed almost undeniable heading into the fourth quarter until the Cornhuskers held her to zero points. Bluder said on Wednesday she felt there was a sort of awe from teammates that can’t happen.

“That’s, I think, been the case with our team all year long is that we can’t have the Michael Jordan effect where everybody’s standing around watching her,” Bluder said.

They can join the club aptly titled the Clark Effect for the most popular, well-known and highly watched collegiate player in the country regardless of gender. Women’s basketball is used to being overshadowed. Now Clark is overwhelmingly college basketball’s biggest star.

The lights were already bright on Clark and the Hawkeyes on Super Bowl Sunday. They’ll be even brighter on Thursday with the NFL in its post-Super Bowl lull and the NBA quiet ahead of its All-Star break. Unlike Plum’s record-breaking day when she scored a career-best 57 points on senior night, reaching the necessary number is easy work for Clark. She’s averaging a career-best 32.1 points per game and could break it by the first-quarter buzzer.

“Eight points is what we’re looking at for this record, and obviously she’s going to just blast it out of the water,” Bluder said. “It’s going to be fun to see how many points she adds on to that.”

Clark, who is sitting at 3,520 points, can soon pass Lynette Woodard, who scored 3,649 points at Kansas in the AIAW era before the NCAA sponsored women’s sports. Next comes Pete Maravich’s all-time DI men’s record of 3,667 points, which is doable by the season’s end. Pearl Moore scored a small-school record 4,061 points at Francis Marion in the AIAW era.

The scoring record was on the radar, but it wasn’t something Clark and Bluder discussed, they said. Nor was it something they talked about as a team until Wednesday’s practice.

“I want to talk to them about the significance of it and that we want to celebrate this,” Bluder said. “This is really exciting for our university, our basketball program, that one of our players is going to do this.”

The school sold out its arena via season ticket sales ahead of the season and all but two of the Hawkeyes’ games have been sellouts, spanning east f