Since 2023, Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark have been publicly correcting a storyline the media built around them. At LSU’s media day in October 2023, Reese said, “I love Caitlin; we’ve been competing since we were in AAU,” and added, “One day, hopefully, we could even be teammates.” On April 1, 2024, the day of their Elite Eight rematch, she said, “Me and Caitlin Clark don’t hate each other. I want everybody to understand that.” In a Time interview published in December 2024, Clark put it plainly: “We’re not best friends, by any means, but we’re very respectful of one another.” None of that stopped the narrative from running. If anything, it ran harder.
The Spark That Wasn’t
The media’s origin story for the “rivalry” is Reese’s “you can’t see me” gesture at the April 2, 2023 national title game, a moment commentators treated as the spark. Clark’s own reaction was the opposite of a feud. Days later she said, “I don’t think Angel should be criticized at all,” and “I’m just one that competes, and she competed.” News reports at the time noted that Clark had made a similar gesture toward another player earlier in the tournament. The storyline hardened anyway, with a rematch to sell.
The Ratings Were the Point
That rematch drew 12.3 million viewers, according to ESPN, a record for a women’s college basketball game and the most for any college basketball game on ESPN platforms. Sports Illustrated’s verdict was that the rematch “lived up to the hype.” That is the business case stated plainly: the narrative was part of the product, and the product worked. A Rice University study released in March 2025 analyzed about 700,000 tweets from before, during and after the 2023 title game. It found Clark was largely celebrated while Reese was disproportionately criticized, often with racial undertones. In the release’s words, public and media reactions to the two “were not just different but racialized.”
| Date | Game | U.S. viewers |
|---|---|---|
| April 2, 2023 | NCAA title game, LSU vs. Iowa | 9.9 million |
| April 1, 2024 | Elite Eight rematch, Iowa vs. LSU, on ESPN | 12.3 million, peaking at 16.1 million |
| April 7, 2024 | NCAA title game, South Carolina vs. Iowa (Clark without Reese) | 18.7 million |
| June 16, 2024 | WNBA, Fever vs. Sky, on CBS | 2.25 million, the most for a WNBA regular-season game in 23 years |
A USA Today columnist wrote on June 5, 2024 that Reese was not the villain she had been made out to be. “Neither Clark nor Reese asked for the roles they’ve been assigned,” the column said. It didn’t blame the press by name; it pointed to “assumptions by people who until now have not paid much, if any, attention to the league” and to fan bases that “made up their minds about the other player long ago.” But it landed in the middle of the cycle it described, after the rematch ratings had already shown what the casting was worth.
The Sequel Nobody Scripted
The sequel was not on the script. In September 2026, both players were on the U.S. roster that beat France 97-79 in Berlin to win the FIBA Women’s World Cup. Asked afterward by OutKick about their friendship, Clark said, “We’ve always been friends.” Reese’s 2023 hope of being teammates one day came true, and the question put to Clark was still about the rivalry.
None of this required malice from any single reporter or network. It required a sport with a compelling new audience, two great young players, and a media apparatus that has always known the fastest way to sell a matchup is to give it a protagonist and an antagonist, whether or not the people involved agreed to the assignment. Reese and Clark kept saying the real relationship looked nothing like the broadcast version. The broadcast version ran anyway, because it was never really about them.
VDG Sports, where Vince Douglas Gregory writes about the business and culture of sports, will keep watching which version of a story the broadcast decides to sell.
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Vince Douglas Gregory is the ‘petulant puppet master’ of a sports media landscape addicted to scripted rage and performance art. As the architect of VDG Sports, he bypasses the corporate talking heads to expose the unfiltered truth behind the narratives.
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