Dawn Staley: 'If Caitlin Clark wins the championship ... she's a GOAT'

CLEVELAND — Does Caitlin Clark need to win the national championship to be considered the greatest of all time?

South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley thinks so, but for obvious reasons she’s hoping there’s no change in GOAT status by Sunday night.

“If Caitlin wins the championship, she's pretty damn good, yeah, like, she's a GOAT,” Staley said Saturday morning. “I mean, she's really damn good regardless. But winning the championship would seal the deal.

“I hope to the dear Lord she doesn't.”

South Carolina and Iowa will meet for the 2024 national championship at 3 p.m. ET Sunday on ABC in what will be Clark’s final collegiate game. The NCAA all-time leading scorer announced last month she would renounce her extra year of eligibility and declare for the WNBA Draft when her season ends.

It is Iowa’s second consecutive appearance in the game after clinching its first title game berth last year. The discussion raging for months is if Clark, who spent the last two months toppling NCAA Division I women’s and men’s records, needs a title to be known as the GOAT.

“Yeah. She does. I think so,” four-time UConn champion Breanna Stewart told Sirius XM from USA Basketball camp Friday. “Because then you’re going to look 10 years back and you’re going to see all the records she’s broken and the points and stuff like that, but anybody knows your goal when you play college basketball is to win a national championship. So you need one.”

Stewart not only won a title every year she played, she also swept the Final Four Most Outstanding Player awards in her tenure. She is the first and only to do so. Most, including Staley, view her as the college GOAT. And Staley said she agrees with Stewart’s take.

“I was really good in college. Never won a championship,” said Staley, a former point guard at Virginia from 1988-1992. “You got to win a championship. You've got to win a championship. That's me personally. Like, I had a great career. But it's always, did you win a championship? Went to the Final Four three times. We never won.”

Championships can never be taken away, but records can. Clark’s takedown of the NCAA Division I women’s basketball scoring record came seven years after Kelsey Plum broke it. Plum sat courtside with Aces teammates Jackie Young and A’ja Wilson — all of whom were with Stewart in USA camp in Cleveland — watching UConn play Iowa on Friday night. Each of their marks are in jeopardy with USC’s JuJu Watkins tearing up competition her freshman year.

The argument often made for Clark is that she is doing it without five-star teammates. Stewart’s UConn teammates over those four titles included a wealth of WNBA talent: Moriah Jefferson, Kia Nurse, Gabby Williams, Napheesa Collier, Katie Lou Samuelson, Morgan Tuck, Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis, Kiah Stokes, Bria Hartley, Stefanie Dolson. Many of them won titles in the pros, including Stokes with the Aces the last two years.