ESPN used an Iowa State logo over a Caitlin Clark image at the end of an Ohio State-Iowa video

Sunday’s NCAA women’s basketball game featuring Caitlin Clark and the No. 6 Iowa Hawkeyes against the No. 2 Ohio State Buckeyes is a big deal. Ohio State handed Iowa one of their four losses this season with a 100-92 overtime home victory back in January, and both sides are looking to end their regular seasons in style ahead of this coming week’s Big Ten Tournament.

The game is also Iowa’s senior day, and Clark’s last regular-season game, considering that she’s declared for the WNBA Draft. And Clark is also just 17 points behind Pete Maravich’s all-time NCAA points record (men’s or women’s). So that all had ESPN paying a lot of attention to the game despite it being broadcast on Fox, including sending their College GameDay studio show there. And they covered it well for much of that studio show. But that ended quite poorly, with an otherwise-solid hype video for the game leading into the picks ending with an image of Clark representing Iowa…but with a logo of the rival Iowa State Cyclones.

you gotta be kidding me pic.twitter.com/CUFw7rH0aA

— Natalie Weiner (@natalieweiner) March 3, 2024

Here’s that full clip:

Here’s ESPN’s Ohio State-Iowa preview, which they ended with Ohio State and Iowa State logos. pic.twitter.com/u8xSWgp7pK

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) March 3, 2024

As Maxwell Smart would say,

Logo mistakes happen, even across sports or levels of competition at times. And these kinds of errors definitely happen in college sports, and often with schools from the same state. But that’s often especially embarrassing given those schools’ rivalries.

And this was a particularly bad miss by ESPN given how much focus and attention they (and everyone else) had put on this game. It was also at least the second questionable graphic from ESPN in a week. So that’s not ideal. But yes, to anyone who wasn’t sure, Caitlin Clark does play for the Hawkeyes, not the Cyclones. We’ll see how she finishes out her regular-season career for them.

[Natalie Weiner on Twitter/X]