JuJu Watkins Gets Blunt About Passing Caitlin Clark's NCAA Scoring Milestone
USC Trojans star JuJu Watkins has produced a (nearly) unparalleled scoring rate during her first two years of college basketball.
She finished her team's Big Ten Conference Tournament championship game against UCLA with 1,684 total points across her two NCAA seasons. And early on in the contest, she surpassed former Iowa Hawkeyes superstar Caitlin Clark's mark of 1,662 points scored during her first two seasons, which makes for the second-highest point total in women's college basketball history.
Unless her Trojans squad is upset early in the NCAA Tournament, there's little doubt that Watkins will surpass Clark's Fever teammate Kelsey Mitchell's record of 1,762 points scored during her first two seasons, which came when she was playing for the Ohio State Buckeyes.
While many women's basketball fans will be watching to see whether Watkins beats Mitchell's record, Watkins doesn't seem too concerned with this scoring accolade, which she conveyed during a March 13 interview with Natalie Esquire of NBC Sports' On Her Turf.
"No. Not really," Watkins said when Esquire asked whether Watkins cared about milestones like passing Clark's scoring mark. "It's cool though. Like sometimes, I'll see, I'll be like 'Oh, wow, I didn't even know that.' I think that has been a lot of things. It's very surprising for me.
"But yeah, it's not something that I really pay attention to," Watkins added.
Natalie Esquire disappointed to hear that Juju Watkins doesn’t really care about breaking Caitlin’s 2nd place scoring for the first two years of college. The record is held by Kelsey Mitchell. pic.twitter.com/pAliXFa5JO
— Ken Swift (@kenswift) March 16, 2025
Watkins is clearly more concerned about helping her team win games than surpassing Clark and Mitchell's scoring milestones. But that won't stop her fans from counting down the points until Watkins becomes the new NCAA women's basketball record-holder for scoring in her first two seasons.
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Grant Young covers Women’s Basketball, the New York Yankees, and the New York Mets for Sports Illustrated’s ‘On SI’ sites. He holds an MFA degree in creative writing from the University of San Francisco (USF), where he also graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing and played on USF’s Division I baseball team for five years. However, he now prefers Angel Reese to Angels in the Outfield.