“She needed a mental break from all the jealousy” – Skip Bayless has a theory about Caitlin Clark’s extended injury absence originally appeared on Basketball Network.
When the Indiana Fever face the Chicago Sky on Saturday night in Indianapolis, it will mark the second straight game where college rivals Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese won’t be playing. But while Reese will miss a fifth straight game, Clark will double that number with her 10th consecutive contest missed.
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Overall, Caitlin has missed 18 out of the Fever’s 31 games played so far this season. At first, she missed five with a quad injury, but since then, Clark has been dealing with groin issues and has been in and out of action. Her most recent setback came on July 15 against the Connecticut Sun, and she hasn’t stepped on the court since. Veteran sports analyst Skip Bayless suspects there’s something more to this prolonged absence than meets the eye.
“The Caitlin Clark saga gets stranger and stranger,” said Bayless. “I just find Caitlin’s entire second season is inexplicably baffling. Think about this: She had played 185 straight games through college and her rookie WNBA season, 185 straight without missing one because of injury. And now, this season, she has missed games four different times with various leg pulls…and there’s no timetable for return for this current groin pull.”
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She was an “Iron Woman”
As Skip mentioned, durability was one of Caitlin’s assets when she entered the WNBA. Clark played in all of 139 possible games with the Iowa Hawkeyes in the NCAA. She proved that in the pros when she began her pro career playing all of her first 46 games with the Fever.
Earlier this season, the Fever revealed that Clark had sustained a quad injury and would be sidelined for two weeks. As a result, on May 28, her “Iron Woman” streak came to an end, marking the first time she missed a non-preseason game since November 18, 2017, back in her high school days.
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She was initially expected to miss four games, but four became five. She came back, then got hurt again. That became a pattern, and after her latest injury, she missed the All-Star Game, which was played in her backyard in Indiana.
All-Star game viewership fell sharply from 3.44 million last year to 2.2 million this year, a 36 percent drop that Skip attributed to the so-called “Caitlin Effect.” But Bayless also believes that her absence is an effect of the treatment she’s gotten from her peers.
“Maybe Caitlin Clark has taken a couple of injury breaks just because she needed a mental break from all the jealousy, all the resentment, all the on-court bullying, and cheap shots she takes. I just know that Caitlin Clark’s second season in this league, this league that she is fueling, is getting curiouser and curiouser,” the analyst added.
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The Fever are just one game off the second seed in the East
The Fever came out smoking out of the All-Star break. Following a loss to the New York Liberty in their re-opener, they bounced back with five consecutive wins. However, they have since suffered back-to-back defeats against the Los Angeles Sparks and Phoenix Mercury.
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At 17-14 on the year, Indiana is ranked third in the Eastern Conference and is just one game behind the second-place Atlanta Dream. Overall, they are tied with the Las Vegas Aces for the fifth-best record in the entire WNBA. But while the Fever remains in good shape despite CC’s long absence, Bayless raised questions because nobody could tell when Clark would come back.
“It’s day-to-day right now,” said Fever head coach Stephanie White on ESPN earlier this week. “We’re really just putting no timetable on it. Going through the rehab process, and then we want to reintegrate her from a strength and conditioning standpoint, and then get her back to basketball activities. So we’re taking it one day at a time.”
But while White is talking about Caitlin’s physical health, Bayless insinuates that it could be about the mental side as well. He feels all the bullying she’s gotten in the league made Clark struggle with her shot this season. And now she’s trying to repair the damage by giving herself a break from the action. It is one of the classic Skip’s longshots, but this time, it might have some truth to it.
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This story was originally reported by Basketball Network on Aug 9, 2025, where it first appeared.
