Caitlin Clark Fired Back After Cooper DeJean Said He Could Beat Her in 1-on-1

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Gregory Shamus/Getty Images
Dylan Gwinn

A battle of the sexes? The basketball version?! Maybe it’ll happen?

In the lead-up to the NFL Draft, former Iowa Hawkeye and current Philadelphia Eagle Cooper DeJean told an interviewer that NFL teams had asked him if he could defeat Hawkeye women’s basketball legend Caitlin Clark in a game of 1-on-1.

A hypothetical that DeJean felt confident he could win.

“I wouldn’t say it’s really weird but a lot of teams have asked me if I could beat Caitlin Clark one-on-one, just being from Iowa. I said I think I can,” DeJean told Yahoo Sports. “She’d probably score a few buckets on me, but I think I could pull it off.”

We are finding out now that, according to DeJean, Clark responded to his prediction that he would win the hypothetical matchup.

“I mean, I was really just answering the question, but obviously, you know, Caitlin’s a special player,” DeJean said on the show, Up and Adams. “She’s done so much for women’s basketball as well and the University of Iowa in general. So I’ve had nothing but respect for her.

“She took a shot back at me after she texted me, and she said didn’t think that I could beat her. I’ll let her say that, but yeah, I mean, I think it’d be fun though if we got to play each other.”

I do, too!

That said, it would be a lot more fun for DeJean than it would for Clark. DeJean is not only an elite male athlete but also one of the best basketball players in Iowa high school history.

Here are the numbers: DeJean had a nearly 40-inch vertical in high school and scored 1,832 points. As a point of reference, that puts him 45 points ahead of fellow Iowan and former NBA first-round pick Harrison Barnes, the New York Post reports.

DeJean says he and Clark have no plan to battle on the court.

Look, this country is dumb on many things, but perhaps it is dumbest on the issue of transgender athletes in sports. An elite male athlete who didn’t even play college basketball soundly beating, arguably the greatest women’s college basketball player of all time, is something many people evidently need to see.

However, I like Caitlin Clark. I love that she shot back at DeJean. So, I don’t want her to be the one who gets made an example. Let it be someone else who doesn’t seem genuinely good and likable.

I don’t know who, but not Caitlin Clark.

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