Peacock is exclusively streaming another historic sports moment

On Jan. 13, Peacock aired the first-ever NFL game that was exclusive to streaming, and fans weren’t happy.

Despite the backlash, the NFL game wasn’t the first exclusively streamed sports event on the platform. It aired one other NFL regular season game in December, while also airing games from the English Premiere League and WWE special events like WrestleMania.

Peacock has another event — this time with historic implications.

Iowa’s Caitlin Clark enters Thursday night’s game against Big Ten conference rival Michigan just eight points shy of surpassing the all-time scoring record in NCAA women’s college basketball. Clark has 3,520 points while the current record held by former Washington guard turned WNBA champion Kelsey Plum is at 3,527 points.

Barring injury or any other anomaly, Clark is sure to smash the record tonight. The senior guard leads the NCAA in scoring at 32.1 points per game, and has not scored less than 21 points in any of the 25 games she’s played in this season.

Clark has been leading the charge in sparking attention to a growing women’s game. Her electric scoring displays and unreal three-point shooting range has electrified fans — so much so that the NCAA Finals game that featured her Iowa Hawkeyes and Angel Reese’s LSU Tigers last year average 9.9 million viewers, the most-watched NCAA women’s championship game ever.

Guard Caitlin Clark #22 of the Iowa Hawkeyes has a chance to make history Thursday, Feb. 15. Matthew Holst/Getty Images

Some of the Iowa guard’s performances this season have garnered a ton of attention, including her game less than a month ago against Ohio State that was on NBC that was the most-watched regular season women’s basketball game since 2010 with an average of 1.93 million viewers. According to The Athletic, Clark and the Hawkeyes have been a part of four of the six most-watched women’s college basketball games this season.

But this game — an almost surely record-breaking night for Clark — will probably not hit that viewership milestone because it’s going to be exclusive to Peacock.

To obtain the rights for the NFL Wild Card game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins. NBCUniversal shelled out an additional $100 million for that single game. And Amazon is likely going to do something similar for the NFL next season.

But Caitlin Clark’s potentially historic matchup against Michigan is already part of the $8 billion licensing package that the Big Ten signed with Comcast’s  (CMCSA)  NBC Sports as well as Paramount Global’s  (PARA)  CBS and Fox  (FOXA)  in 2022. According to The Athletic, over 50 Big Ten games for both men’s and women’s basketball are exclusive to Peacock. It just so happened that this record-breaking game fell on one of them.

That’s just the case with many of these records. Leagues and networks can’t plan for them — though sometimes they do get lucky like when TNT aired the game that LeBron James broke the NBA all-time scoring record.

There’s probably even the case that Peacock is available nationally, which allows more people to still access the game if they decide to shell out the money.

But regardless, this is just another sign that sports continues to move to streaming. And Peacock is one of the big forces in doing so.