Kim Mulkey is changing her tune on the altercation between her LSU team and South Carolina in last weekend’s SEC championship game.
In her weekly appearance on WAFB in Baton Rouge in front of a live audience, Mulkey shrugged off the shoving match that began between South Carolina center Kamilla Cardoso and LSU guard Flau’jae Johnson. Not for nothing, the reigning NCAA champion head coach said the hoopla around the altercation was also not only excessive, but “sexist.”
“When you have two tough teams who play so hard, who are so good, and compete, those kind of things happen,” Mulkey said. “And it’s so out of control with the media right now. You don’t give that much attention when the men do it. So why do you keep writing it about the women? It really comes across, and I’ll just say it, it comes across as a little bit sexist.”
"Nobody got in a fight. There were no punches thrown. There was nobody choked. It was a shoving match. Whoop-dee-doo!"@LSUwbkb @KimMulkey had plenty to say at our final radio show of the year at @TJRibsAcadian.
"It comes across as a little bit sexist." #LSU pic.twitter.com/13d8RcxyIK
— Jacques Doucet (@JacquesDoucet) March 13, 2024
Of course, Mulkey is often working an angle. After calling out the media for highlighting aggressiveness among her team and Dawn Staley’s Gamecock squad, Mulkey intimated she was also a victim of it herself.
“You’re tearing down two great teams, you’re tearing down a woman who coaches one of those teams,” Mulkey said. “Stop it.”
Mulkey was subject to a ton of criticism following the SEC title game not because of her involvement in the altercation as head coach, but because of her own comments on it. While Staley owned up to the mistakes by her players, Mulkey said she wished Cardoso would have instead shoved a bigger player like star forward Angel Reese, who could have stood her ground.
So if Mulkey’s point is that the media is focusing too much on this dust-up because it happened in women’s basketball as opposed to men, she certainly didn’t do herself or her team any favors by adding fuel to the fire with her own retort postgame.
[NOLA.com]
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.