Kim Mulkey has confronted reporters mid-interview, called journalists “sleazy,” threatened to sue the Washington Post before they even published a profile on her, and made student reporters squirm with questions about how many Final Fours they’ve played in.
When Kim Mulkey has something to say, you hear about it.
So when she didn’t show up to her postgame press conference Thursday night after LSU’s 121-43 exhibition win over Langston, something was wrong. Assistant coach Bob Starkey filled in for her and explained why.
“Yeah, she’s heartbroken,” Starkey said. “In 40 years of collegiate coaching, I’ve worked for two phenomenal athletic directors. One was Skip Bertman. The other one was Scott Woodward.”
“Yeah she’s heartbroken” says #LSU women’s basketball assistant Bob Starkey as to why Kim Mulkey didn’t show for her postgame press conference. Scott Woodward out as Tigers Athletics Director. @KimMulkey pic.twitter.com/6r7OFjQRUg
— Mike Scarborough (@ScarboroughMike) October 31, 2025
By the time LSU’s exhibition game tipped off Thursday, Scott Woodward was already out as LSU’s athletic director. The news reached Mulkey’s bench mid-game, four days after Brian Kelly’s firing and hours after Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry went on The Pat McAfee Show to publicly strip Woodward of any involvement in the football coaching search.
Mulkey was “heartbroken” because Woodward was responsible for bringing her home.
She’d spent 21 years at Baylor, won three National Championships, and built one of the most dominant programs in women’s basketball before Woodward convinced her to return to Louisiana. Two years later, she delivered LSU its first women’s basketball national championship and signed a 10-year, $32 million extension, making her the highest-paid coach in women’s college basketball.
Now, Woodward is gone because Brian Kelly couldn’t win enough football games to justify the $95 million contract Woodward gave him, leaving LSU on the hook for a $54 million buyout when the school fired him eight games into his fourth season. That’s the second-largest buyout in college football history. The largest belongs to Jimbo Fisher’s $77 million buyout from Texas A&M, another contract Woodward negotiated when he was athletic director in College Station.
“I can tell you right now, Scott Woodward is not selecting the next coach,” Landry said Wednesday at a press conference. “Hell, I’ll let Donald Trump select it before I let him do it.”
By Thursday night, Woodward was out entirely, replaced by interim athletic director Verge Ausberry.
Woodward’s tenure at LSU produced six national championships across four sports. Mulkey’s title in 2023. Baseball coach Jay Johnson’s titles in 2023 and 2025. Gymnastics coach Jay Clark’s title in 2024. Three of Woodward’s major hires delivered championships, and Brian Kelly made the SEC championship game in his first season and went 34-14 overall in less than four years.
But none of that matters when your football coach’s buyout is $54 million and the governor is on national television talking about how you’ve left taxpayers on the hook for failure. Woodward’s crime wasn’t being bad at his job. It was being too good at giving coaches the security they wanted without building in enough protection for the school when things went wrong.
Football drives everything in college athletics. Football money funds everything. And football decisions break everything. So when football goes wrong, everyone pays the price, even the people who did everything right.
“I think one of the things that gets overshadowed is that these are people and human beings that are going through these situations, and they have families,” Starkey said via NOLA.com. “It always, always gives us pause.”
LSU’s athletic department is now without a president, an athletic director, or a football coach, all in the span of a few months. The school narrowed its presidential search to three candidates earlier this week. The Board of Supervisors will form a committee to find the next football coach. Ausberry will lead the search as interim athletic director.
Mulkey’s team opens its season Tuesday night against Houston Christian. She’ll be there coaching, probably snapping at a reporter or two because that’s who she is. But Thursday night, for one of the only times in her career, Kim Mulkey had nothing to say.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.