WaPo reporter Kent Babb reacts to Kim Mulkey’s ‘hit job’ claim on Brian Kelly article

While sports fans wait with bated breath for the Kim Mulkey profile piece that Washington Post reporter Kent Babb is working on, he’s setting the record straight about the article that the LSU Tigers women’s basketball coach referred to as a “hit job.”

In a fiery press conference last Saturday, Mulkey accused Babb of writing a yet-to-be-published “hit piece” on her in the Post. Along with threatening legal action and accusing Babb (whom she did not refer to by name) of attempting to dig up dirt on her from former players, she said that part of the reason she refused to talk to him was because of a “hit job” that he did on LSU football coach Brian Kelly two years prior.

The article in question was Babb’s January 2022 piece entitled, “In Baton Rouge, there’s a $100 million football coach and everyone else.” The crux of the article was a juxtaposition of Kelly’s massive salary against the harsh financial conditions that Baton Rouge’s residents and LSU’s students faced. Babb never actually criticized Kelly in the article, though LSU Board of Supervisors member Collis Temple Jr. takes a shot at Kelly over his salary while many LSU professors and Baton Rouge residents struggle to make ends meet. While the article certainly asks its readers to consider the imbalance in the situation, it does not paint Kelly as a villain.

The article does not read like a “hit job” and even Babb was quick to note the strange reading that Mulkey had assigned to it.

Hit piece? https://t.co/NvOQ1JMuXW

— Kent Babb (@kentbabb) March 23, 2024

Babb has remained mum regarding the Mulkey profile so far, other than to confirm that he is writing it. However, he did speak with Front Office Sports about the 2022 article and offered further clarification on why he wrote it.

“My contention all along with the 2022 story is that it’s not even about Brian Kelly,” he wrote in an email to FOS. “It’s really a look at one city’s vast economic gulf and what our society seems to value. Nobody did anything wrong here, least of all Kelly. I said it then and still believe it now: It’s just the sky-high cost of competing, and my only aim was to point out one extreme on the LSU pay scale and find someone who existed on the opposite end of that extreme.

“Many readers have said I could’ve chosen any college coach in the country, and I couldn’t agree more. I chose Kelly for two reasons. The first is that he had just left Notre Dame for LSU and a contract worth a possible nine-figure maximum, and the second is that, just months earlier, my second book—about high school football in New Orleans, a city plagued by gun violence and corruption—had just been published, so I had an intimate knowledge of Louisiana’s political, racial, and economic disparities.”

Anyone who has read the article can tell you that the only way to read it as a “hit job” is as if you are someone in a position of power who does not want to be criticized or held accountable in any way.

Sounds about right.

[Front Office Sports]