When we last caught up with No. 12 LSU and declared them schedule merchants in for a rude awakening, the Tigers were reeling from an 0-2 start to SEC play and looking ahead to a game against undefeated No. 2 Texas, an even tougher opponent than the Kentucky and Vanderbilt teams that had already beaten them. Head coach Kim Mulkey had supplied a simple diagnosis: “We’re not tough enough,” she told reporters. But on Sunday, LSU’s band of athletic guards rediscovered the ways of Mulkeyball. In an ugly 70-65 home win, they handed the Longhorns their first loss of the season and also handed me the 10,000th loss of my blogging career.
Writing from a distance and in relative obscurity, I can at least suffer my defeat in peace. Not everyone is so lucky. For someone who decries newspapers, Mulkey has a remarkable faculty for remembering every single thing any journalist has ever written about her. Reed Darcey, the LSU women’s basketball beat writer at the New Orleans Advocate, pointed out after the Kentucky loss that LSU had yet to beat an SEC opponent ranked in the top 12 of the AP poll since Mulkey was hired in 2021. “They're now 0-8 in those games. Five losses to South Carolina, two to Texas and one to Kentucky,” he posted.
Never tweet! “Reed, I’m gonna tell you something,” Mulkey said in her postgame presser. “I beat Texas, so you can’t write that in your articles anymore. Do you know how many times I beat Texas in my career? Go look it up. Do you know that I have lost three of my first four games in a conference before and made it to a Final Four—write that article, OK? Losing games in this league—that’s how hard it is, guys.”
Another sign of how hard this league is? Impressively, Mulkey didn’t even give the game’s most resentful press conference. (This improves her record to something like 1–5326 in postgame press conferences.) Texas head coach Vic Schaefer was less than gracious in defeat. He did credit LSU for their improved rebounding and their work forcing turnovers—Texas turned the ball over a season-high 17 times—but he also cited another nefarious force at work. He pointed out that Texas had back-to-back road games against LSU and South Carolina on their schedule, the product, he suggested, of the SEC’s “vendetta against Texas.” Totally straight-faced, he continued his strange insinuation. “The league is hard enough as it is, but then to bless me and my group with that—it really has a stench to it.”
At least to me, the vendetta is not particularly obvious, nor the stench particularly strong. It's a simple artifact of the conference’s depth this year that a given team might end up playing a pair of difficult road games back-to-back. Just as LSU’s losses fueled them to become “tough” again, perhaps Schaefer only meant this as a manufactured slight to motivate his players. “It’s us against the world a lot of times, and we have to embrace that,” he said. Kim Mulkey teams and Vic Schaefer teams both have a knack for turning games they play into queasy, annoying affairs. Fitting that the afternoon went the way it did.
