Kim Mulkey's weekend started out OK: The Baton Rouge crowd greeted her with applause on Thursday night as she held hands with Lane Kiffin and paraded the school’s new football coach around the court. (To assess the passage of time, consider that Ed Orgeron was the football coach greeting her as she stepped off the plane for her introductory press conference at LSU four years ago.) But the crowd died down. To begin conference play, her LSU Tigers are 0-2 after falling to Kentucky, 80-78, at home, then losing Sunday afternoon’s sloppy turnover fest at Vanderbilt, 65-61.
They also lost while looking very unlike a Mulkey team. In the past, the teams she’s coached have created huge margins for themselves by playing the possession game, forcing turnovers and winning battles on the glass. Both strategies, Mulkey said, were absent in the first two games of SEC play. After being killed on the glass by Kentucky—the Tigers were out-rebounded 45-29—LSU won the rebounding battle against Vanderbilt, but the Commodores showed that sometimes rebounding is simple matter of when and not how many. Five of Vanderbilt’s 14 offensive rebounds came in the last six minutes. “It’s an old term, but listen, guys, we're not tough enough,” Mulkey told reporters after the Vanderbilt loss. “You’re not tough enough to make a play when we need it, not tough enough to get that rebound when we need it.”
How do teams get tougher? For the fourth straight season, LSU began conference play with some real duds of opponents on their résumé. Their No. 5 ranking last week owed to a spectacular string of scoring performances to start the season. The Tigers, whose guard group might be the most entertaining in college basketball, scored 100-plus points in 11 of their first 14 games, and set an NCAA record with eight straight 100-point games. They stunted on the likes of the Morgan State Lady Bears (1-16 this season) and the New Orleans Privateers (0-13). By HHS rating—an advanced metric of team strength from the stats website Her Hoop Stats—the two are among the 20 worst teams in D-I basketball. In fact, the only top-100 team by HHS rating on LSU’s non-conference schedule was Duke, whom the Tigers beat 93-77 in early December. Their next-toughest non-conference opponent after that was a Georgia Southern team that ranks 118th.
The competition-averse schedule sets LSU apart from other contending programs. UConn, a Big East team that tends not to encounter other powerhouses in conference play, is pretty good about scheduling tougher non-conference matchups. Already, the Huskies have survived a close scare from No. 9 Michigan and routed No. 21 USC, with games still to play against Notre Dame and Tennessee. In November, LSU’s SEC rival South Carolina headed west for an event billed “The Real SC,” a game against the other USC in Los Angeles. The other USC, for their part, packed their own non-conference schedule with games against NC State, UConn and Notre Dame.
This year’s slate of non-conference games has felt a little duller than usual across the board. A classic matchup wasn’t on the schedule: UConn and South Carolina didn’t play each other in the regular season for the first time in 11 years, though they'll run it back in 2027. Playing a tough non-conference schedule also admittedly requires some guesswork, and some marquee teams have struggled more than expected: USC is down JuJu Watkins this season; Notre Dame was hit hard by the transfer portal. But teams can at least try guessing, and there’s little indication LSU even tried. That Duke game, the lone big-name matchup on their non-conference schedule, was assigned to LSU as part of the ACC-SEC challenge event run by ESPN.
Asked if she was looking back on the soft non-conference schedule any differently, Mulkey said she wasn’t, and sort of winked the question away. “Probably good thing that we did play that, right?” she said. “Because if we’d have played anything tougher, we might be sitting here with a lot of losses.”
The games ahead won’t require any less toughness from LSU. The Tigers play No. 2 Texas this weekend and No. 5 Oklahoma the weekend after that. On Monday, for the first time in the history of the AP women’s basketball poll, the SEC had five of the top seven ranked teams. No. 7 Vanderbilt, coached by longtime Geno Auriemma assistant Shea Ralph, has itself a National Player of the Year candidate in sophomore Mikayla Blakes, who scored 32 points in the LSU win. Kentucky, now No. 6, is re-establishing itself as a top program in head coach Kenny Brooks’s second year.
None of those five teams was LSU, which tumbled seven spots to No. 12. Flau’jae Johnson, South Carolina transfer MiLaysia Fulwiley, and Mikaylah Williams headline the Tigers’ entertaining and athletic guard group, but the roster is light on quality post players in a conference that is now too competitive to survive without great defense and rebounding. “I think it’s a sign of parity, for sure,” Mulkey said after the loss to Vanderbilt. “When you get into conference, we know each other so well. You take away what teams do well, and you have to go to your second, third, and fourth options. Then it gets physical.” LSU doesn't have many teams left to push around.
