The LSU women’s basketball team has faced many new experiences throughout this season. From being a top-10 team in the nation by the end of the regular season, the No. 2 team in the SEC going into the NCAA Tournament and a team with a target on its back, this season has been everything Head Coach Kim Mulkey and her Tigers could have asked for and more.
While the team has worked tremendously hard over the past several months, the Tigers’ most difficult challenge is that they are now the hunted, instead of the hunters.
The Tigers do not find out their official NCAA Tournament seeding until Sunday, March 13. However, in the most recent publishing of the women’s bracketology for the 2022 NCAA Tournament on ESPN, LSU is projected as a two-seed and is projected to host the first two rounds in Baton Rouge. Being a two-seed in the tournament would be the program’s highest tournament seeding since 2008. The bracketology projects that nine teams from the SEC, including LSU, will make the tournament.
Coming off an opening game loss to Kentucky in the SEC Tournament, questions arise on how the team will handle the pressures that comes with the postseason. However, seeing Kentucky beat the three seed, Tennessee, and the No. 1 ranked team in the country, South Carolina, to win the SEC, is comforting. It shows Kentucky was a team that caught fire and that could beat anyone, including the best of the best.
LSU will have about two weeks to prepare for its first round matchup of the NCAA Tournament. This is an obstacle completely foreign to these Tigers, as they haven’t been on this stage since the 2017-18 season. Only three current players played on that team: Khayla Pointer, Faustine Aifuwa and Jailin Cherry. While the team does not have much experience in the NCAA Tournament, the experience it has comes from some important pieces of the team.
If there was a time where LSU should be thankful for Mulkey coming into the program, it would be now. While the team has plenty of senior leadership, it lacks veteran experience. Mulkey’s post-season knowledge will give the team guidance on how to handle the pressure of being one of the top seeds in the tournament.
While Mulkey was at Baylor, she won three national championships; she is just about as experienced on the biggest stage with the brightest lights as it gets in women’s college basketball. She has also coached her teams to NCAA Tournament bids every year since 2003.
Of the 17 seasons she has coached since then, she has never lost in the first round, and has only lost in the second round twice. Seeing how Mulkey handles the NCAA Tournament, it is comforting that she consistently does well, especially now that she has a team of players that have not seen the NCAA Tournament much.
One thing that LSU has to look forward to heading into the NCAA Tournament is that Alexis Morris is likely to be back and healthy. Morris went down with an injury against Alabama in the Tigers’ last regular season home game on senior night, which kept her out of the last regular season game against Tennessee and the SEC Tournament loss to Kentucky.
The senior guard out of Beaumont, Texas has been a staple piece to the LSU offense all season long, as she averaged 15.8 points per game and was named to the All-SEC Second Team.
The challenges that the Tigers have gone through and the ones that are yet to come might be foreign to the team, but the timeline up until the NCAA Tournament works in their favor. The team has more than enough time to prepare and fix the things that went wrong at the SEC Tournament. They will have everyone healthy and enough time to prepare for how to deal with the unfamiliar pressures of being a true postseason contender. But they look forward to having a great crowd turnout for their games in Baton Rouge as they’ve had all season. In the games the Tigers need the fans most, they will be there, and the team will be able to feed off them as they have all year, and start off a great NCAA Tournament run right at home in the PMAC.