In terms of turning dust to gold, not many come close to Kim Mulkey and the LSU women’s basketball program in the world of college sports.
Coming off nine wins in the 2020-21 season and the departure of head coach Nikki Fargas, LSU athletic director Scott Woodward pulled off the hire of the offseason by landing three-time national champion head coach Mulkey.
You could say the rest was history.
Despite low projections heading into her first season and a rough, early loss to Florida Gulf Coast, things quickly transitioned in the other direction for the Tigers. In just 11 games, it had surpassed its previous win total, earned its first top-15 win of the Mulkey era and placed in the AP Top-25, as those preseason expectations were aptly forgotten about.
When LSU went into halftime against No. 1 South Carolina with a six-point lead, the team had already proven capable of a championship run, even after the eventual national champions came back and defeated LSU by six. That came in her 16th game with the program, fresh off back-to-back ranked wins over No. 13 Georgia and No. 23 Texas A&M.
Ultimately, it surpassed 25 regular season wins for the first time since 2008 and advanced in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2014 within her first season with the program. But it still left plenty on the table and the postseason went about as badly as possible.
The last three games of the season went as follows: a 15-point loss to seven-seed Kentucky to start and finish its SEC tournament run, a three-point victory over No. 14 Jackson State in the Round of 64 of the NCAA Tournament and another 15-point loss to conclude its season, this time against No. 6 seeded Ohio State.
Though that temporarily put a damper on what had been a promising season up to that point, it did little to alleviate the high expectations the team had entering its second season under Mulkey.
Despite losing star guard Khayla Pointer and a multitude of other key contributors, Mulkey did what she could to build around the sparse remains from the prior season’s roster.
She paired Maryland transfer Angel Reese, Missouri transfer LaDazhia Williams, West Virginia transfer Jasmine Carson, Ohio State transfer Kateri Poole and five-star prospect Flau’Jae Johnson with LSU’s lone remaining starter in guard Alexis Morris, which made up its top-six players in terms of minutes per game this season.
Fans didn’t know it at the time, but her acquisitions from both the transfer portal and 2022 recruiting class would take this team to unexplored heights. In what would have been a rebuilding season with an average coach, the Tigers would once again sport championship aspirations.
Its 23 straight wins to open the season perfectly coincided with sophomore Angel Reese’s record-breaking streak of 23 double-doubles, a span of which they beat their opponents by an average of over 31 points. But even as the Tigers finished the regular season with one loss, there were still doubts.
For one, the SEC wasn’t the strongest conference, as despite having seven teams in the tournament, just four of those were seeded No. 8 and below. Considering LSU’s lone matchup against No. 1 South Carolina was a blowout loss and its most considerable win came against No. 4 seeded Tennessee, the doubt wasn’t entirely unreasonable, though it did disregard the fact that the Tigers managed an absurd 27-1 regular-season record.
A blown lead in their SEC semifinal matchup against Tennessee dropped it to a No. 3 seed for a second straight season but despite the parallels to last season, this time they prevailed. The Tigers presented little worry against No. 14 seeded Hawai’i and even when they drew another No. 6 seed from the Big 10 in Michigan, LSU blew through its competition with a 24-point win.
It stumbled a bit on its way to its first Final Four appearance since 2008, needing a small amount of luck to advance past No. 2 seeded Utah and struggling to score against No. 9 seeded Miami, but it got the job done in each of those and put itself in position to make program history.
After five straight seasons from 2003 to 2008 where it made it to the Final Four and failed to advance, Mulkey and this Tiger squad made history, not only making it to its first ever championship but winning it in electric fashion.
It did so thanks to an improbable nine-point comeback against No. 1 seeded Virginia Tech and a historic offensive performance in the title game against No. 2 seeded Iowa, a game in which it beat the championship record for most points with 102.
In just two seasons with the program, Mulkey turned a program that hadn’t advanced past the Final Four in its history or won a tournament game since 2014 into a champion, a feat not many coaches in college sports history have accomplished. The best comparison I could come up with was Nick Saban, who won a national championship in just his third season with Alabama.
Being that Saban is considered by most to be the best coach in college football history, that says a lot about the legacy of Mulkey.
