NY Post: We didn’t need Washington Post to tell us Kim Mulkey is bad for college sports

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In a world gone nuts, a laugh, now and then, can temporarily deliver us from evil. Kim Mulkey, the often repugnant, clown-outfitted, attention-starved, raging, sideline-stomping coach of LSU’s women’s basketball team, recently made low comedy when she threatened to sue the Washington Post for casting her in a poor light — a threat made entirely on what she anticipated reading.

Good guess, Coach!

What makes this comical is that whatever ill might have been written of Kim Mulkey, the primary source of the info is — ta-da! — Kim Mulkey.

One need only have watched her in action to conclude that she is a representative of the uglier side of college sports — not that “college” is any longer relevant — as it now includes, for better and worse, big-time, big-ticket women’s basketball. Knowing as we do that all college coaches are limited to what they’re allowed to do — increasingly anything they wish in order to recruit academically deficient kids to produce many more wins than losses — Mulkey has been a dark-side overachiever.

At Baylor she specialized in remorselessly stomping opponents, humiliating them in the name of sports.

Here are a few of Baylor’s home game results vs. “Guests” — fish-in-a-barrel prey — at Mulkey’s direction from just the 2019-20 season: 97-29 vs. New Hampshire, 120-46 vs. Grambling, 112-42 over Houston Baptist, 90-28 over Lamar and 111-43 vs. Arkansas State.

She’s a regular Attila The Hon.

Naturally, her great regard for her sport made her a must-have for LSU, which signed her to a $3.3 million per annum contract.

As for her “nothing intentional” explanation for LSU’s absence during the national anthem before the Iowa game, Monday, it didn’t rhyme with the truth. Her teams have often practiced rude disregard for the pregame anthem since Brittney Griner, now repatriated from a Russian prison, played for Mulkey at Baylor.

Regardless, she has already been inducted to the College Basketball Hall of Fame, taking her place alongside unsavory male coaches who were allowed by their colleges to win by hook but mostly crook.

As a disciplinarian, Mulkey seems as tantrum-prone as her players. In the win vs. UCLA prior to the Iowa game, star Angel Reese, a transfer from Maryland despite evidence of an inability to write a cogent sentence as a public reply to a question on Instagram, fouled out late, then headed off — but stopped to bad-mouth UCLA’s coach. Yep, in a close tournament game, she risked a technical.

At that point, ABC/ESPN pandering analyst — pandering has dominated all media’s women’s tournament coverage — Rebecca Lobo said that LSU’s taunting was a pregame concern. Gee, thanks. Why not say so, oh, an hour earlier?

And after the intemperate game, ABC/ESPN cameras abandoned the handshake line before viewers could see if the two coaches met.

Of course, given that the world has gone nuts, rationalized, wishful defenses of Mulkey and her young women have followed, everything from dangerous speculative claims of racism to a double standard for male coaches over women coaches, as if no one noticed Bobby Knight’s behavior. But this is the bag we’re in. Don’t believe what you see — over and over — believe what you’re told.

Yes, the women’s college game has ascended in skill and interest.

But as with everything else, there are compromises to make, thus prices to pay

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