re: Mulkey Retirement News Dropping Soon

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Bump

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ForeverLSU5

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. — No, Kim Mulkey is not yet ready to call it quits on her Hall-of-Fame coaching career.

Mulkey said in a news conference Friday that she is, in fact, returning to the sidelines for a sixth season with the LSU women’s basketball team. The viral rumors that floated around the internet before the No. 2-seeded Tigers lost to Duke in the Sweet 16 on a buzzer beater, she said, are not true.

I'm not retiring,” Mulkey said. “Do I look that bad?"

“I don't know where that came from. I'm only 63. And I'm healthy, with a few stints in my heart. Doctor says I'm good to go. I have no clue where that stuff comes from, guys. I've never ever told anybody that.”

The rumor appears to have originated from a pair of X accounts that claim to be “LSU insiders.” Their posts that said Mulkey was retiring at the end of the 2025-26 season looked like social-media news reports, and as of early Saturday morning, they had accumulated more than 200,000 impressions.


Late Friday night, a reporter asked Mulkey if the rumors were true, and she said people were “blowing up” her phone with that same question.

“There are moments where you feel like, ‘Why am I doing this?’” Mulkey said. “But I don't get how people can just write crap on social media. That has to make you all feel really bad as journalists.”

Mulkey, who’s under contract through the 2032-33 season, also said that sometimes opposing coaches try to use her age and experience against her in recruiting. Some of them, she said, float the possibility that she could soon retire, given the fact that she’s more than 40 years into her coaching career. She spent 16 seasons as an assistant at her alma mater Louisana Tech before she accepted Baylor’s head coaching job in 2000. She took over at LSU in 2021.


During Mulkey’s tenure, the Tigers won the 2023 national title and advanced to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament in three consecutive years. They reached the Elite Eight in both 2024 and 2025, but in 2026, they’ll fell just short of that round of the tournament.

LSU led the No. 3-seeded Blue Devils 85-84 with nine seconds left in the fourth quarter. Duke missed its first go-ahead shot, but because the Tigers couldn’t secure the defensive rebound, the Blue Devils received a second-chance opportunity. Guard Ashlon Jackson took a 3 off a baseline inbounds pass, and her shot rolled around the rim before falling through the net.

Now, Mulkey said she plans to fill the two openings on her coaching staff and begin evaluating players in the transfer portal. Flau’jae Johnson and Amiya Joyner are the only contributors who exhausted their eligibility when LSU lost on Friday. The rest of the Tigers can return for another year.

And yes, Mulkey will coach the ones who come back — regardless of what you may have seen on social media.

“I'm going to be in this game unless LSU fires me, okay?” Mulkey said, “until I can't put a product on that floor that's competitive or my health fails me. So I would appreciate all of you in here, whoever put that out, if you know who they are, you need to stop it when you see it, because it's just a flat-out lie.”

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