One of the positive things in LSU's blowout loss to top-ranked South Carolina on Sunday: It was over early enough that you could still pay full attention to Super Bowl 57 later in the day.
That's what Kim Mulkey did, as she explained to Mike Detillier on SportsTalk this week. She observed. She learned. But it wasn't the winning team that stood out most, but Jalen Hurts who gave the most impactful bit of advice in defeat.
"He didn’t say ‘you win or you lose,’ everybody knows that," Mulkey recalls. "But he said you win or you learn, and he says I’m gonna learn.”
Listen to the full interview with Kim Mulkey in the player above. Can't see the embed? Click here.
It was a line that resonated after her team's similarly disappointing defeat on a national stage, its first of the season. So she printed out the story documenting Hurts after the game. Her team got a day off on Monday, but when they returned every member of her team was handed a copy. She gave them time to read it, then hit them with the all-important question: What did you learn?
“Because you’re going to be in this position again during your career here, maybe get the chance to play them again if you can get to the championship of the conference tournament," Mulkey said. "What did you learn? And so that’s how I approached it, and then we flushed it."
The Tigers, now 23-1 (11-1 SEC) will get to show just how much they were able to "flush" the 88-64 result when they face Ole Miss (20-5, 9-3 SEC) at the PMAC on Thursday.
"We’ve got four remaining games and as I told everybody, if we lose any of these remaining games, it won’t be because of the South Carolina loss," She continued. "It’ll just be because it’s February, everybody’s tired, everybody’s annoyed at everybody, everybody’s grinding out just one more win to try to get a place in the NCAA Tournament.”
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There's no question the Tigers and Gamecocks drew national attention, considering it was the top-rated women's basketball game since 2010. It was also one of just two sellouts in women's college basketball this season, the other being LSU vs Tennessee in Baton Rouge. The stage wasn't lost on Mulkey, who knows what those big moments are like considering she played in a national championship and on the Olympic stage, and has also coached in multiple Final Fours with Baylor.
“It is good for the game. It’s really, you can’t put a dollar value on it. ... There aren’t many women’s programs that make money. But the dollar value that you can help a university, somebody watched and said ‘ooh, I’ve got a little interest in maybe becoming a student at LSU now that I’ve watched them,’ " Mulkey said. "You can’t understand, when I was a player, literally one game was shown on national television and it was CBS covering the national championship game, and now you can tune in just about every night and find a game. But that stage doesn’t happen much for women’s basketball."
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“It was electric. It was something that a lot of my players had never been a part of. ... It was everything that you hope your players get to play in front of.”
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“For my team at LSU right now, man we needed that. We didn’t need a butt-kicking, but we needed that experience, we need them to learn from it.”
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