Amidst scandal, hiring Mulkey is almost a no-brainer for LSU

Imagine being Will Wade. Imagine the hard work you’ve done over the past four years to rebuild the men’s basketball program at LSU.
Imagine the pride in drawing top recruits on a year-after-year basis and being a yearly contender in the Southeastern Conference.
Still with me? It sounds pretty good if you’re Wade.
Now, imagine being relegated nearly to the brink of irrelevance almost overnight. And none of it being your fault.
That was the situation last Sunday, when LSU made the biggest hire in school history in wooing former Baylor head coach Kim Mulkey to Baton Rouge to become the head coach of its own women’s basketball program.
Mulkey is a coup. She comes with three national championships on her resume, and that’s only the head coaching portion of it. Throw her .859 career winning percentage and her being the coach who was the fastest to 600 career wins in women’s college basketball history into the bag as well.
It’s an elite resume, and well-worth the price tag LSU is paying. Mulkey is expected to make $2.5 million in year one with a contract that will ultimately escalate north of $3 million over the duration of the deal, which runs through 2029-2029 according to the subscription-based website The Athletic.
Furthermore, The Athletic reports that upgrades are expected to the basketball facilities during Mulkey’s tenure.
If you’re privy to this sort of knowledge, facility upgrades don’t come cheap. When McNeese State University built and opened its new basketball arena in 2018, it came at a price tag of $40 million.
One can almost surely expect LSU to upgrade in a bigger-and-better way than McNeese did.
LSU isn’t penny-pinching by any means. However if this hire works out it will almost certainly be worth the lofty price tag, likely for the value Mulkey brings in public perception alone.
With the university currently embroiled in a sexual assault scandal centered around Title IX, it was almost a no-brainer for LSU to take a swing at the biggest fish available in the pond of women’s college basketball.
That’s for many reasons. First, this is an athletic program that is hell-bent on being nationally competitive in all sports.
Prying Mulkey away from Baylor almost certainly puts LSU ahead of the curve in accomplishing that goal.
More than that, though, it gives the athletic department and the university as a whole a “win” in the public relations battle it is currently caught up in.
Two-and-a-half million dollars per season? Chump change and money well-spent when you’re a school and program very much in-need of a boost in many ways.