LSU Ate Too Many Cupcakes Before Dinner

Kim Mulkey's weekend started out OK: The Baton Rouge crowd greeted her with applause on Thursday night as she held hands with Lane Kiffin and paraded the school’s new football coach around the court. (To assess the passage of time, consider that Ed Orgeron was the football coach greeting her as she stepped off the plane for her introductory press conference at LSU four years ago.) But the crowd died down. To begin conference play, her LSU Tigers are 0-2 after falling to Kentucky, 80-78, at home, then losing Sunday afternoon’s sloppy turnover fest at Vanderbilt, 65-61. 

They also lost while looking very unlike a Mulkey team. In the past, the teams she’s coached have created huge margins for themselves by playing the possession game, forcing turnovers and winning battles on the glass. Both strategies, Mulkey said, were absent in the first two games of SEC play. After being killed on the glass by Kentucky—the Tigers were out-rebounded 45-29—LSU won the rebounding battle against Vanderbilt, but the Commodores showed that sometimes rebounding is simple matter of when and not how many. Five of Vanderbilt’s 14 offensive rebounds came in the last six minutes. “It’s an old term, but listen, guys, we're not tough enough,” Mulkey told reporters after the Vanderbilt loss. “You’re not tough enough to make a play when we need it, not tough enough to get that rebound when we need it.”