LSU, Kim Mulkey have a hill to climb: beating South Carolina | LSU

Before these games, former Louisiana Tech coach Sonja Hogg likes to compare her old point guard to a duck swimming across a pond.

On the surface, Kim Mulkey appears calm and composed, Hogg thinks, even elegant and graceful. But that serenity arises only as a result of what’s underneath — a frenetic, frantic paddling, churning her toward an annual showdown with the only Southeastern Conference opponent that her LSU women’s basketball program still hasn’t defeated: Dawn Staley’s reigning-champion South Carolina team. 

“I think they have a lot of respect for each other,” Hogg said. “But as a competitor, yeah, Kim wants to get that monkey off her back and wants, first of all, her team to win — period.”

When the two women’s college basketball powerhouse programs collide at 4 p.m. Friday on ESPN, LSU will try to find a win that has eluded it in recent years.

The No. 5 Tigers (20-0, 5-0 SEC) haven’t beaten South Carolina since 2012, which means their losing skid in the matchup now spans 12 seasons, two coaches and 16 games. Even under Mulkey, LSU is 0-4 against the Gamecocks, one of only two Division I teams with more wins than the Tigers over the last four seasons.

Overall, Mulkey-coached squads are 2-5 against Staley’s South Carolina teams. One of Mulkey’s groups hasn’t beaten a Staley squad since 2019, when Baylor bounced the Gamecocks out of the Sweet 16 on its way to a national championship. That season, South Carolina lost 10 games.

The No. 2 Gamecocks (18-1, 6-0) were already an elite program then. In the four previous seasons, they had appeared in two Final Fours and won a national title.

But something changed after they lost that game to Baylor.

They’ve lost only 10 total games in the five years since, a run in which they made four Final Four appearances and won two championships, including the title that punctuated their undefeated 2023-2024 season.

LSU has a national championship now too. But to win that title, Mulkey’s Tigers didn’t have to topple the Gamecocks, now a bitter rival seeking a fifth consecutive win in the head-to-head matchup.

What are the stakes? It’s not an easy question to answer. LSU would, of course, love to break that losing streak, but how much can only one regular-season game in January really matter?

“I don’t think that she would put any extra pressure or extra incentive into that particular game,” said Bill Brock, Mulkey’s longtime associate head coach at Baylor. “But I just know her being the competitor that she is, she knows in the back of her mind, if we’re going to compete for an SEC championship, we’re going to have to probably go through South Carolina.”

Which means that Mulkey is now chasing Staley. Those roles were once reversed, with South Carolina hunting the kind of teams that made runs to the Final Four look routine. Staley didn’t lead the Gamecocks to the NCAA Tournament until 2012, her fourth season as their coach and the same year Baylor took home its second national title under Mulkey at the end of a 40-0 run.

You can spot the exact moment in which it all changed. In 2019, Staley started to guide South Carolina across a Rubicon, transforming a program that competed at an elite level into one that competed at a historically elite level. The dividing line is its Sweet 16 loss to Mulkey’s Baylor team.

“At that time,” Fred Chmiel said, ‘they were the bull’s-eye.”

Chmiel, now the head coach at Bowling Green, coached on Staley’s staff for eight seasons, helping her recruit the freshman class that lifted South Carolina past the Sweet 16 and into the 129 wins it earned across the four seasons after its 2019 loss to Mulkey’s Bears.

“They were the target everybody was chasing,” Chmiel said, “and we weren’t ready for that yet. But I do think that we regrouped, and we did figure out that it takes levels of talent. It takes a lot more than what we had at that time, and our youth showed through.”

One of those younger players was a sophomore named LaDazhia Williams. She grabbed two rebounds for South Carolina but watched most of the game from the bench. There, she could observe Baylor’s domineering post players — the 6-foot-4 Lauren Cox and the 6-7 Kalani Brown — unaware that she’d later become a similarly strong interior presence for the coach yelling and stomping at the other end of the floor.

They too, to her surprise, would also win a title — but at LSU after Mulkey first careened into two more games against the Gamecocks.

In the 2022 matchup, a physical South Carolina team grabbed 24 more rebounds than her Tigers in a 66-60 win.

In 2023, a more talented LSU team fell into a 16-point first-quarter deficit it couldn’t erase. After the 88-64 loss, Mulkey said her program “aspires to be that one day” in a nod to South Carolina’s depth, talent and pedigree.

And just two months later, it proved that it was.

Williams — the ex-South Carolina center who had developed into a veteran who could score 18 points per game in the Final Four — thinks the regular-season loss to the Gamecocks gave the Tigers the focus they needed to make a deep run through the NCAA Tournament.

“We really just locked in,” Williams said, “even with practices, just making sure we didn’t let ourselves or each other slack off, just making sure we’re getting on each other without the coaches having to say anything.”

In the past four seasons, South Carolina has lost only four games — one of which was the defeat that gave LSU a title-game date with Iowa in 2023. No other Division I team has fewer than 10 losses across that same stretch of play.

The Tigers nearly handed the Gamecocks one or two extra defeats last season.

But junior Bree Hall snuck behind Mikaylah Williams, where she found the space she needed to bury the go-ahead corner 3-pointer that propelled South Carolina to its 15th straight win over LSU.

The Tigers nearly won the rematch too. But in the 2024 SEC tournament final, they couldn’t erase a six-point fourth-quarter deficit by the time the game descended into a scrap, started by an exchange between Flau’jae Johnson and Ashlyn Watkins and escalated by a shove from Kamilla Cardoso.

Chmiel — the South Carolina assistant turned Bowling Green head coach — observed from afar, the day after his Falcons team wrapped up its regular season with a loss to Eastern Michigan.

“When you’re South Carolina, you’re the hunted,” Chmiel said. “And I do think that LSU came in with a big gun, so to speak, hunting and chasing us down. I think everybody is South Carolina’s rivalry right now, but I do think that LSU is pretty good at poking the bear.”

For the second time since 2021, LSU is undefeated ahead of a top-five matchup with South Carolina. The Gamecocks, on the other hand, already have a loss. In November, No. 1 UCLA handed them that defeat, which is now only the second regular-season game they’ve dropped over the past four seasons.

The Tigers had to survive a few close games — against Washington, Stanford, Tennessee and Vanderbilt — to stay unbeaten.

But South Carolina has played only one game all year that was decided by fewer than 10 points, and that contest was its season-opener against Michigan. Since then, it’s picked up six double-digit wins over ranked teams, setting up quite the challenge for Mulkey’s LSU team.

“Kim is the ultimate competitor,” Brock said. “I mean, she wants to beat you if you’re playing ping pong or if you’re playing checkers or if you’re playing marbles or whatever. So, if you’re gonna try to keep score and determine a winner, she’s gonna try to be at the top of that.”

Hogg expects Mulkey to project an air of calm confidence before the game tips off.

But maintaining that composure once it begins is easier said than done, especially given the way the last matchup ended and LSU’s prolonged losing skid, which will only grow longer if the Tigers fall short once again.

“I really think that Kim has a knack for getting a feel for the game,” Hogg said, “getting a feel for the crowd. She knows she’s played up there before, and it’s not an unknown at all, so I think she will try to keep them calm, cool and collected and not let anybody intimidate them.

“So, it’s going to be a real battle.”