Kim Mulkey didn’t have much time to ruminate over a season-ending loss to UCLA in the women’s Elite Eight.
The LSU women’s basketball coach told ESPN 104.5 FM on Tuesday that she turned her attention toward next year before she and her team’s flight from Spokane, Washington, even landed in Baton Rouge on Sunday.
“I’m on the phone, on the plane,” Mulkey told hosts T-Bob Hebert and Jacob Hester, “talking to portal kids. We’ve got our own kids that’ll get in the portal. It’s just free agency, and you just never know.”
Mulkey’s comments were part of a larger discussion about the transfer portal, the recruiting calendar, the state of college sports and when she may retire. She called the current state of affairs “tiring” and “broken.”
Now, athletes can transfer between schools an unlimited number of times without losing any eligibility.
For both men’s and women’s college basketball players, the transfer portal opened March 24 — right in between the second round of the NCAA Tournament and the Sweet 16. That timing forces coaches of teams still alive in the postseason to juggle the needs to both prepare for do-or-die games and recruit players from the portal.
Those teams, Mulkey said, are almost incentivized to lose early in the tournament. The ones who reach the second weekend risk falling behind in recruiting.
“I don’t have an answer,” Mulkey said. “I just know that my generation of coaches … they’re getting out. This is now what it’s supposed to be like. They’re not opposed to money. They’re not opposed to young people making all that they can. It’s just that the transfer portal is not healthy in their eyes.”
In that breath, Mulkey mentioned Nick Saban, the legendary former LSU and Alabama football coach who retired after the 2023 season. After he stepped down, Saban, 73, told ESPN that he was not ending his coaching career because the sport had become too hard to manage, though he did say that “everybody is frustrated about it.”
