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Baylor’s Kim Mulkey was out of line with her comments on Saturday

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Today was Senior Day for Baylor’s women’s team, and legendary head coach Kim Mulkey took that as an opportunity to rail against people that have spoken and written negatively about the university in the wake of a scandal involving an alleged 52 sexual assaults by football players over a four-year period.

“If somebody’s around you and they ever say, ‘I will never send my daughter to Baylor,’ you knock them right in the face,” Mulkey said (my emphasis added). “Because these kids are on this campus. I work here. My daughter went to school here. And it’s the best damn school in America.”

She ended that speech by dropping the mic she was speaking into:

But that wasn’t the end of it.

It got worse.

“I’m tired of hearing it. I’m tired of people talking about it on a national scale that don’t know what they’re talking about,” Mulkey said in a press conference after the game. “If they didn’t sit in those meetings and they weren’t a part of the investigation, you’re repeating things that you’ve heard. It’s over. It’s done.”

Here’s the worst part: “I work here every day. I’m in the know. And I’m tired of hearing it. The problems that we have at Baylor are no different than the problems at any other school in America. Period. Move on. Find another story to write.”

Kim, you cannot do this.

People that work for Baylor athletic department cannot complain about the criticism they get, the negative publicity they get, when their employer was party to an alleged 52 sexual assaults over a four-year period, according to a lawsuit filed against Baylor last year.

And the people in that athletic department cannot claim that their problems “are no different than the problems at any other school in America” when those 52 alleged assaults were committed by 31 different players and only two of them were dismissed from the program. And they cannot make those claims when their problems cost the football coach, the school president, the school’s athletic director and the school’s Title IX coordinator their jobs.

And the people that work in that athletic department damn sure cannot tell people that they are wrong and claim that “I work here, I’m in the know” when said lawsuit alleges that at least one victim was paid off with free tuition and that others were “encouraged by Baylor employees to leave school without further investigation.” The people that worked there, that were in the know, were the ones that allowed this to happen.

I can understand where Mulkey’s frustration lies.

She’s coaching a women’s team at a school that has spent the better part of two years in the news for being unable and unwilling to protect their women. There is no doubt that hurts recruiting. Hell, one of the most enticing rumors of this year’s coaching carousel is that Scott Drew is going to try and parlay this season into a different job because of the stench of the Baylor brand.

So I get it.

I’d be frustrated, too.

But the idea that it is any way is the media’s fault is ridiculous. If it didn’t become a massive, national story, Art Briles would probably still be coaching a program that didn’t care about fielding 31 players with a sexual assault allegation to their name.