Baylor Lady Bears beat Winthrop by 108?
There really isn't the right verbiage to fully encapsulate Baylor women's basketball team's 140-32 win over Winthrop. Fresh off a 90-24 execution of Texas State, Lady Bears' coach Kim Mulkey's insatiable thirst for blood clearly wasn't quenched when Baylor welcomed Winthrop to Waco. Mulkey displayed the ruthlessness of a Waffen SS commander as her team remorselessly slaughtered the 1-9 Eagles by 108. I've heard of war crimes that are more humane than a 108 point margin of victory. Which begs the question - why did Mulkey and co. feel the need to comprehensibly murder, and then disfigure, their obviously inferior opponent? To destroy a team by 100 points means that one has to completely dehumanize their opponents. In almost every game, in every sport, when a scoreline approaches an embarrassing amount, the players on the winning team will begin to a have a conscience about what they're doing. At a certain point we, as human beings, begin to feel sympathy for a team getting blown out...but not the Baylor Lady Bears. There wasn't one shred of morality displayed on the court in Waco, Texas that night. There was no 'calling off the dogs' or 'passing the ball around' as the Lady Bears continued to shoot, and hit, 3 pointers late into the 4th quarter. Their defense also refused to relent as they held Winthrop scoreless... 0..zilch...nada, in the 4th quarter. In fact, if Baylor didn't score another point after the first quarter, if they just let the shot clock expire on every single possession for the last 3 quarters of the game, they still would've won 38-32.
You can't completely blame Baylor for the absurdity of this result, however. Winthrop couldn't have shown less heart in the defeat, and if I was head coach Kevin Cook, I would be more upset with my players than Mulkey and Baylor. At a certain point, you need to have some respect for yourself. Clearly the game was out of hand after the first quarter when the Eagles trailed 38-6, but you still need to do everything humanly possible to avoid losing by 100+. This may include some controversial tactics, and if I was coach Cook I would've gooned it up before half time. If your opponent is willing to run the score up by over 100 points you have every right to play dirty. I would've demanded elbows, boob punching, hair pulling....literally anything in the book. I don't even think the refs would call anything at that point. Even if they did, at least you sent some kind of message. Losing by 100 is the single most disrespectful thing I can imagine in basketball. You need to keep some level of pride in a blowout, because there is no dignity in playing a clean game and still getting steam rolled like that.
Kim Mulkey has clearly issued a warning to the rest of the women's college basketball community that there will be now prisoners taken this year. As for Winthrop, if I was coach Cook or the Athletic Director, I would've cancelled the season right there in the locker room after the game, for, as Tony Perkis famously declared, "Lack of hustle."
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