After the No. 4 Baylor women's basketball team beat Texas Tech to clinch the Big 12 regular-season championship on Saturday, Bears coach Kim Mulkey sounded off on the scrutiny the university has been under for its handling of incidents of sexual assault involving student-athletes.
Speaking to the Waco crowd from center court after the Lady Bears won their seventh straight conference title, Mulkey said, "If somebody around and they ever say, 'I will never send my daughter to Baylor,' you knock them right in the face. Because these kids [pointing to her team] are on this campus. I work here. My daughter went to school here, and it's the damn best school in America."
In her postgame news conference, Mulkey elaborated on her feelings about the university and the national media's attention paid to the investigation and its fallout.
"I'm just tired of hearing it," she said. "I'm tired of people talking on a national scale that don't know what they're talking about. 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. And this is a great institution, and I would send my daughter here and I'd pay for anybody else's daughter to come here. I work here every day. I'm in the know.
"And I'm tired of hearing it. This is a great institution. The problems we have at Baylor are no different than the problems at any other school in America. Period. Move on, find another story to write."
In May 2016, Philadelphia law firm Pepper Hamilton reviewed Baylor's handling of sexual assaults. After receiving the review, the school's board of regents fired football coach Art Briles, suspended athletic director Ian McCaw and demoted President Kenneth Starr to chancellor; McCaw and Starr would later resign.
Since then, several prominent alumni and donors, and even the school's former Title IX coordinator, have asked for further investigation into how other Baylor employees -- most notably senior administrators and some members of the board of regents -- handled reports of sexual assaults and compliance with Title IX, the federal law that requires schools to investigate sexual assault complaints.