Baylor women’s coach apologizes for saying fans should hit critics of school in the face

Baylor women’s basketball coach Kim Mulkey caused a bit of a stir over the weekend.

The Bears beat Texas Tech and clinched the Big 12 championship as Mulkey won her 500th game on Saturday. In the joyous aftermath, Mulkey told the crowd in Waco, Texas, that the football program’s sexual-assault scandal shouldn’t be all that people know about the university.

Her word choice was questionable: “If somebody around you and they ever say to you, ‘I will never send my daughter to Baylor,’ you knock them right in the face. Because these kids are on this campus, and I work here, and my daughter went to school here, and it is the damn best school in America.”

On Sunday, Mulkey apparently realized that calling on fans to assault people who were critical of the sexual-assault scandal might not have been the best idea.

“I hate that I used the remark about punching them in the face,” Mulkey told ESPN’s Mechelle Voepel. “That was not literal. I was trying to make a point, to be firm in what you are saying back at them. I’m not a violent person. I apologize for the very poor choice of words.”

Later in the story, Mulkey said she was trying to stand up for the women at Baylor.

“My point was, ‘Please don’t paint, with a broad brush, the women at Baylor,’ ” Mulkey told Voepel. “I didn’t think about what I was going to say. I looked at my players, and the little girls and the women who are cheering for them. And I spoke with a lot of emotion.”

Here is what she told the crowd: