That seems to be quite the little soap opera escalating over at LSU.

Oops. Sorry. It involves women’s basketball so maybe the modifier “little” diminishes the situation.

My bad.

The women’s game, of course, wants to be taken just as seriously as the men’s game, put on equal footing in all areas.

It does, that is, until controversy arises.

Then, apparently, the women’s game wants to be treated with kid gloves, like little innocent girls.

At least that’s the situation right now at LSU, where rock star head coach Kim Mulkey and NIL darling Angel “The Bayou Barbie” Reese are locked in … well, something or another.

No one outside the program seems sure what’s up.

It looks like a battle of two strong-willed egos clashing with neither wanting to blink, but there I go “interpreting” things, that Mulkey has ruled off limits to the media.

Mulkey is used to getting her way, but she doesn’t get to make those rules — not when her relative silence is the reason for much of the speculation, where even LSU players’ parents are bickering on social media like it was Little League jealously at work.

All we know is that Reese, an All-American who was the MVP of LSU’s national championship run last year, and arguably the face of the women’s game at the moment, was benched at halftime of the Kent State game on Nov. 14 and hasn’t been in the arena for the last two games.

“We hope to see her sooner than later,” Mulkey said after the first missed game Friday at Southeastern Louisiana.

By Monday, at home against Texas Southern, Reese had been upgraded to “Angel will be back sooner than later.”

Or maybe I’m interpreting too much there.

But there was more silence when Mulkey was asked if Reese would be making the team’s trip to the Cayman Islands this week for two more games — “If I knew I wouldn’t tell you,” Mulkey said.

Interpret that as you may.

“You always have to deal with locker room issues,” Mulkey said. “Sometimes you (media, and by extension, fans) know about them. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you want to know more than you’re entitled to know.”

Sorry, but that’s news. Those questions need to be asked.

Reese can shoot and score and rebound with the best of them, but is perhaps best known — for marketing purposes, at least — for her flamboyance and for unapologetically taunting Iowa star Caitlin Clark in the waning moments of last year’s national championship game.

The long eye lashes and heavy makeup don’t hurt. She certainly doesn’t seem allergic to the spotlight, an advertiser’s delight.

So she’s one of the true success stories of the new age of name image and likeness. USA Today estimates her various deals are worth $1.8 million, much of it Reebok.

Good for her.

But it comes at a price, men or women.

Her deal with Reebok was pushed through by the company’s president of basketball operations. You’ve probably heard of him — big fella named Shaquille O’Neal.

Well, go back 33 years or so at LSU, when O’Neal was the men’s college version of Reese, and try to imagine the brouhaha if Dale Brown had benched him at halftime of one game and Shaq wasn’t present for the next two.

Do you think Brown could have tried to pass it off as none of anybody’s business?

“These kids are like my children,” Mulkey explained after Monday night’s game. “And I’m not going to tell you what you don’t need to know. That’s just the way I address things.”

Few of us, of course have the burden of raising children closing in on $2 million salaries.

Of course, few of us make Mulkey’s 10-year, $36 million salary.

But Mulkey’s real family had a high-profile athlete right there at LSU a few years ago when her son Kramer Robertson was one of the stars of the Tigers’ high-profile baseball team.

If he’d been yanked in one game and wasn’t in the stadium for the next two, then-head coach Paul Mainieri could not have gotten away with no-commenting about it.

Here’s the deal: Reese can shoot and rebound and taunt with the best of them.

That alone, however, is not really worth millions of NIL dollars.

Her worth — like all athletes and entertainers — is that people (fans) care about it, sometimes obsessively.

It can be lucrative, for sure.

There’s a responsibility that comes with it — and, yes, there’s a certain loss of privacy that’s part of the trade-off for the payoff.

That’s what she signed up for.

Mulkey, too, for that matter.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com