Flau'jae Johnson is set to walk across the graduation stage Saturday in Baton Rouge, just months after beginning her rookie season in the WNBA. She will return to the Pete Maravich Assembly Center to receive her degree from LSU, with family members, friends, coaches and former teammates expected to be there.
Johnson is earning her college degree in interdisciplinary studies and has minors in business administration, communications studies and entrepreneurship. Her graduation adds another milestone to a week that already marked the start of her pro career, after she was selected eighth overall by the Golden State Valkyries on draft night and later traded to the Seattle Storm.
That trip back to campus lands after a four-year LSU career that helped define one of the program’s most productive recent runs. Johnson played and started in all 35 games LSU played, finished as the team’s second-leading scorer and averaged 14.2 points, 4.2 rebounds, 2.5 assists and 1.3 steals per contest. She scored in double digits 27 times and had nine games with 20-plus points.
Her final season also put her among a small group nationally, as she finished her college career as one of 14 active players in the 2025-26 season to have 2,000-plus points. The honors kept coming, too: Third Team All-America recognition from the and USBWA, a finalist spot for the Ann Meyers Drysdale Award and a second straight All-SEC First Team selection.
For LSU, Johnson’s graduation is another marker of how often the program has turned out WNBA talent under Coach Kim Mulkey. She became the 25th LSU player selected in the WNBA Draft, the seventh since Mulkey took over the program and the 26th player to be drafted with Mulkey as their college head coach. LSU has now had a player selected in the WNBA Draft five years in a row.
The setting gives Saturday a fitting symmetry. Johnson will celebrate a degree in the building where she spent four seasons building her LSU résumé, then head back to a rookie season that has already begun. It is the kind of clean transition few college athletes get: one chapter closing in the arena where it started, and the next already underway in the league where the work now continues.
