The offseason is here, with all of Arizona’s sports done for 2023-24 season and the 2024-25 campaigns still a little ways away.
Which makes this a great time to step back and see how all of the Wildcats’ programs are doing, especially with the impending move to the Big 12 Conference.
Over the next few weeks we’ll take a look at each of the UA’s men’s and women’s athletic programs to see what shape they’re in and what prospects they have for the near future. We’ll break down each team and evaluate how it is performing under its current coaching staff, looking at the state of the program before he/she arrived and comparing it to now while also looking at the upcoming debut in the Big 12 and beyond.
Next up: Tommy Lloyd’s men’s basketball team
How it looked before
The Sean Miller era produced more than 300 wins over 12 seasons, as well as five Pac-12 regular season titles, three conference tourney championships and three trips to the Elite Eight. But it ended poorly, both on the court—no NCAA Tournament appearances the final three years—and off it, with the final Miller-coached team in 2020-21 self-imposing a postseason ban in anticipation of NCAA sanctions related to the FBI bribery scandal that led to assistant Book Richardson serving time.
A change was needed, and rather than try to hire away someone else’s coach the school opted to give a newcomer a shot at his first head coaching job. Tommy Lloyd had built a reputation as a great international recruiter for Gonzaga in his 20 seasons as an assistant under Mark Few, and the belief had always been that he’d succeed Few at some point.
Instead Lloyd came to Tucson, inheriting a roster that included three future NBA draft picks and a Euro-heavy roster that perfectly fit his up-tempo style. That resulted in one of the best seasons for a first-time coach in NCAA history, winning 33 games with both Pac-12 regular-season and conference tourney titles and the UA’s first trip to the Sweet 16 since 2017.
Where things stand now
Lloyd has won 88 games in his first three seasons, tied for the most in the first three years of a head coaching career at the Division I level. Arizona has won two Pac-12 regular-season titles, including the final one in the conference’s 100-plus year history, as well as two Pac-12 Tournament crowns, and made the NCAA Tournament each year.
But while the Wildcats have gotten to the Sweet 16 twice in three years under Lloyd, both teams it was knocked out in that round by a lower-seeded team. Throw in a shocking upset loss to No. 15 Princeton in the first round in 2023 and Lloyd has continued the program’s trend of getting beat by lower-seeded opponents, with the last six exits coming to teams seeded at least four spots lower than the UA.
The postseason disappointments can’t be ignored, but that Arizona has been in such a highly ranked position each year under Lloyd also must be acknowledged. Each year he’s managed to assemble a championship-caliber team, mixing transfers and prep recruits with returning talent, and the 2024-25 team figures to be no different with more than 45 percent of last season’s scoring combing back including Pac-12 Player of the Year Caleb Love.
What life in the Big 12 should look like
Arizona was the dominant team in the Pac-10/12 during its 45 years as a member, winning 18 regular-season titles and more than one-third of the conference tournament crowns. But now it moves into arguably the best overall league in college basketball, one that has produced three national champions since the last Pac-12 one (the Wildcats in 1997) including the last two before UConn’s current back-to-back titles.
Even with Texas and Oklahoma moving to the SEC, the Big 12 will feature 11 schools that were in the top 50 in KenPom.com’s final rankings. To illustrate how deep the league is, in 2023-24 its 11th-best team (Cincinnati) was rated higher than Pac-12 runner-up Washington State.
Kansas has won the league 19 times since 2000, while Houston took first in its debut season last year. Baylor won a national title in 2021, Texas Tech played for a championship in 2019 and in recent years Iowa State and Kansas State have made it to the Sweet 16 or deeper.
In other words: UA fans better prepare themselves for the high likelihood of several league losses.
One big question
Can Arizona compete in the top league in the country? As mentioned above, Arizona had no trouble navigating the Pac-12 and its travel partner scheduling format. There won’t be nearly as many back-to-back road games in the Big 12, but the overall level of competition (regardless of locale) is about to go way up.
Houston showed it could step right in, and fellow 2023-24 newcomers BYU, Cincinnati and UCF each showed flashes of competitiveness in that first season. Why not the Wildcats?