SAN JOSE — Arizona basketball has enjoyed a half-century of near-continuous men’s hoops excellence. The Wildcats have had 40 20-win seasons since 1975, with five different coaches contributing to that number. The last losing season was in 1983–84.
One of the key elements of that sustained success has been a poach-proof array of coaches. If the university wanted to keep its guys, it has.
Fred Snowden, who took Arizona to the 1976 NCAA tournament Elite Eight, did not coach again after a decade at the school. Lute Olson, the program patriarch, retired in 2007 after 24 years and a national championship. Sean Miller was fired in 2012, but spent 12 seasons at Arizona and might have stayed forever if not for that pesky FBI investigation of corruption in the sport.
Now there is Tommy Lloyd, the best Wildcats coach since Olson, leading a wagon of a No. 1 seed into the West Regional final Saturday against Purdue. The fifth-year head coach may test the school’s retention abilities.
Lloyd is a naturally attractive candidate for the vacant North Carolina job. As he would be at Kansas if Bill Self retires, which is unclear at present. If either or both of those blueblood positions are offered, can Arizona keep him?
The 51-year-old is 147–35 at Arizona, a .807 winning percentage—if you win more than eight out of 10 games, you’re at the elite end of the sport’s bell curve. (John Wooden, for example, checks in at .804, albeit with a much larger sample size.) His worst season is 24–13, and he’s won more than 30 games in a year twice, including this one (35–2 and counting). The Tar Heels have never hired a coach with a national title already on his résumé, but they might have a chance at doing so in a couple of weeks.
Lloyd was asked about his name being mentioned in connection with North Carolina here Wednesday, and his answer did not exactly shut the door.
“I already have one of the best jobs in the country,” Lloyd said. “One thing we talk about in our program all the time, and I think I’ve gotten better at, and I think our team has been crushing it this year, is just the ability to have full focus and be present in the moment. …
“This team deserves my full focus, so there’s not one thing that is going to knock me off my path. I’m 100% focused on Arizona basketball and this program.”
Veteran observers of coach-speak during a job search can identify the potential warning signs there: no definitive statement of disinterest, and no commitment beyond the current season. That’s not proof positive that he wants the job, nor is there proof positive that he will be offered the job. But a hedge is a hedge—even one that might just be used in ongoing discussions with Arizona on a new contract.
Everything in Lloyd’s coaching background has been informed by stability. He spent 20 years with Mark Few at Gonzaga—a loyal assistant working for a loyal head coach who has resisted an untold number of overtures to go elsewhere for more than a quarter century. And Lloyd said here Friday that “Tucson’s got a special place in my heart.”
“This is my fifth year being a head coach, and I’ve only been a head coach at one place,” Lloyd said. “And if I want my players and my staff committed to development, I better be committed to developing myself, too. So I spend a lot of time trying to get better myself.”
What’s the best place for Tommy Lloyd to better himself? Selling Arizona becomes job one for athletic director Desireé Reed-Francois. She might be the second woman AD to claim a Division I men’s basketball national championship, after Virginia’s Carla Williams in 2019, but the status of the program beyond this dominant run will occupy her time until the situation resolves itself.
This isn’t Reed-Francois’s first job-search rodeo with Lloyd. Villanova had real interest in him last year, until Lloyd declined overtures and the school turned its focus to Kevin Willard.
“Tommy really loves Tucson and loves the community,” Reed-Francois tells Sports Illustrated. “We extended his contract last year, and the university had extended it the year before. He’s a vital part of our athletic department and the community, so he’s critically important and we look forward to many years ahead.”
The overall athletic trajectory in two years under Reed-Francois at Arizona is up. She inherited football coach Brent Brennan in 2024, who was hired about a month before her, and rode out a rugged, 4–8 first season with him—extensive staff changes ensued, but Brennan kept his job. The payoff for that patience was a 9–4 second season highlighted by a five-game winning streak to end the regular season. Quarterback Noah Fifita, a three-year starter, will be back for his senior season and should begin the year in Heisman Trophy consideration.
The baseball program broke through to the College World Series last year, its first appearance in Omaha since 2021. Softball has made consecutive NCAA tournament appearances and is currently ranked in the top 15 nationally. Women’s volleyball competed in the NCAA tournament last fall. The women’s triathlon team, while not an NCAA-sponsored championship sport, has produced consecutive national champions.
While winning is important, Reed-Francois and her department also were tasked with finding ways to cut costs. A deficit of $39 million was reduced to $5 million last year, with a goal of breaking even in 2026.
“We changed our budgeting model and it went to a needs-based budgeting model,” she says. “We made some hard decisions in terms of some cuts on our expenses, on our personnel, etc., and renegotiated contracts.”
In addition to belt tightening, Arizona leaned harder into revenue generation. Reed-Francois says her department is up 26% in philanthropic giving and done $87.7 million in naming rights in the last two quarters.
“As a business, we’re in a pretty good space,” she says. “We need to keep enhancing our NIL opportunities, capitalizing on our Fortune 500 companies in the area—but also smaller companies, midsize companies, because there’s opportunities for all of our student-athletes. And so finding creative ways that we can enhance the brand of the university, enhance the brand of our student athletes, and really provide resources that help move the whole department forward.
“Hey, we are aggressive. We are going to be aggressive in everything that we do, and we’re not going to apologize for it, but we’re going to be good stewards of our university resources, of our athletic department resources. We have to be. I’m not going to have a $300 million budget, so we have to see what do we genuinely need?”
It stands to reason that men’s basketball will be more expensive in the very near future, especially if a fight is brewing over Lloyd’s services. There could be another contract enhancement for him, probably new deals for staff, and the price of a competitive roster isn’t going down anytime soon.
Those are priorities. Basketball success is not optional at Arizona; it’s mandatory.
“That’s critically important,” Reed-Francois says. “Everybody loves basketball, and everybody loves Tommy.
“I appreciate his recruiting of talented young men who have great character and I appreciate the culture that he’s building. His X’s and O’s are unparalleled, but those young men that represent the University of Arizona, I’m just very proud of them. And I say that not only as an athletic director, but as a mother, too, who sees it from maybe a little bit of a different lens [Reed-Francois’s son, Jackson, is a senior walk-on on the team].”
Tommy Lloyd has the school’s first national championship since 1997 to chase. For now, that’s the obsession. Whenever and wherever that chase ends, it will be time to find out whether someone is going to successfully poach a sitting Arizona men’s basketball coach for the first time in anyone’s memory.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Arizona’s Stability Is About to Be Tested by Tommy Lloyd’s Men’s Hoops Success.
