.jpg)
1 hour ago
1
The way he tells the story, Tommy Lloyd literally looked himself in the mirror for the conversation of a lifetime. He had been presented an opportunity no one who could accurately be described as a career assistant might have anticipated: head coach at the University of Arizona. And such a position never had been the plan.
No, the plan was one particular position, and there was no rush to get there.
“I ended up in such a stable situation at Gonzaga,” Lloyd told The Sporting News. “I honestly thought I was Bill Guthridge. I thought I was going to be Dean Smith’s loyal guy for all those years, and then Coach Smith is going to retire and Guthridge takes it over for a few years. I thought that was my playbook, and I was totally OK with it.”
Lloyd was Mark Few’s assistant for 20 years at Gonzaga, and he was on board for as many more as the Zags would have him. If the boss coached until age 70, say, Lloyd would be 58 then and could have a nice tenure as Few’s successor, a little like Guthridge taking North Carolina to two Final Fours in three years following Smith’s retirement.
And then Arizona called.
And now Lloyd is not replacing Few, but joining him as one of the great coaches to win The Sporting News Coach of the Year award. Lloyd is our selection for the 2025-26 season.
MORE: Sporting News 2026 College Basketball All-America team
“I honestly was probably more ready than I knew,” Lloyd said, recalling his Arizona origin story. “I didn’t come down here and assume I was going to crush it, by any stretch. I thought, OK, wow, what an opportunity! And I remember looking in the mirror before I took the job, and I said to myself: If you turn down Arizona, you don’t believe in yourself.
“And knowing that it’s going to be an incredible challenge. OK, it would be a challenge if I took the head coaching job at Fresno State.”
The Big 12 was so loaded with elite talent and NCAA title contenders Lloyd called it “a monster.” The Sporting News named six Big 12 players to its 15-player All-America team. The March Madness selection committee placed five of its teams within the top 16 at its annual late-February bracket preview. And in that crucible, Arizona lost only twice in league play by a combined five points. Against outside competition in non-league games, the Wildcats were unbeaten and took out KenPom top-30 teams Florida, Connecticut, Alabama and UCLA.
The official Big 12 poll of league coaches predicted Arizona to finish No. 4 in the league. They won it by two games. The preseason national AP poll placed the Wildcats at No. 13. They were No. 2 at the close of the regular season, with four first-place votes, and stand as a lock to earn a No. 1 NCAA Tournament seed.
“We had a good feeling about it all along, and we weren’t trying to look for extra attention or get extra eyes on it. We wanted to go out and prove it,” Lloyd told SN. “These guys did that.”
MORE: SN's latest March Madness bracket forecast
Few won The Sporting News Coach of the Year award in the 2016-17 season, when Lloyd was a significant component of the Zags’ first-ever run to the Final Four and NCAA Championship game as a primary recruiter and connection to such overseas talents as Przemek Karnowski and Killian Tillie.
Now, Lloyd joins his good friend and former boss in an esteemed fraternity that opened in 1964 and has admitted such legends as John Wooden, John Thompson, Jim Calhoun, Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams.
Five years into his time at Arizona, Lloyd has constructed the best career start of any Division I men’s head coach. His 140 victories are the most ever by a coach in his first five seasons, one more to this point than Brad Stevens achieved at Butler.
Arizona ranks in the top 10 in both offensive and defensive efficiency, in the top 15 in points scored and top 50 in points allowed. There is no player averaging even 16 points but seven delivering at least 9 points per game.
In an era of college sports redefined by NIL payments and instant eligibility for transfers, the Wildcats have a team Lloyd contends “is the same Arizona would have had 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago. The way it was built – you have some experienced guys that are proven winners and knew what it meant to play for the University of Arizona and loved Tucson, and you had some really talented young guys that are probably going to have a great chance to have careers beyond college. I think that’s a formula Arizona had mastered for a long time, and I feel like we kind of captured that this year.”
There are transfers, to be sure. All-America point guard Jaden Bradley spent one year at Alabama, then was looking for something new and found himself in the desert. Tobe Awaka was a reserve on an Elite Eight team at Tennessee and has become a foundational player for the Wildcats, even while coming off the bench. Wing Anthony Dell’Orso transferred up from Campbell, where he averaged 19.5 points in his second season with the Camels.
Jay Biggerstaff-Imagn Images
There have been questions about the potential fragility of a team that starts three freshmen. But the nature of those freshmen has repelled that doubt. Shooting guard Brayden Burries quietly assumed the role of primary offensive option. Massive power forward Koa Peat provides a stability to the frontcourt at both ends. Wing Ivan Kharchenkov is the sort of glue guy a first-year player rarely is fashioned to be, but he suits the role ideally.
It is a team so intent on achieving together that the solution for an overabundance of potential frontcourt starters was resolved by one player – Awaka, the most experienced – volunteering to be the guy who came off the bench.
Awaka has played 137 career games and started all of last season, but the recruitment of McDonald’s All-American Koa Peat and return from injury of 7-2 Motiejus Krivas presented the Wildcats with this champagne problem: Two big-man spots, three big men.
“Tobe came to us -- he’s such a good guy – and he said to one of our assistant coaches, Jack Murphy, ‘Who do you think Coach will start?’ Jack said, ‘I don’t really know; we haven’t talked about it yet,’ ” Lloyd told SN. “And Tobe said, ‘Well, if you want my opinion, I think you guys should start Krivas and Koa Peat.
“His reasoning was, ‘Krivas is recovering from an injury and worked really hard to come back, and I think it would be good for his confidence to start. And Koa is a big-time recruit who’s never not started, so he might not know how to acclimate to in that role. Whereas I’ve done it before. For me, it doesn’t matter, as long as I know I’m going to be a contributor.’ ”
DECOURCY: Why expanding the NCAA field is pointless
Awaka led the Wildcats in rebounding at 9.5 per game though he averaged 21 minutes. He was named the Big 12 Sixth Man of the Year. Peat has averaged 10 points and 5.3 rebounds and shot .548 from the field. Krivas is near a double-double average, at 10.8 points and 8.2 rebounds. It worked because Awaka was willing to sacrifice and his coaches realized he was onto something.
“Resource-wise, we are getting to a place that I think we will be resourced in the upper echelon of college basketball,” Lloyd said. “We haven’t been up until this point. We don’t need to get into numbers or anything, but we have been judicious, and we’ve been fortunate we made a lot of good decisions on people we’ve taken, and how we handle it on a day-to-day basis.
“We don’t want to be the highest bidder. We want kids to have other reasons to want to come here, so there is still kind of that old college feeling, where you have a connection to the university or the area or they want to play for the coaching staff. Whatever it is. You always want something else to be attached to them coming. And once they’re here, we literally treat it like college basketball’s always been. I’m not coaching any different now than I was 20 years ago. Hopefully I’ve gotten better.”
A short while after he was hired at Arizona, Lloyd had the chance to sit down with the university president who approved his hiring. Robert Robbins was a cardio-thoracic surgeon at Stanford University Hospital before entering academia. Lloyd expressed his appreciation for the administration taking a risk on a coach whose career record was 0-0.
“He looked at me and was like, ‘What, are you crazy?’” Lloyd recalled. “He said, ‘The best and most talented people I ever worked with were my residents when I was a heart surgeon at Stanford. And so why would it be any different for coaching? I believe in you; you’ve been well-schooled, you were at a program that had incredible values. And I just ask you to bring that stuff down here.’ ”
Lloyd brought Gonzaga concepts and ideals to Tucson, and those international recruiting connections, but he felt it was necessary to close the door entirely on the Zags.
“In my first couple years, I didn’t watch Gonzaga at all. And it wasn’t anything weird, but I wanted to be intentional and not watching them play and comparing ourselves to them,” Lloyd said. “I didn’t want to think like, ‘Oh, OK, look at that play they just ran. I better put that in.’ I wanted Arizona basketball, once we started what we were going to do, to evolve naturally from within. I didn’t want it to be influenced by me comparing it to something else that I had left.”
It’s our job to compare Lloyd’s work to that done by others. This isn’t the job he he might have expected to hold at this point in his career, but for the 2025-26 season, no one has done the college basketball head coaching thing any better.
More college basketball news:
- Darryn Peterson situation not alarming to NBA teams, ESPN insider says
- AJ Dybantsa makes college basketball history never done by NBA stars
- John Calipari says college athletics is broken — Here’s his plan to fix it
- Mike Krzyzewski fights against NCAA Tournament expansion
- Where Arkansas Darius Acuff Jr. ranks among John Calipari's best NBA guards
English (US)