Arizona Wildcats basketball, football games to overlap tonight

Die-hard Wildcats fans without two television screens handy might need to fire up the WatchESPN or Fox Sports Go apps tonight.

By winning Thursday’s game, the Wildcats will play at 8:30 p.m. Arizona time on Friday – just when the football Wildcats should be into the second quarter of their season finale against ASU.

That could mean fewer UA fans show up in Las Vegas, except those who live locally or cruise up from Southern California, but  Ryan Reynolds, UA’s director of basketball operations, is OK with that.

“It puts us in a tough spot,” Reynolds said. “But we need people to go to the football game.”

The conflict is also forcing UA play-by-play announcer Brian Jeffries to skip one of only a handful of Wildcat basketball games he hasn’t been able to work since 1987.

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“I’ve probably only missed a dozen or so,” Jeffries said. “But I’ve never missed a football game.”

The end of the football season often poses conflicts for Jeffries, but usually he can work it out, even calling both the New Mexico Bowl and a UA-Florida basketball game at McKale in 2012 thanks to a private jet that shuttled him from Albuquerque to Tucson.

The good news for UA is that Ryan Radtke, a former Tucson sports radio voice, will be in Las Vegas in his role as Nevada’s football play-by-play man. So he’ll cover for Jeffries on Friday while working his day job when the Wolf Pack face UNLV on Saturday.

For those listening on radio, the UA basketball game will be carried on 1400 AM, while the football game will be on 1290 AM.