Arizona and Indiana to meet for the first time ever in men's basketball

Surely, longtime Arizona Wildcats fans remember all those epic Lute Olson-Bobby Knight clashes when Arizona met Indiana on the hardwood.

Or the tense sibling showdowns between Sean and Archie Miller, when the brothers coached the Wildcats and Hoosiers, respectively, through the 2020-21 season.

Plus all the times over the years that the two storied college basketball programs came across each other in early season multi-team events, made-for-TV classics and, of course, the NCAA Tournament.

Well, no. No. And nope.

Never happened. None of it.

The Wildcats and Hoosiers, two of college basketball’s bluer bloods, have never played each other.

Believe it or not.

“That’s crazy,” said Arizona associate head coach Jack Murphy, a longtime Olson aide who graduated from UA.

It finally happens Saturday, when Arizona and Indiana will play the second half of a doubleheader in Las Vegas, a meeting arranged by an event broker and the Fox network.

UA coach Tommy Lloyd said he, too, was surprised that the two programs will finally be playing, though he also cited some history that probably had a lot to do with it.

Because nonconference matchups are often a product — or not of — relationships between the coaching staffs.

“I’m sure a little bit is probably just the luck of the draw in these NCAA Tournaments,” Lloyd said. “But the other part of it, I’m sure has to do with (that) Coach Olson competed against Indiana when he was at Iowa and I’m sure he probably didn’t want to play against Indiana anymore. So he probably had a lot to say for that, and he was here for a long time.

“And then you had Sean and Archie. They probably didn’t want to play against each other. So there just probably wasn’t very many opportunities for this game to happen for 40 years because of the dynamics of the coaching staffs on both programs.”

That’s why this one didn’t happen until Lloyd took over for Sean Miller in the spring of 2021. Promoter Brooks Downing matched the two programs together and Fox joined in, putting the first half of the doubleheader (UNLV vs Washington State) on Fox Sports 1, while “big Fox” — the network’s over-the-air channel — will plant the game in homes all over the country.

Fox has also assigned its marquee announcing duo, Gus Johnson and Bill Raftery, to handle the call, for a game that will begin in prime time in the Central and Eastern Time Zones (5:30 p.m. in Arizona).

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“That’s stuff that I don’t think about very often, but it’s where you want to be,” Lloyd said. “You want to put your program on the map. And in order to put your program on the map, you’ve got to get a lot of eyes on your program. Obviously, that generates interest and a little bit of buzz.”

At the same time, Lloyd and Indiana coach Mike Woodson have created some buzz of their own. Both took over their programs in spring of 2021, Lloyd elevating the Wildcats all the way into a No. 1 NCAA Tournament seed while Woodson steered the Hoosiers off the bubble and into a No. 12 seed.

While Arizona reached the Sweet 16 before losing to Houston, the Hoosiers beat Wyoming in the First Four before losing 82-53 to Saint Mary’s in the first round. While that may still have fallen short of historical Indiana-type expectations, the Hoosiers had won just 12 games in Archie Miller’s final season of 2020-21.

“I thought our season was very productive considering where we started when I came in as the coach,” Woodson told reporters in May, according to Blue Ribbon Yearbook. “We had a lot of barriers to knock down. We were trying to put a ballclub together where you had players that didn’t raise their hand to stay on board, and we had to do a lot of damage control to make sure that we kept the right pieces in place.”

Those pieces include a number of Archie Miller’s former players, most notably player of the year candidate Trayce Jackson-Davis, a multiskilled big man who just put together a triple double on Wednesday against Nebraska with 12 points, 11 rebounds and 10 assists — all while taking only six shots from the field.

“Each year he’s just gotten better and better, but the biggest thing is his unselfishness and his willingness to pass,” said Indiana guard Trey Galloway, another of the team’s veterans.

“That’s the big part, because he knows he can score, and obviously teams are trying to take that away now because he can score at such a high rate.”

That’s something Lloyd and the UA staff is fully aware of. Murphy said Jackson-Davis’ unselfishness is impressive, while Lloyd rattled off Jackson-Davis’ long list of attributes.

“He’s really impressive,” Lloyd said. “He’s got experience now. He’s got tons of talent, he’s got great hands and he’s got quick twitch. And he’s left handed, which is a challenge.”

While Lloyd said he didn’t want to “get caught up in a one-on-five version of this deal,” there’s little doubt that, Jackson-Davis and UA’s interior defense is expected to be the big matchup within the big matchup.

So, tune in. It’s happening this time, the kind of big-time matchup Woodson said he wanted to get the Hoosiers involved in upon taking over for Archie Miller in spring 2021.

“If you’ve got a good enough team that can compete at that level, why not give it a shot,” Woodson said earlier this week, when asked about scheduling North Carolina, Arizona and Kansas this season. “As a player and as a coach, I’ve never feared any team or any players, so I think we’re good enough to beat anybody in the country if we commit for 40 minutes on both ends of the floor.

“I think it’s good for basketball. It’s good for viewership, and it’s definitely good for our fan base. They love that. I don’t see anything wrong with it.”