As two of the top up-and-coming Western coaches in college basketball over the past two decades, Tommy Lloyd and Jeff Linder hit it off pretty well.
“I’ve got a lot of respect for him and his basketball acumen,” said Linder, now Wyoming’s head coach. “For 20 years we’ve shared a lot of a lot of basketball thoughts and theories.”
They became friends.
Linder launched from assistant coaching jobs at Weber State, San Francisco and Boise State into the head coaching job at Northern Colorado in 2016-17, where his first Bears team put up a stubborn effort in a 16-point loss to the Wildcats at McKale Center. He took over the Wyoming program in March 2020.
Meanwhile, Lloyd moved up at Gonzaga, becoming Mark Few’s top assistant and helping build the Zags into a perennial power. Arizona hired him away in April, and it didn’t take long after that for Lloyd to identify one problem with the schedule he inherited.
Wyoming. Dec. 8. McKale Center.
Linder’s team.
“The one thing about this profession, you get a lot of acquaintances but you don’t have a lot of friends,” Linder said. “Usually you don’t want to play those guys, and Tommy being one of those, when he got the job, I got a phone call pretty quickly.
“He said, ‘Hey, man, are we really going to play this game?’ I said, ‘The problem is I’ve got my schedule done, and it’s already hard for me to get games. As much as I don’t want to play against you, I also don’t want to try to rearrange my schedule, because that just becomes a nightmare.’”
It wasn’t about the money, the way Linder described it. Wyoming will get a $90,000 payment from Arizona for Thursday’s game for the one-time appearance. But unlike when Linder was at Northern Colorado, saying he needed to collect $300,000 each season in “buy game” proceeds to help finance the Bears’ entire athletic department, Wyoming has the resources to avoid such a mandate.
What the Cowboys don’t have is anybody who actually wants to go to Laramie to play them.
So last month, Wyoming ventured to Seattle to play Washington, beating the Huskies 77-72 in overtime, then went to Phoenix and beat Grand Canyon 68-61 before a capacity crowd of about 7,000. They even went to Cal State Fullerton for another road game a week after that.
“It’s hard to schedule at Wyoming. It’s hard,” Linder said. “You’re not gonna get Arizona to come play at Wyoming. You’re not gonna get Washington to come play at Wyoming. As much as people think that should happen, that will not happen.
“So for us to be able to go to Washington and do what we did, and Grand Canyon and Cal State Fullerton — I think that win over the course of the long run will be a pretty good one as well.”
While the undefeated Cowboys didn’t receive a single vote in the Associated Press Top 25 poll this week, they were rewarded for their efforts by picking up the No. 12 slot in the NCAA’s first NET rating on Monday. The Cowboys have since moved up to No. 9 (Arizona is No. 3).
Meanwhile, in an era where many high-major teams play mostly at home and in neutral-site multi-team events during the early part of the season, the Cowboys have also picked up some valuable road game experiences — especially in front of GCU’s ever-spirited home crowd.
“A lot of those other teams in the Top 50, they haven’t gone on the road and played,” Linder said. “So for us to go on the road and have three true road wins at tough places to play … I mean, Grand Canyon is tough as a place to place any place in the country, and it’s never easy going in and playing the Pac-12 teams.”
Among the “fans” in that GCU crowd was none other than Lloyd, who was on hand to watch his son, Liam, play for the Antelopes — and maybe keep an eye on the Cowboys.
After the Wildcats beat Oregon State 90-65 on Sunday, Lloyd indicated Linder’s team might be as good as anyone the Wildcats have faced so far.
“Jeff’s a good friend of mine, he does a great job and he’s gonna build a successful program there, there’s no doubt,” Lloyd said. “They’re off to a great start.”
Jeff Linder’s Wyoming team has already won true road games in Seattle, Phoenix and Fullerton, California.
At 8-0 with three true road wins, the Cowboys are one of the Mountain West Conference’s scariest teams so far this season. The Cowboys boast a 6-foot-7-inch “point forward” in Hunter Maldonado, a constant double-double threat in center Graham Ike and a pair of steady 3-point threats in Drake Jeffries and Xavier DuSell.
UA assistant coach Riccardo Fois said Wyoming’s combination of shooters and efficient big men, plus the Cowboys’ slow pace, makes them one of the most unique teams in the country.
“They have a lot of capable 3-point shooters, and they have two guys who demand so much attention (inside) that those guys end up getting open 3s,” Fois said.
All those threats should help the Wildcats stay focused during what could be something of a trap game, sandwiched between a conference road win at Oregon State and a Saturday showdown at an Illinois team that won at Iowa on Monday.
But Lloyd said he isn’t concerned about the Wildcats’ motivation at this point, with the 7-0 Wildcats having shown consistent effort all season so far.
“I think these guys are excited to play, and we’re really emphasizing that,” Lloyd said. “We always want to be the most excited team to play. That’s the standard and expectation.”
Maybe deep down, underneath that layer of respect and friendship, the two coaches are excited, too.
After all, only 12 teams remained undefeated entering Tuesday’s games, and Tommy Lloyd and Jeff Linder will each bring one of them into McKale Center on Wednesday.
“They’ve been two of the best assistant coaches in the country for years, so it will be a really interesting chess game,” Fois said. “It’s gonna be a great game.”
