Arizona coach Tommy Lloyd 'not losing sleep' over long layoff, lack of rescheduled games

UA coach Tommy Lloyd says he and the Wildcats “haven’t lost any sleep” over playing just one game during the past three weeks because of COVID-related postponements and a lack of quick rescheduling.

During his first media availability since the Wildcats defeated Washington on Jan. 3, Lloyd said Wednesday he wasn’t aware of any gamesmanship affecting the Pac-12’s effort to reschedule games and that he had not been told if television priorities or the temporary banning of fans at the Los Angeles venues were factors.

Both UCLA and USC were back from COVID pauses last week and theoretically could have been scheduled to for makeup games against Arizona last weekend. But UCLA instead played Long Beach State last Thursday while USC kept Saturday open and was rescheduled to face Stanford on Tuesday.

“Neither (fans or television) were given to me as excuses and to be honest, I didn’t do a lot of digging,” Lloyd said. “It’s just one of those deals. You’re gonna feel like you’re doing something but you’re really not doing anything. So I’ve chosen to focus on what I think are constructive things.”

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None Arizona’s three postponed games -- at UCLA (originally scheduled for Dec. 3), at USC (Jan. 2) and at ASU (Jan. 8) -- have been rescheduled yet. But Lloyd said he does expect one of them to be played during the week of Monday, Jan. 24.

The Wildcats play at Cal on Jan. 23 and aren’t scheduled to play again until Jan. 29 at ASU, allowing the possibility of them stopping over in Los Angeles to play USC or UCLA on the way back from the Bay area – or giving them time to play ASU twice that week.

In any case, Lloyd said the missed ASU game at Tempe will be easy to make up because of the short travel time. He also noted that the Wildcats will hardly be alone in potentially facing multiple three game weeks ahead.

“To me, it looks like it's everybody's gonna have those issues,” Lloyd said. “In order to get a full conference season in you're going to have to make some sacrifices. The unfortunate thing is if you schedule games a couple of weeks out, you can't predict injuries, you can't predict stuff like that. So hopefully it'll all work out for everybody.”