With Pac-12's impending breakup, Arizona-UCLA rivalry to take at least one season off

Someday, there may be another warm desert winter Saturday afternoon where fans pack into McKale Center to experience another heated chapter in what has become arguably the West’s top college basketball rivalry.

But UCLA and Arizona won’t be playing with the Pac-12 title on the line, as they have so many times before. They won’t be playing in January or February, with tension building over conference standings and NCAA Tournament bracket projections.

And, actually, they probably won’t be playing each other anytime soon at all, after the Pac-12 splits up following this season.

Arizona’s nonconference schedule is already full of high-major games for next season, meaning the Wildcats won’t play the Bruins until at least 2025-26, and there are not yet any future games agreed on or contracted to between them.

So, for now, maybe for a couple of years, maybe for a long time, this is it: Saturday’s game at McKale, then a Thursday night matchup during the last week of the regular season in Los Angeles and, possibly, a final chance to meet in Las Vegas during the last Pac-12 Tournament as everyone knows it.

There are caveats to Saturday’s showdown. UCLA is only 8-10, loaded with young talent that has only started to come together in victories over its past two games. The Pac-12 title isn’t on the line, though the No. 12-ranked Wildcats need another home win to stay firmly in the conference race, and the Bruins need to win if they want to really turn a corner and even begin to think about the NCAA Tournament.

But, in a historical sense, none of that really matters. It’s UCLA versus Arizona.

The Wildcats already sold out the game this week despite charging $79 for the cheapest seats in McKale, and ESPN2 will carry it to those who won’t be on hand.

The Pac-12 even ripped up its schedule formula to make it happen, taking the Bruins away from a planned game at Colorado and planting them at McKale instead when UCLA initially wasn’t scheduled to play in Tucson this season.

“Arizona and UCLA, for a long time, almost my whole lifetime, have been the two of the top programs, if not the two top programs out West,” UA associate head coach Jack Murphy says. “Anytime they play, it’s going to be a big game.”

That’s true for Murphy even though he grew up in Las Vegas, following the Jerry Tarkanian-era teams that were also once a big rival of Arizona’s. And it’s even true of UCLA center Adem Bona, who spent his early childhood years in Nigeria, moved to Turkey as a 13-year-old and therefore had zero reason to watch UCLA-Arizona games until he joined the Bruins last season.

“It’s gonna be big,” Bona said Wednesday, after UCLA beat ASU 68-66.

So it might seem easy, almost a no-brainer, to somehow keep the rivalry going even after UCLA bolts for the Big Ten and UA takes off for the Big 12 next season.

Their conferences will have changed, but the geography will have not. And maybe flying to all their suddenly distant conference games starting next season will encourage UA and UCLA to seek nonconference competition closer to home.

“If we can play a home-and-home (series of games) with an hour flight, that’s pretty appealing,” UA coach Tommy Lloyd said at Pac-12’s preseason media day last October.

At that time, both Lloyd and UCLA coach Mick Cronin expressed plenty of interest in continuing to play each other. In fact, when a Los Angeles reporter asked Lloyd if he was “open to it,” he answered sharply.

“No, no, no, no — we’re gonna do it,” Lloyd said. “More than open to it. One hundred percent.”

But, considering the logistics of modern-day high-major basketball scheduling, it’s not so simple.

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For one thing, Lloyd’s phone call isn’t the only one Cronin has taken. The UCLA coach said at Pac-12 media day he’s had plenty of other coaches asking if they could start a home-and-home series with the Bruins, too.

“I don’t think he understands that,” Cronin said of Lloyd. “But I’m not against it. We’re discussing it.”

A major issue, Cronin said, is that he’s bracing for up to a 22- or 23-game commitment as a member of the Big Ten, including 20 conference games and interconference “challenge” games the Bruins may be asked to play. Arizona may face a similar commitment as a member of the Big 12.

Then there are the multi-team events, or MTEs. Playing in those allows teams to schedule an extra regular-season game, up to 31 total, but they typically soak up two or three games each.

So, for teams playing in an MTE plus another neutral site game or two and a 20-game conference schedule, those 31 games can quickly get down to just a handful of nonconference games.

And high-major coaches overwhelmingly use those remaining “buy” or “guarantee” games to pay lower-rated opponents to drop by for one-time appearances at their place, giving them a break between big games and/or a chance to work out their rotations and schemes.

In Arizona’s case, the 2024-25 nonconference schedule looks like this: a home game against Duke, a road game at Wisconsin, a semi-neutral with Alabama in Birmingham and probably a semi-neutral with Purdue in Las Vegas — plus a trip to the Bahamas to play in the three-game Battle 4 Atlantis.

The math: Thirty-one minus seven nonconference games minus 20 Big 12 games equals … no room for UCLA.

“We only have to get four more games right now, and they’re gonna be buy games,” UA special assistant TJ Benson, who coordinates UA’s schedules, said in late October. “I’ve got guys that are trying to talk to me about scheduling for next year and the following year, and I’m like, ‘For 24(-25), we’re done in terms of high-level games.”

Maybe that’s just as well. Both Lloyd and Cronin talked about wanting to adjust to their new conference schedules, which promise adjustments in travel and competition, forcing them to possibly make one-game trips to faraway college towns instead of the tidy two-game road weekends teams commonly play in the Pac-12.

“We need to sit down and hammer out exactly what it’s gonna look like,” Lloyd said of his early discussions with Cronin. “There’s so much so much change going on.”

Fans might need to adjust, too. Benson said it might make sense to take a break from the UCLA-Arizona rivalry anyway at least for a year, to make it more special when it returns.

But Benson said he definitely wanted to start it up in 2025-26 or beyond, and Lloyd was adamant about it.

Because to Lloyd, there will be another day like Saturday. Maybe many more.

They’ll just be different.

“It’s not gonna be the last time Arizona and UCLA play,” Lloyd said Wednesday after UA beat USC. “It might be as members of the Pac-12, but it won’t be the last time.

“I don’t know exactly how it’s gonna happen. But we’re gonna play UCLA for sure, and I want to play UCLA.”