The truth, the whole truth, half-truths, shades of the truth and other items admissible as sports news:
– ITEM I: When former UA Final Four basketball player Harvey Mason, now CEO of the Grammys, wrote “Wild About the Cats” in 1988, one of his most catchy lines was “Tucson, Arizona, is a basketball town.”
Now, 37 years later, Mason’s words go beyond the UA’s 1988 Final Four team. When the NJCAA Division II basketball championships begin this week, Pima College’s men’s team will be ranked No. 1 and the Aztecs’ women’s team No. 6. That’s no longer breaking news. The teams of Brian Peabody and Todd Holthaus have been elite programs since Holthaus was hired off the Arizona coaching staff in 2007.
This will be PCC’s 10th season in the NJCAA women’s championships and its fourth year in the men’s championships. Both have finished as high as No. 2. Beyond that, only three Division II junior colleges have more combined men’s and women’s berths in the NJCAA championships than Pima: Kirkwood Community College of Iowa, 24 combined tournaments; Johnson County Community College of Overland Park, Kansas, 23 combined berths; Parkland College of Champaign, Ill., 18 berths.
Peabody and Holthaus, who have combined to win 553 games at Pima College, are looking to win it all for the first time. The last team from the ACCAC to win the NJCAA basketball championship was the Central Arizona women’s team in 2009.
Pima forward Kaelum Brown (15) puts pressure on the shot attempt by Chandler-Gilbert guard Cohen Aldridge (21) in the first half of the Region I, Division II playoff final in Tucson on March 7, 2025.
Only two with basketball connections to Tucson have won an NJCAA championship: former Arizona head coach Bruce Larson, 1961-72, coached Weber State to the 1959 NJCAA championship. And guard Puntus Wilson, the lead recruit of UA basketball coach Ben Lindsey‘s ill-fated 4-24 team of 1982-83, was the MVP of the 1982 NJCAA finals, playing for Midland College of Texas.
– ITEM II: The differences between the athletic departments at Arizona and ASU go far beyond the UA’s 40-year rule over the Sun Devils men’s basketball team. The No. 1 difference is money, even though the athletic department revenues of Arizona and ASU are almost identical.
In a head-turning move, ASU last week announced it has absorbed its athletic department’s budget into the broader campus budget, effectively ending the athletic department’s status as a separate auxiliary enterprise. ASU’s athletics debt stood at $304 million in fiscal year 2024.
Jamie Pollard, athletic director at Big 12 rival Iowa State, spoke for all Big 12 schools last week when he said, “It’s not going to get any easier to remain competitive when schools you compete with can do this.”
Sports economist Victor Matheson of the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts told a Phoenix reporter: “All they’ve done is waved a magic wand, in this case an accountant’s pen, and they ‘balanced the budget.’”
By comparison, the UA, with no magic wand, created a “competitive fee” of $50 and $25 per season ticket holder to help minimize its athletic debt.
– ITEM III: Staging the Big 12 men’s and women’s basketball tournaments at the T-Mobile Center in Kansas City through 2031 might not be a go-to location for fans in, say, Tucson, Salt Lake City and from far-away conference members in West Virginia and Orlando, Florida.
Predictably, travel is an issue in every Big 12 conference tournament.
Two weeks ago, for example, the Big 12 swimming championships were held in Federal Way, Washington, near Seattle, of all places. No kidding.
Most of the other Big 12 conference championship venues have a heavy Texas/Oklahoma twist: the baseball title will be decided at Globe Life Field near Dallas; the cross country, tennis and track championships will be held at Baylor; the softball championship is in Oklahoma City, and the golf championships will be staged in Tulsa.
Arizona should someday soon be able to host the Big 12’s golf and softball championships.
– ITEM LAST: Bobby Hurley finished ASU’s basketball season with nine consecutive home losses. Yes, nine straight at home. Is that possible? In the 1990s, Arizona lost a total of nine home games. Again, from 2010-18, Arizona lost nine total home games.
Yet the Sun Devils announced they will allow Hurley to complete the final year of his contract next season. “Getting us to an elite level in basketball, we’re going to pull many strategic levers to get us where we want to go,” said ASU athletic director Graham Rossini. “We’ve got higher aspirations; we’ve got good things in the hopper.”
Or not.
Hurley has won 168 games in 10 ASU seasons. By comparison, a slumping Utah franchise won 191, twice firing its coach. The only Big 12 team with fewer victories than ASU during the Hurley years is Oklahoma State, with 166.
