Hansen's Notebook: Pac-12's decade of mediocrity likely culprit for Arizona's NCAA stalls

The Star's longtime columnist on the reception of another early exit for Arizona from the NCAA Tournament, Brent Brennan and UA football facing college football's newest era, Pima College's women's basketball's NJCAA march, Tucsonans and Wildcats on MLB rosters and more.

Greg Hansen's Sunday Notebook is presented this week by Rite Way Heating, Cooling & Plumbing.

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Clemson vs. UA more Tortoise vs. Hare than David vs. Goliath

"... When at last the Hare did wake up, the Tortoise was near the goal. The Hare now ran his swiftest, but he could not overtake the Tortoise in time."

Final score: Tortoise 77, Hare 72.

After nine minutes of Thursday night's Sweet 16 in Los Angeles, Arizona had gone 2 for 13 from the field. Caleb Love was 0 for 6. The Wildcats had committed three turnovers. Clemson, the Tortoise, led 16-6.

In Friday's Eye On The Ball radio program on 1450-AM, I asked former Arizona point guard Matt Muehlebach why the Wildcats were so slow to stir.

"When you see a No. 6 seed next to Clemson's name and a No. 2 seed next to Arizona's name, you think it's like Arizona versus Salpointe High School," Muehlebach said.

How many times have we seen Arizona lose to a so-called Salpointe High School? Let's see, there's Buffalo. Wichita State. Princeton. East Tennessee State. Santa Clara. Seton Hall. Miami of Ohio.

The Tortoise has been a mean opponent.

Said Muehlebach, the Pac-12 Network's leading basketball analyst: "If the NCAA Tournament was a best 4-of-7 like the NBA, we'd all feel good about Arizona's chances."

Alas, this one-and-done business has stained Arizona's basketball reputation for more than 30 years. UA fans have surely known more anguish than any Top-25 program across that period.

"Not going to the Final Four in 23 years is shocking," former UA point guard Reggie Geary said Friday on 1450-AM. "It also shows how difficult it is."

I have a theory why Arizona has stalled so often in the Big Dance: It's because the Pac-12 has been (by far) the worst of the Power 5 basketball conferences since adding Colorado and Utah. The Pac-12 does not adequately prepare you for 40 minutes of war against a team like Clemson, whose ACC schedule is brutally difficult.

Here's the evidence since 2011-12 (not counting the chaotic 2021 COVID season):

• No. 1 seeds: The Pac-12 has had 3 of 44

• Sweet 16 berths: The Pac-12 has had 17 of 176

• Elite Eight berths: The Pac-12 has had 4 of 88

• Final Four berths: The Pac-12 has had 1 of 40

Even though Arizona played Duke, Wisconsin and Alabama, the UA's strength of schedule this year was ranked just 21st in the NET analytics. Once Arizona got to its Pac-12 schedule, it played 107th UCLA, 113th Stanford, 128th Cal, 134th ASU and 165th Oregon State. The average NET ranking for Pac-12 teams was 89.

Big 12 teams averaged No. 47 in the NET schedule rankings.

To his credit, Tommy Lloyd has been proactive in moving away from Sean Miller’s easy-does-it nonconference schedules. Lloyd has already scheduled Duke, Wisconsin and accepted a spot in next season's Battle 4 Atlantis tournament in the Bahamas that includes Gonzaga, Creighton, Oklahoma and Louisville.

With the Pac-12 in its rear-view mirror, Arizona is likely to get bumped around and scarred up while becoming more battle-tested in the Big 12.

But as it learned against Clemson, the race is not always to the swift, but to the tough and resilient.

Brennan facing a new way of college football

In a 25-minute speech Wednesday at the Tucson Rotary Club, capped by an extended Q&A session, UA football coach Brent Brennan was not asked about his standout players. He was asked about fundraising, NIL and the uncertain future of college football.

"It has become a transactional game, a game of retention and acquisition," said Brennan, sounding like a financial advisor. "There's no salary cap." He estimated that the players in highest demand — offensive linemen, defensive linemen and cornerbacks — are being paid between $50,000 to $1 million.

"If you can find someone who can sack the quarterback, it's like you've won the lottery."

Brennan pointed to staff assistant and College Football Hall of Famer Ricky Hunley, sitting at a table with Rotarians. "When Ricky played here, you couldn't buy him a hamburger or a pizza, it was against the rules," he said. "Now a donor could buy him a car."

As Brennan prepares to move to the Big 12 next season, he has more on his plate than just trying to beat Baylor and BYU.

"What I've learned is that the biggest wallet gets the best players," said Brennan, whose immediate challenge is roster retention (and addition) when the Transfer Portal opens April 15-30.

He will not spend effort reflecting on Jedd Fisch’s breakout 10-win season.

"Everyone wants to keep talking about the past," he said. "I'm more interested in talking about the future. I like what we've got. It's almost cathartic to be back on the field, looking forward to a new year in a new league."

Pima's march to NJCAA success one of its best

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March Madness extends far beyond whatever UConn, Duke and Iowa's Caitlin Clark are doing on TV. This month, coach Todd Holthaus’ Pima College women's basketball team thrived in the madness in, of all places, Joplin, Missouri.

That's where the Aztecs went 4-1 in six whirlwind days, finishing with the NJCAA women's Division II consolation championship with three wins in three days over Parkland College of Illinois, South Arkansas Tech College and Harcum College of Pennsylvania.

"We played the last three of our games at 7 a.m. Tucson time," said Holthaus, whose team finished 27-9 with four freshmen in the starting lineup."We were tough, resilient and united."

Of note, freshman guard Rylei Waugh, who averaged 16.3 this season, scored a school-record 43 points in the consolation title game against Harcum College.

Holthaus is an impressive 341-121 at PCC dating to his hire off the Arizona women's basketball staff in 2007. He has coached the Aztecs to No. 2, No. 3 and No. 5 in the NJCAA finals. But he said last week's No. 7 finish in Missouri compares to any and all of his clubs.

"We played five games in six days," he said. "No one whined or complained. I call it 'Aztec Tough.' When I finally had the chance to sit back and exhale, it was unbelievable. We were the underdogs in every game."

Holthaus has always been a resourceful recruiter. His starting lineup included players from Bisbee, Yuma, Nogales, Los Angeles and Cody, Wyoming. He found his star point guard, Waugh, at Westchester High School in SoCal. She was recommended to him by a friend of the father of a former Pima College football player. She agreed to play at Pima without visiting Tucson. It all worked out.

Now PCC is awaiting the announcement of the NJCAA 2024 All-American team. Waugh, the ACCAC player of the year, could soon join the list of Pima All-American guards J.J. Nakai, Sydni Stallworth and Abyee Maracigan.

"We had 12 freshmen but they figured it out," said Holthaus. "The whole season was such a feeling of accomplishment."

Gabusi's baseball legacy a strong one

When Tony Gabusi was a high school baseball player at Salpointe Catholic in the mid-1970s, his coach, Pima County Sports Hall of Famer Jerry Stitt, remembers that Gabusi "got it.'

He understood analytics of the game 30 years before on-base percentage and "Moneyball" changed the game. Gabusi, Mr. Personality got more out of less.

"Tony was a wonderful coach, he produced quality teams wherever he went," Stitt said last week after learning that Gabusi, 66, died at his home in Tucson.

Gabusi is most known for coaching a numbers-challenged Catalina High team to the 2011 state championship, overcoming a heavily favored 27-3 Phoenix Thunderbird club in the finals. Gabusi wasn't afraid of a challenge. After his days at Catalina, he coached Cholla High School for three seasons, accepting the job even though he knew the Chargers had gone 7-50 the two previous seasons.

He coached at Cienega, Mountain View, Tucson High and Santa Rita. In 1985-86, he was a graduate assistant on Jerry Kindall’s College World Series championship Arizona team. Gabusi was helping coach his alma mater, Salpointe, when he died last week.

Mr. Baseball will be missed.

Short stuff: Record-break White-Austin just getting started; Tucsonans, Wildcats on MLB rosters

• Kobi Simmons was one of the most talented recruits signed by Arizona's Sean Miller, a five-star prospect from Georgia who started 19 games for the UA's 2017 Sweet 16 team. But he jumped to the pro draft after that lone season and has since drifted to four G League teams and bit appearances by NBA clubs Cleveland, Memphis and Charlotte, as well as playing one season in Poland.

Now at 27, Simmons returned to the NBA last week, signed to a 10-day contract by the Toronto Raptors. He played 41 minutes in two Raptors games last week.

I always thought that if Simmons had stayed in college another year or two, he would've been a first-round draft pick good enough to play eight or 10 years in the NBA. But that's not the culture these days. Patience? What's that? Let's hope Simmons can stick this time.

• Unlike Michael Bates, who became the state champion sprinter as a sophomore at Amphitheater High School in 1986, Sahuaro High's Trayvion White-Austin didn't become a known sprinting star until he won the ACCAC championships in the 100 and 200 at Central Arizona College in 2021.

He then transferred to Arizona and last week broke Bates' 33-year-old school record at 100 meters. White-Austin ran 10.14. Bates' 1991 record was 10.17. Of course, Bates went on to win a bronze medal in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and become a six-time NFL Pro Bowl selection.

By comparison, White-Austin, a sixth-year senior at Arizona, is just getting started. At the Pac-12 championships in May he appears to have a chance to become one of the 10 fastest Pac-12 100-meter runners in history. It would take a 10.04 to do so. The conference record is an amazing 9.86 set by Oregon's Micah Williams in 2022.

• Sahuaro High grad Alex Verdugo (Yankees) is the only baseball player from a Tucson high school to open the 2024 MLB season on a big league roster.

He joins six ex-Arizona Wildcats in the big leagues: Red Sox third baseman Bobby Dalbec; Diamondbacks reliever Kevin Ginkel; Angels pitcher Chase Silseth; Miami pitcher Andrew Nardi; Mets pitcher Tylor Megill; and Yankees catcher Austin Wells. The list is expected to grow in early April when Red Sox outfielder Robert Refsnyder, MVP of the 2012 College World Series, is activated from the injured list.

Ex-Wildcats Kevin Newman (Diamondbacks) and Scott Kingery (Phillies) were designated for assignment to the minor leagues last week.

My two cents: Athletic department downsizing underway, but don't expect men's basketball, football staff contraction

The seemingly inevitable downsizing of Arizona's financially-troubled athletic department began last week when Krystal Swindlehurst, the Chief of Staff/Assistant Vice-President of Human Resources, parted ways with the school. She was the highest paid of the seven-member executive staff at $242,000 per year.

The six remaining employees on athletic director Desireé Reed-Francois’ executive staff are paid a cumulative $1.24 million per year. If and when further cuts are made, don't expect them to be from coaching staffs.

For example, Tommy Lloyd’s men's basketball staff is being paid a cumulative $1.52 million, with assistant coaches Jack Murphy at $425,000, Steve Robinson at $359,000, Ricardo Fois at $359,000, recruiting coordinator Tim Benson at $153,000, player development director Rem Bakamus at $76,000, operations director Evan Manning at $60,000 and player relations director Jason Gardner $112,000. That's the going rate to be a Top-25 basketball program.

And it doesn't compare to the UA football staff. Last year, offensive coordinator Brennan Carroll and defensive coordinator Johnny Nansen both were paid $717,000. Such is life in the big leagues of college sports.

Photos: Arizona goes down 77-72 to Clemson, NCAA Tournament West Region Sweet 16