Greg Hansen: Odds may not favor Arizona's Tommy Lloyd, but magic happens in March

SAN DIEGO — It’s not necessary to consult a Las Vegas bookie or contact a college basketball bracketologist to find that the odds of Tommy Lloyd winning the NCAA championship this season are astronomically bad.

What’s the phrase I’m looking for? Not in the cards.

But that’s what everybody always said about a No. 16 seed beating a No. 1 seed, and then along came UMBC — University of Maryland Baltimore County — which beat No. 1 seed Virginia in 2018. (And not just beat the Cavaliers, but rout them, 74-54).

I bring this to your attention because no first-year, full-time college head coach has ever won the men’s NCAA basketball championship. Not even close. It’s an 0-for-82 streak that began in 1939 when Howard Hobson coached the Oregon Ducks — known as the “Tall Firs” — to the first-ever national title.

But before you bow to the powerful mathematics that suggest Lloyd and Arizona are fighting impossible historical odds, consider Lloyd’s seductive link to Howard Hobson. Hobson’s first head coaching job was at Kelso High School, 1928, in western Washington.

That’s Tommy Lloyd’s alma mater.

Maybe the basketball gods have got something at work here. Hobson and Lloyd share Kelso Hilander blood. CBS might wish to send a camera crew to Kelso just in case.

Winning the Big Dance has been an older man’s game. It took John Wooden 18 years, at Indiana State and UCLA, before he won his first NCAA championship. Bob Knight was in his 12th head coaching season, including a stint at Army, before he won it all.

Mike Krzyzewski? He cut down the nets in his 18th season.

Lute Olson was 63 when he won it all, at Arizona in 1997-98. It was Olson’s 24th season as a head coach.

The closest anyone has come to winning the NCAA championship in his first full-time season was UConn’s Kevin Ollie in 2014. It was Ollie’s second year at UConn. That stopped people from tossing former Michigan coach Steve Fisher’s name into the conversation.

Fisher was a Michigan assistant in March 1989 when Wolverines head coach Bill Frieder agreed to become Arizona State’s head coach the following season. (Bad move, huh?) Frieder planned to coach the Wolverines through the end of the season, but UM athletic director Bo Schembechler insisted Frieder was a traitor and should leave the premises immediately.

“I want a Michigan man coaching Michigan,” said Schembechler. So Fisher, a UM assistant for eight years, took charge at the NCAA Tournament. Nice timing. No. 1 Arizona was stunned by UNLV in the Sweet 16 and Michigan all but got a freebie to the Final Four, beating Seton Hall for the title.

None of the coaches you’ve probably never heard of won national championships in their first season, either. Holy Cross’ Doggie Julian, the ‘47 champ, was in his second season. Ed Jucker, who coached Oscar Robertson’s ‘61 Cincinnati team to the championship in Jucker’s first year at Cincy, had coached six seasons at RPI. No, that’s not a basketball analytic, it’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York.

One out-of-nowhere national championship coach has a Lloyd-type link to Spokane. When Jud Heathcote coached Magic Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans to the 1979 title, he was in his third year at MSU. From 1950-64, Heathcote learned the game as the coach of West Valley High School in Spokane. That’s just down the hill from the Glenrose Prairie neighborhood where Lloyd lived during the latter part of his 21-year stint at Gonzaga.

After Heathcote retired from coaching in 1995, he moved back to Spokane and became an ally and mentor to Lloyd and Gonzaga head coach Mark Few.

There’s rarely been a more unlikely national championship coach than Heathcote. Late in the 1975 regular-season, I sat in the small press box, covering a Weber State-Utah State game. The man sitting next to me was Heathcote; I had never heard of him. He was then the head coach at Montana.

An engaging man, Heathcote talked hoops with me for two hours. I soon discovered he was scouting Utah State, who he suspected would be Montana’s first-round opponent in the NCAA Tournament a week later.

It was anything but a high-roll. Heathcote said he was driving overnight back to Missoula immediately after the game because the Montana budget didn’t account for a hotel stay. Sure enough, a week later, Utah State and Montana met at Washington State’s Friel Court in the NCAA Tournament.

Montana won, 69-63, earning a spot in the second-round against what turned out to be Wooden’s last NCAA team. UCLA won in the last ticks of the clock, 67-64, and went on to win the national title. But Heathcote — the charming old high school coach from Spokane — was discovered, soon hired away by Michigan State.

That’s a story almost as appealing as Lloyd’s rise from a career-assistant to a 31-3 record and a No. 1 seed in his first head coaching season.

Unfortunately, neither Heathcote nor Howard Hobson — Lloyd’s links to NCAA championships — are alive. Heathcote died in 2017, Hobson in 1991. But if there is a coaches’ heaven somewhere, both are probably raising a toast to the former Kelso Hilander and Gonzaga Bulldog.

There’s always a first time, right?