{"id":698073,"date":"2026-04-04T16:51:21","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T16:51:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/698073\/"},"modified":"2026-04-04T16:51:21","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T16:51:21","slug":"can-arizona-bring-glory-back-to-the-west-after-a-29-year-mens-ncaa-tournament-title-drought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/698073\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Arizona bring glory back to the West after a 29-year men\u2019s NCAA Tournament title drought?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Athletic has live coverage of Illinois vs. UConn<\/a> in the 2026 Men\u2019s Final Four.<\/p>\n

INDIANAPOLIS \u2014 Bill Walton would have loved this Arizona team.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the sentiment shared by family and friends of the late Hall of Famer, the biggest, loudest, most bombastic champion of West Coast basketball. That magnificent mouthpiece never failed to remind viewers that he adored the Pac-12 and all its teams, and despised its demise. He\u2019d be the first to boast about these Wildcats from the West, the ones with a chance to snap the streak of East Coast teams collecting all the national championships and with them, all the fun. He\u2019d declare that this is the moment, finally, for the drought to end. He\u2019d command that a tide of titles come the way of the West.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, he would be loving this,\u201d said Sean Elliott, widely considered the best player in Arizona history, who helped the Wildcats to their first Final Four in 1988 and introduced UA as a national basketball power. His alma mater is slated to play in its fifth Saturday against fellow No. 1 seed Michigan. \u201cAll the superlatives would come out, all the stories, the hyperbole. He\u2019d be all over it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walton, a three-time All-American and two-time national champion at UCLA, died in 2024, two days after the Pac-12 as we knew it officially ceased to exist because of football-driven conference realignment. And yes, he\u2019d likely still be insisting that this Final Four belonged to the conference of champions, even if Arizona is two years into its Big 12 membership.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe would be putting people in their place about that,\u201d said ESPN\u2019s Dave Pasch, Walton\u2019s longtime broadcast partner. \u201cHe\u2019d be reminding them that Arizona was, first and foremost, a Pac-12, a Pac-10 team. The Big 12 doesn\u2019t just get to claim them, he\u2019d say.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walton was all about fun facts, so here\u2019s one: You think 25 years between Arizona Final Fours is stunning? How about the fact that it\u2019s been 29 years since a team west of the Rockies won a national championship?<\/p>\n

What\u2019s with the dreadful drought anyway, Walton would want to know?<\/p>\n

Good question.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that teams out west haven\u2019t had opportunities since Arizona brought home the trophy in 1997. Just three years ago, in 2023, San Diego State played for the national championship (the Aztecs lost 76-59 to UConn). Twice in the last decade, two Western teams made it to the same Final Four: Gonzaga and Oregon in 2017, and Gonzaga and UCLA in 2021. The Zags played for the title and came up short both times, including a 2021 team that went undefeated until the championship game.<\/p>\n

As for the Bruins, Walton\u2019s alma mater, the program that\u2019s won more NCAA titles (11) than anyone else: UCLA has been to the Final Four four \u2014 four! \u2014 times since 2006, including three in a row from 2006 to 2008, but hasn\u2019t brought home its 12th trophy.<\/p>\n

Surely Walton, along with the late John Wooden, would be disappointed in those stats.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is not easy to get there,\u201d said Mike Bibby, the freshman point guard who helped Arizona to its lone championship and current Sacramento State coach. \u201cWe expected to go back and win again the next year and instead we lost in the Elite Eight \u2014 and we had a better team the next year. It\u2019s so tough, being a one-and-done tournament. One bad game and it\u2019s over.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before the Wildcats\u2019 championship, Western teams had won 20 titles, from Oregon in the first NCAA Tournament to UCLA\u2019s dominance in the 1960s and early 70s to UNLV, and UCLA once more in 1995. A Western team had won at least one national championship in six of the first seven decades the tournament was held.<\/p>\n

No one can pinpoint a single culprit for the lack of championships since 1997. Recruiting doesn\u2019t seem to be an issue, as teams in the West that went to Final Fours attracted both local and national top-ranked talent. UCLA in 2008 had Kevin Love, the No. 1 player in his class, as well as L.A. native Russell Westbrook. Gonzaga\u2019s 2017 squad had Nigel Williams-Goss (from Oregon), plus some international superstars, and its 2021 squad had a five-star freshman in Jalen Suggs.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Nigel Williams-Goss and Gonzaga reached their first national championship game in 2017, but came up short against North Carolina. (Ronald Martinez \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy 29 years since they\u2019ve won a title? We can say the same about the Big Ten and their title drought,\u201d said ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla. \u201cWe can\u2019t figure out that one, either.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Fraschilla pointed to a handful of variables that might play a role. There are fewer major colleges in the West, which means fewer big-time programs that can realistically compete for a national championship. For many years, the Pac-10\/12 was considered a finesse league, with some arguing it didn\u2019t prepare its teams for the rough and tumble postseason. (This same debate has plagued Gonzaga, of the WCC, for two-plus decades.)<\/p>\n

\u201cOr,\u201d Fraschilla offered, \u201cit could just be bad luck.\u201d<\/p>\n

Luke Walton was a junior forward on the Arizona team that lost to Duke 82-72 in the 2001 championship game, the last time Arizona reached college basketball\u2019s final night. He remembers 1997, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cGoing to Final Fours was 100 percent my expectation,\u201d said Walton, now an assistant with the Detroit Pistons. \u201cWhen you\u2019re a fan, you think, \u2018We should be going every year,\u2019 but when you play in it, you realize how hard it is. One bad five-minute stretch can cost you the whole season.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walton said it\u2019s \u201ccrazy\u201d a team from the West hasn\u2019t won in nearly 30 years, but he isn\u2019t as befuddled about Arizona\u2019s 25-year absence from the Final Four.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you have the end of an era, which you did when Lute Olson retired (in 2008), it\u2019s going to take time to get back to that level,\u201d Walton said. \u201cYou\u2019ve gotta find a new coach, build a new culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

And realistically, it might never be the same. Sean Miller took the Wildcats to the NCAA Tournament seven of his 12 years in Tucson, losing in the regional final three agonizing times. There are no guarantees, even when your team is loaded with NBA talent.<\/p>\n

Current players don\u2019t have a real perspective on the drought \u2014 or how challenging it is to get to the Final Four.<\/p>\n

On Friday in Indianapolis, Lloyd recounted a funny moment between himself and Wildcat freshman Ivan Kharchenkov.<\/p>\n

\u201cIvan, I think half serious and half joking, when we won the Elite Eight game, he was like, \u2018is this really hard to do?\u2019\u201d Lloyd said, laughing, while Kharchenkov looked on sheepishly. \u201cI\u2019m like, \u2018Wow. Yeah, thanks.\u2019 I said, \u2018Yeah, 27 years of my life, and this is the third time for me. So yeah, it is hard to do.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s beauty in that, though,\u201d Lloyd continued. \u201cTheir expectation is, we\u2019re going to get in the game, and we\u2019re going to try to win. They don\u2019t make it much more complicated than that.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Elliott, a Tucson native, arrived at UA as a freshman in 1985, he\u2019d never heard the term \u201cEast Coast bias\u201d \u2014 until Olson started talking about it in news conferences. And it wasn\u2019t until 1989, when he\u2019d been drafted by the San Antonio Spurs No. 3 overall, that he really started to understand it.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople were like, \u2018This pick sucks, we should have drafted Danny Ferry from Duke!\u2019\u201d Elliott recalled. \u201cWhen I got to town, I\u2019d tried to watch college basketball on Saturdays, and it would be a big-time East Coast game, a Big 12 game and then it\u2019s over. In the early 90s, you really had to seek it out to know there was good basketball being played out west. It wasn\u2019t just on TV all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

That attitude, which Elliott believes still permeates the East Coast, put a chip on the shoulders of all players out west. It\u2019s part of why they root for each other, even across school rivalries, in the Final Four, he said.<\/p>\n

The solution is straightforward, of course, and Walton would be the first to offer this advice. Destroy those pretenders from the Big Ten and Big East. Throw it down, big fella, and bring basketball glory back where it belongs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Athletic has live coverage of Illinois vs. UConn in the 2026 Men\u2019s Final Four. INDIANAPOLIS \u2014 Bill…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":698074,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3723],"tags":[1982,7,217,354,231,772,1544],"class_list":{"0":"post-698073","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-basketball","8":"tag-arizona-wildcats","9":"tag-basketball","10":"tag-college-basketball","11":"tag-mens-college-basketball","12":"tag-ncaa","13":"tag-ncaa-basketball","14":"tag-ncaab"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116347476835858991","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/698074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}