The much-publicized, draft-day prank phone call to Colorado QB Shedeur Sanders last week wasn’t the first of its kind. Hardly. On an early May morning in Tucson, 1968, former NAU Lumberjack linebacker Rusty Tillman, who went on to be a 16-year NFL assistant coach, disguised his voice and called UA tackle Bill Lueck, telling him he was the player personnel director of the Cleveland Browns and that the Browns had just drafted him in Round 1. In 1984, Lueck — who would play eight years in the NFL — told me that he wasn’t sure if Tillman’s hoax was real or not. But about 30 minutes later, he got a call from Pat Peppler, Green Bay’s personnel director, who told him the Packers had selected him in Round 1. Said Lueck: “I said, ‘hey, Rusty tried it already and it didn’t work.’” Eventually Peppler sold himself to Lueck, who added, “it took me a couple of hours to really understand what happened.”

People are also reading…

Reed-Francois

Courtesy Arizona Athletics

– UA athletic director Desireé Reed-Francois‘ ambitious, 13-stop Bear Down Takeover Tour completed events Nos. 8 and 9 last week in Southern California. On Thursday, UA football coach Brent Brennan and basketball coach Tommy Lloyd were at Angels Stadium, hosted by Tucson native Arte Moreno, owner of the Los Angeles Angels. The crowd didn’t disappoint. It included Dana Wells, the UA’s 1988 Pac-10 football Defensive Player of the Year, who is now in his fifth year as executive VP of the Angels. Also in the crowd was 1997 Final Four MVP Miles Simon, now a scout for the Atlanta Hawks; and Dylan Rigdon, part of Arizona’s 1994 Final Four team who is now president of Laguna Equity Funding. The Bear Down Tour concludes with four stops in the Tucson area and three in the Phoenix area through mid-May.

– It looks like former Arizona associate athletic director Erika Barnes made a good professional move to leave the UA and start her own sports strategy business, the EB7 Advisory Group. She spent last week with dozens of college athletics executives at the Fiesta Bowl Spring Summit in Scottsdale, invited to speak on a panel about “Managing NIL and Revenue Generation.” A week earlier, she was invited to Nashville to be part of Sports Business Journal’s “World Congress of Sports.”

Jamie Streit makes contact during Arizona beach volleyball’s match vs. UTEP at Bear Down Beach on April 18, 2025. 

Sarah Rosewater, Arizona Athletics

– Utah athletic director Mark Harlan, a UA grad, last week became the Big 12’s first AD to eliminate a sport in recent memory. Harlan eliminated Utah’s nine-year-old beach volleyball team. Could this be the first of many non-revenue sports eliminated in the money, money, money transfer portal era? Who knows? But beach volleyball in the Big 12 only has three remaining teams: Arizona, ASU and TCU. Not exactly ideal. Arizona coach Steve Walker was only able to play five Big 12 matches (he played 25 nonconference matches this season) with everybody from Grand Canyon and UTEP to Stetson and Pepperdine.

Dig deeper into Arizona Daily Star columnist Greg Hansen’s notebook

Be the first to know