INDIANAPOLIS — Bill Walton would have loved this Arizona team.
That’s 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’d 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’d declare that this is the moment, finally, for the drought to end. He’d command that a tide of titles come the way of the West.
“Oh, he would be loving this,” 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. “All the superlatives would come out, all the stories, the hyperbole. He’d be all over it.”
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’d 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.
“He would be putting people in their place about that,” said ESPN’s Dave Pasch, Walton’s longtime broadcast partner. “He’d be reminding them that Arizona was, first and foremost, a Pac-12, a Pac-10 team. The Big 12 doesn’t just get to claim them, he’d say.”
Walton was all about fun facts, so here’s one: You think 25 years between Arizona Final Fours is stunning? How about the fact that it’s been 29 years since a team west of the Rockies won a national championship?
What’s with the dreadful drought anyway, Walton would want to know?
Good question.
It’s not that teams out west haven’t 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.
As for the Bruins, Walton’s alma mater, the program that’s won more NCAA titles (11) than anyone else: UCLA has been to the Final Four four — four! — times since 2006, including three in a row from 2006 to 2008, but hasn’t brought home its 12th trophy.
Surely Walton, along with the late John Wooden, would be disappointed in those stats.
“It is not easy to get there,” said Mike Bibby, the freshman point guard who helped Arizona to its lone championship and current Sacramento State coach. “We expected to go back and win again the next year and instead we lost in the Elite Eight — and we had a better team the next year. It’s so tough, being a one-and-done tournament. One bad game and it’s over.”
Before the Wildcats’ championship, Western teams had won 20 titles, from Oregon in the first NCAA Tournament to UCLA’s 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.
No one can pinpoint a single culprit for the lack of championships since 1997. Recruiting doesn’t 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’s 2017 squad had Nigel Williams-Goss (from Oregon), plus some international superstars, and its 2021 squad had a five-star freshman in Jalen Suggs.
Nigel Williams-Goss and Gonzaga reached their first national championship game in 2017, but came up short against North Carolina. (Ronald Martinez / Getty Images)
“Why 29 years since they’ve won a title? We can say the same about the Big Ten and their title drought,” said ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla. “We can’t figure out that one, either.”
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’t prepare its teams for the rough and tumble postseason. (This same debate has plagued Gonzaga, of the WCC, for two-plus decades.)
“Or,” Fraschilla offered, “it could just be bad luck.”
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’s final night. He remembers 1997, too.
“Going to Final Fours was 100 percent my expectation,” said Walton, now an assistant with the Detroit Pistons. “When you’re a fan, you think, ‘We should be going every year,’ but when you play in it, you realize how hard it is. One bad five-minute stretch can cost you the whole season.”
Walton said it’s “crazy” a team from the West hasn’t won in nearly 30 years, but he isn’t as befuddled about Arizona’s 25-year absence from the Final Four.
“When you have the end of an era, which you did when Lute Olson retired (in 2008), it’s going to take time to get back to that level,” Walton said. “You’ve gotta find a new coach, build a new culture.”
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.
Current players don’t have a real perspective on the drought — or how challenging it is to get to the Final Four.
On Friday in Indianapolis, Lloyd recounted a funny moment between himself and Wildcat freshman Ivan Kharchenkov.
“Ivan, I think half serious and half joking, when we won the Elite Eight game, he was like, ‘is this really hard to do?’” Lloyd said, laughing, while Kharchenkov looked on sheepishly. “I’m like, ‘Wow. Yeah, thanks.’ I said, ‘Yeah, 27 years of my life, and this is the third time for me. So yeah, it is hard to do.’”
“There’s beauty in that, though,” Lloyd continued. “Their expectation is, we’re going to get in the game, and we’re going to try to win. They don’t make it much more complicated than that.”
When Elliott, a Tucson native, arrived at UA as a freshman in 1985, he’d never heard the term “East Coast bias” — until Olson started talking about it in news conferences. And it wasn’t until 1989, when he’d been drafted by the San Antonio Spurs No. 3 overall, that he really started to understand it.
“People were like, ‘This pick sucks, we should have drafted Danny Ferry from Duke!’” Elliott recalled. “When I got to town, I’d tried to watch college basketball on Saturdays, and it would be a big-time East Coast game, a Big 12 game and then it’s over. In the early 90s, you really had to seek it out to know there was good basketball being played out west. It wasn’t just on TV all the time.”
That attitude, which Elliott believes still permeates the East Coast, put a chip on the shoulders of all players out west. It’s part of why they root for each other, even across school rivalries, in the Final Four, he said.
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.