INDIANAPOLIS — With fewer than five minutes left in the first half of a game that was spiraling away from Arizona, freshman point guard Brayden Burries dribbled up the sideline near the Michigan bench and right into the grown-up body of 22-year-old senior Roddy Gayle.

Unable to power through the trap and with no room to escape it, Burries’ only option was to call timeout. As he walked toward the bench, he glared toward his fellow freshman, forward Koa Peat, who had been frozen at half court. The look Burries gave him said it all: Why did nobody come to help? 

For an Arizona team with three freshmen in the starting lineup, there was no more defying gravity in the new college basketball landscape, where teams are older, more physically mature and fully professional. The history of this sport has long told us that winning a national title with a freshman-dominated team is exceedingly rare. 

This Final Four has shown us that it may now be impossible. 

Though the games played out in different ways at Lucas Oil Stadium, Michigan’s 91-73 win over Arizona and UConn’s 71-62 victory over Illinois both made the same statement: At the highest level of college basketball when championships are on the line, old beats young nearly every time. 

“They had us on our heels all night,” Arizona coach Tommy Lloyd said. “We couldn’t get into a rhythm. No one has been able to do that to us all year.” 

Eleven years ago in this building, Duke took down Wisconsin for the national title with a team led by four spectacular freshmen, all of whom eventually became first-round draft picks. Three years before that in New Orleans, Kentucky did it with Anthony Davis, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and Marquis Teague. 

But that’s it. They’re the outliers. 

Every year before and every year since has been the same story: No matter how talented they are or what they’re projected to be in the NBA, teams that rely on multiple first-year collegians to be their best players will likely not win six straight games in March and April. 

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Across the two semifinals Saturday, there were four freshmen projected to be first-round draft picks as soon as this year and a fifth who could get there next year. All of them played well below the potential they showed all season:

• For Illinois, forward David Mirkovic went 2-for-7 from the field for 6 points and 5 rebounds despite season averages of 13.5 points and 8.1 rebounds.

• Illini point guard Keaton Wagler had 20 points, but it took him 16 shots. A 41 percent 3-point shooter for the season, he went 2-for-10 and also had difficulty handling the ball against UConn’s physicality, leading to 3 live ball turnovers while Illinois had 3 assists for the entire game. 

• Burries was 0-for-5 at halftime and 0-for-8 before hitting a few shots in the second half when Arizona was too far behind for it to matter.

• Peat was 2-for-8 at halftime and missed several opportunities right at the rim before finishing with 16 points on 18 shots.

• Arizona’s Ivan Kharchenkov, a role player who should eventually find his way into the NBA as well, had to be pulled in the first half because of 3 turnovers and a couple wild drives to the rim that resulted in backboard-clanging misses. 

Mock drafts have rarely felt more irrelevant. 

But here’s the moral of the story: No matter how much first-year players grow up through the course of a season, everything about the Final Four experience is different. The stadium is huge and sometimes disorienting. The pageantry from the moment you get to town is intense. The stakes are sky high. 

It’s probably not a coincidence that both Arizona and Illinois, practically from the moment they stepped on the floor, played with the skittishness of a team that had not been here before. 

Michigan and UConn played like themselves. 

“They were, like, surgical,” Lloyd said. “We’ve had a great year, but even if you’re a great team and you can’t get in a rhythm, it’s going to be a tough night and that’s what we felt tonight.” 

One freshman did perform up to expectations: Braylon Mullins, also a big-time prospect, made four of UConn’s 12 threes. But there’s a pretty big difference between being a star freshman and a role player on a team like UConn that starts Tarris Reed and Alex Karaban, both in their fourth year of college basketball, alongside juniors Solo Ball and Silas Demary.

UConn shot 34 percent from inside the arc and 36 percent from three — and won anyway. That’s the mark of a team built for tournament play, where one bad night can send you home. But it’s hard to put that kind of culture together in one year. With UConn, it shows. 

“We haven’t been a machine of destruction,” UConn coach Dan Hurley said. “We’ve been a team that’s had to grind out games like this. We’re comfortable in a possession game like that. We’re a tough program. We’ve got incredible will. We go into these games, we’re ready for battle. It’s not a game that we’re just running around in uniforms throwing the ball around, hoping it goes in. We’re fighting. It’s a life-or-death struggle for us to get to Monday night for the opportunity to win a championship.”

Like UConn, Michigan’s starting lineup is experienced: Two graduate students, two juniors and a sophomore, taken mostly out of the transfer portal. It’s also quite large in the front court, which showed up big-time against Arizona’s wunderkinds. One team came out, set a physical tone right away and stuck to its plan. The other looked impatient from the beginning and got away from its season-long identity, settling for shots it had no business taking because of how formidable Michigan was in the paint.  

“We felt like we were battle tested,” Michigan coach Dusty May said. “We felt like if a team relies on scoring 15 feet and in, because of our size and length, its just going to be tough to score enough points if we’re making some shots and we’re in a decent rhythm offensively. I think that’s what happened tonight.”

Arizona isn’t alone. Year after year since 2015, Duke has failed to nab a title despite a bevy of top-five draft picks. Houston stacked up on five-star freshmen this season and got eliminated in the Sweet 16. A.J. Dybantsa was a one-man show at BYU and the Cougars didn’t make it to the second weekend. The days of John Calipari recruiting like he did at Kentucky and making long tournament runs seem like they’re in the rear-view mirror.

Elite-level talent is always important, but Saturday showed once again how little it can mean on college basketball’s biggest stage. 

So perhaps it’s fitting that the 2026 college basketball season will come down to two teams that have hit the talent and experience quotient right in the sweet spot. Both UConn and Michigan are loaded not just with future NBA players but guys who have been around the block. 

As much as college basketball has changed, Saturday was a reminder of the one thing that seems to always remain the same.

INDIANAPOLIS — As the drama around coach Tommy Lloyd’s future extended into Final Four week, there was one person in the Wildcats’ locker room who understood how all this works. 

It’s the athletic director’s son, whose résumé includes a line that gives him an even more incisive view into the sometimes uncomfortable business of college sports: Intern for super agent Jimmy Sexton. 

“I’d seen it from my mom’s perspective for years,” said Jackson Francois, whose mother Desiree Reed-Francois left Missouri to become Arizona’s AD in 2024. “And then you’re like, ‘Oh, wow. This is why he’s so good at his job.’” 

Of all the unique dynamics at play in Arizona’s first trip to the Final Four in 25 years, this has been arguably the strangest: As North Carolina pursued Lloyd up until his decision Friday to sign a contract extension, speculation about whether Lloyd and Reed-Francois had a contentious working relationship took center stage in the public discourse about their ongoing contract negotiations. 

Caught in the middle was Jackson Francois, who became a walk-on for the Wildcats shortly after his mother took the job. Though he’s undecided which end of the sports business spectrum his career will take him — coach, athletic administrator and agent are all on the table — he knows what leverage looks like.

When he went to Nashville last summer to work for the Sexton-led coaching division at Creative Artists Agency, he learned from the best. 

“Jackson did a great job for us,” Sexton told Yahoo Sports. “He was very inquisitive. He worked on several projects with our basketball analytics and research people. Everybody in the office loved him. Sometimes when you have parents in certain situations they try to live off that, but he didn’t do that at all. He was a very hard worker.”

Jamie Schwaberow via Getty Images

Lloyd, who is represented by the agency that recently rebranded from Wasserman to The Team, played the same game that Sexton became famous for through decades of football coaching searches that often begin with interest from other schools and end with his clients securing lucrative contract extensions. 

Asked Thursday about his potential interest in North Carolina, Lloyd offered the same answer he had given several times after the job came open: “I've got my full focus on this team. Nothing is distracting me. That's just how I've decided to approach it.”

Francois understands, as both the AD’s son and a member of the team, that these high-stakes negotiations put him in an unusual position. As someone who aspires to work in sports and has learned from some of the best in the industry, he is likely among the most aware and informed college athletes in the country. As someone whose job is to help the Wildcats prepare for games like the one they face Saturday against Michigan, he knows his best bet during times like these is to stay away from social media and avoid talking business with his mom.

He took the same approach in 2023 at Missouri when Dennis Gates received interest from other schools after leading the Tigers to the NCAA tournament in his first season. 

“I’ve done this for four years now, so at this point we’ve got a good line of mom and athletic director,” Francois said. “We try not to blur those lines. I stay out of it. My job is to be a basketball player, not to go on the message boards and be a poster. Yeah, people say things about my mom, but you’ve just got to walk it out and delete Twitter, which sucks, because I do love looking at [coaching carousel] stuff.”

As he should. 

When he was at CAA last summer, Francois did some of the leg work that helped Sexton and Evan Daniels, who focuses on the basketball coaching side, prepare for their respective coaching cycles, compiling numbers, preparing summaries on their coaching clients and, yes, projecting what jobs might come open and where the pieces might move. 

But it would have been hard to predict some of the circumstances that led Arizona and Lloyd to a position where his future at the school was in question. At the beginning of the season, North Carolina was not expected to fire Hubert Davis. Nor did many people envision Arizona rolling to the Final Four at 36-2 with a Big 12 regular season and tournament title, making the 51-year old Lloyd arguably the hottest coach in college basketball. 

It presented him with perhaps a once-in-a-career opportunity to either move to the bluest of blue-blood programs or secure the kind of contract at Arizona that would theoretically give him everything he wants from the amount of revenue share and NIL money he can offer recruits to autonomy over certain aspects of the program. Meanwhile, the white-hot spotlight on Reed-Francois was complicated by the fact that Chicago Bulls coach Billy Donovan, who is also perceived to be among North Carolina’s top candidates, is represented by the same agency as Lloyd. Had Arizona been unable to finish its contract extension with Lloyd, this could have theoretically dragged on until the end of the NBA season on April 12. 

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Having multiple clients in play for an elite job is a leverage position that has played out in dozens of football coaching searches and made Sexton one of the most influential people in college sports. 

“The main job in the agency is to serve its clients, and they do a really good job,” Francois said. “He’s just so organized. You learn like, wow, every detail is done to a T. You see it a little bit from a [public] perspective, but to see his organization down to the minuscule detail and the precision he works everything with, his day is minute-by-minute prepared. Everything has a purpose.”

It’s unclear exactly what Francois intends to do with the experience he gained under Sexton. Earlier this week, he was accepted into Arizona’s one-year MBA program. He’s coached some high school basketball on the side and is going to be the offense coordinator at Sahuaro High School in Tucson this season. His mother would prefer he go to law school. With the experience he gained at CAA, he could eventually get on the agent career track. 

But Reed-Francois is proud of how he has handled this unique setup — one that Lloyd termed “interesting” when asked about it Thursday. 

“As a working parent in college sports, you have to integrate your child,” she said. “That’s been our approach. He was Bruce Pearl’s ball kid [when Reed-Francois was an associate AD at Tennessee], he was the official statistics distributor as a second grader when we were at Virginia Tech. I think when I was in labor, I was working on a contract. So he’s been around college athletics from birth.

“But one thing I appreciate about Jackson, and one thing I’m really proud of, but as a walk-on you have to have humility. You have to work really hard and you have to make others around you better. That’s something he’s learned from his experience. I don’t know how many moms and sons there have been that have been athletic director and student-athlete but it’s been true moments of joy.”

Not everyone would embrace that kind of spotlight, and you can understand why. 

Though a university’s org chart might put a coach underneath an athletic director, there is not much ambiguity about who really has the power in those relationships — especially at a school like Arizona where basketball success is everything. Though the school has had an athletics renaissance lately, going 9-4 in football and making the College World Series in baseball last year, Reed-Francois was hired largely to get the athletic department’s finances in order after swimming in red ink for years. She has done that, getting Arizona to a break-even point and recruiting some new, large donors. 

But if Lloyd had left for North Carolina, it would have been a tenure-defining stain — whether it was her fault or not. 

“Tommy’s a great basketball coach and we’re lucky to have him,” Francois said. “I hope he’s here for a long time. He’s one of the best coaches in the country and there’s a reason for [UNC’s interest].” 

Ultimately, that wasn’t Francois’ problem to navigate — for now, anyway. He’s just trying to win a ring. But after seeing the business side of the sport from so many angles, it’s not a stretch to think that in 10 or 15 years he could be in the middle of a scenario like the one that played out at Arizona this week. 

“Who knows,” he said. “I’m pretty open. I just know I’ve got to be near a field or a court. I have a very unique perspective of the business, right? I can see it from my mom’s lens. I can see it from CAA’s now. So I can see it in almost every aspect.”

INDIANAPOLIS — The sequence of events that led to Tommy Lloyd spurning North Carolina and signing a five-year contract extension with Arizona on the eve of the Final Four began with one simple premise.

Arizona, in the end, is where he wanted to coach.

“That was the driving force behind everything,” Lloyd said, revealing the news at his regularly scheduled Friday news conference. 

It made perfect sense. Though there was no indication that North Carolina’s interest – and Lloyd’s refusal to tip his hand as negotiations were happening – had any impact on Arizona’s performance as it stormed through the West regional last week, it was always going to be a big task for the Tar Heels to dislodge a small-town guy from Kelso, Washington, who had moved his entire family to Tucson and set up shop in the Catalina foothills with his own pickleball court and a burgeoning basketball kingdom. 

But they tried. Goodness, did they try. 

North Carolina, sources told Yahoo Sports, offered Lloyd a contract with more guaranteed money than the $7-plus million he will make going forward at Arizona and a larger resource pool for player procurement.

For Lloyd, however, money wasn’t what had him thinking seriously about North Carolina, to the point where one source said the expectation as recently as Tuesday or Wednesday was that he’d probably be the next Tar Heel coach. It was whether Arizona’s administration led president Suresh Garimella — described by sources as a novice in the world of college athletics — understood Lloyd’s vision for how to make the Wildcats a sustainable power.

How Arizona kept Tommy Lloyd in Tucson

Around college athletics, the buzzword on every campus is alignment. In Lloyd’s mind, he did not have it — at least not at the level he wanted. 

Getting the deal done now rather than dragging it out beyond the Final Four — and perhaps to the point of walking away — was going to require the alignment piece being fixed. That means, sources told Yahoo Sports, his contract going forward will now stipulate that he no longer reports to athletic director Desiree Reed-Francois, giving him a level of autonomy over the basketball program that few coaches have in the country.

“Rather than get into specifics, to me it's just a holistic approach,” Lloyd said. “There's not one thing anymore. Arizona basketball needs to become a locomotive, where everything surrounding it is pushing it forward. To me — that's not because of me. That's because of what was built before I came here, and it's my opportunity right now to kind of be the captain of the ship.

“But just putting everything we have behind our program, and the No. 1 thing that starts with is just energy and effort. It's not easy. It's not easy when you are trying to build a program or run an athletic department. I fully understand that. So just getting that alignment, and I think we are taking big steps towards doing that.”

Ben Solomon via Getty Images

A few minutes into Lloyd’s press conference, Reed-Francois took a seat near the back. Afterwards, as a crowd of reporters approached her for comment, it turned into something of an awkward scene when a local beat reporter asked her what specifically had changed in the new contract. The conversation ended with an offer from a communications staffer to send out the term sheet. 

“We want to now put the focus back on our team and winning the national championship,” Reed-Francois said. “It’s definitely been a journey.”

The tension between Lloyd and Reed-Francois since she arrived in February 2024 has largely been an outgrowth of her mandate to clean up Arizona’s books after a university-wide budget crisis that led to significant cuts, layoffs and the resignation of president Robert Robbins, who was the driving force behind hiring Lloyd in 2021 after two decades as a Gonzaga assistant. 

Though Lloyd and his staff were able to generate enough money to build what is very clearly a superior roster this season and maximize European connections that took many years to build, there was a perception within the program — fair or unfair — that Arizona basketball was not being treated by the administration like a basketball blue blood with ironclad commitments to keep up with other championship-caliber programs. 

Lloyd, it’s worth remembering, came up at a school that did not have to feed an FBS football program. At Gonzaga, basketball was the only game in town — and from an infrastructure or financial standpoint, there was little difference between the way Mark Few’s program operated and what you’d see at the top basketball-centric schools in the country. 

Arizona, for all its history, has long been more of a challenge. It wasn’t until a decade ago that Arizona basketball had charter flights for most of its road trips, many years after most top programs were chartering exclusively. Though the Wildcats have a top-notch practice facility, their offices in McKale Center — including Lloyd’s coaches’ suite — are, to put it kindly, not designed to impress. 

The point is this: While bells and whistles are no longer the coin of the realm in recruiting, and ultimately what matters is how the players are taken care of, Arizona has managed to build this kind of powerhouse team without the trappings of a North Carolina or Duke. 

On the other hand, Reed-Francois has largely succeeded in doing what she was tasked to do. Arizona’s $39 million athletic budget deficit has nearly been zeroed out, she has cultivated significant new donors and grown revenue and the school is having success across a variety of sports, including the football team’s 9-4 record last season and the baseball team’s trip to the College World Series last summer. 

‘You can grow roots in the desert, trust me’

It appears now that whatever concerns Lloyd had about where basketball falls in the hierarchy have been addressed. 

“This wasn't like meant to be like a leverage deal,” he said. “I appreciate our administration, and I think we've made huge progress on what the vision for Arizona basketball can be. I appreciate them getting behind it and kind of rallying behind it, investing in it.”

Though North Carolina will undoubtedly be disappointed, Lloyd’s decision should not be perceived as a commentary on the job losing its luster or that the blue-blood label doesn’t matter anymore in college basketball. 

Lloyd, who has won 81 percent of his games as a head coach, was worth the shot. It’s always hard — even for North Carolina — to convince a coach to move across the country when they are successful and content with their situation. That’s especially true with Lloyd, whose parents, in-laws and grandkids are all in Tucson. 

“The roots are getting pretty deep,” he said. “You can grow roots in the desert, trust me.”

North Carolina will now move on to other targets. Billy Donovan, who is represented by the same agency as Lloyd, would seem a logical fit if the parties can navigate the end of the Chicago Bulls’ season on April 12 with the opening of the transfer portal on Tuesday. If North Carolina can convince a two-time national championship coach with 11 years of NBA experience to come back to college, it will confirm the perception that it’s still among the best jobs in the sport. 

It just wasn’t the best job for Lloyd — largely because on Friday, he managed to make the good job he has even better. 

“Arizona basketball, you guys know what it means to me, and when I say it's a special place, that always comes from the bottom of my heart,” Lloyd said. “I didn't want to make this entire Final Four about that because I'm just a small part of something much bigger. But on that same note, I'd also like to let you know that North Carolina is an amazing place. I mean, it's one of one. It's an honor to even be considered for that job.”

INDIANAPOLIS — Arizona fans would undoubtedly prefer that their first Final Four in 25 years was not happening under a cloud of uncertainty about the future of their coach, Tommy Lloyd. 

But the North Carolina job is open. His contract negotiations with Arizona are ongoing. And Lloyd is leveraging this unique moment for absolutely everything it’s worth.

That much was made clear Tuesday afternoon at his news conference when, despite the best efforts of the reporters in attendance, Lloyd once again refused to offer anything that would be considered reassuring to Arizona fans — or, more importantly, administrators — about his intentions after the season ends.

“People are going to speculate all they want,” Lloyd said. “Guys, this team has my full focus. Nothing, nothing, I promise you nothing is knocking me off that path. You guys might call them distractions because you’re distracted. That doesn’t mean I’m distracted or we’re distracted. You know what’s pretty cool? Once you get some experience in this deal and you’re a player or coach who’s been at it awhile, you get pretty good at eliminating distractions. So I think I’m pretty good at that and I can’t wait to get to practice today.”

It’s not difficult to see what’s going on here.

Lloyd is — rightly so — a top target for North Carolina, which fired Hubert Davis. The 51-year-old from Kelso, Washington, waited a long time to take on his first head coaching job after 20 years as Mark Few’s top assistant at Gonzaga, and he has absolutely crushed the opportunity with a 148-35 record and Final Four breakthrough in his fifth season. Among the current crop of college coaches, either Lloyd or Michigan’s Dusty May would be the slam dunk of all slam dunks for a North Carolina program that is finally ready to give the job to someone “outside the family.” 

Ben Solomon via Getty Images

Just as importantly, he is also considered somewhat moveable despite his general happiness in Tucson and the potential for Arizona to dominate the West Coast. And this, it seems, is where the standoff lies: How committed is Arizona, a school and athletic department that has gone through significant financial challenges in recent years, to investing in that dominance? 

Or, to put a finer point on it, what exactly does Lloyd want? He seems to understand that this is the moment to get it.

“That’s what I feel like my No. 1 responsibility is, to fight to protect the program and fight to build it for those who came before me and for those that are going to follow after me, because you know what, Arizona is going to have another good coach after me,” Lloyd said Saturday after the Wildcats’ Elite Eight win over Purdue. “I promise you. The place is special.”

Talking about a future theoretical successor shortly after the greatest moment of your career was an eye-catching choice, to be sure, but perhaps more of the focus should go toward the first part of the quote about fighting to protect the program. We are in an era where coaching careers, in many ways, hinge on the resources schools give a coach through revenue sharing and NIL to go build a roster. Since the pay-for-play era began, those numbers have not once gone down.

The message from Lloyd is unambiguous: I need more. And never has there been a more perfect vessel to deploy in negotiations than interest from arguably the top basketball job in the country. And rarely has there been a weaker negotiating position than the one Arizona’s administration is in right now with an athletic director in Desireé Reed-Francois who was hired two years ago to fix the department’s budget issues and has had, sources told Yahoo Sports, a sometimes rocky relationship with her basketball coach over his expectations for funding the program. 

Lloyd has played this game before. In fact, he did it last just year — albeit under different, much quieter circumstances. After Arizona’s exit from the Sweet 16, according to sources, Villanova came after Lloyd hard. He was probably closer to taking that job than most people realized before signing a five-year contract extension last April. Though the details are somewhat opaque, it is believed that Lloyd left money on the table — both for himself and in player acquisition — to stay at Arizona. 

It's hard to see that happening again.

We can only speculate about where Lloyd truly wants to spend his prime coaching years. What’s undeniable is that he’ll never have a better opportunity to set up the rest of his career to win national titles — either at Arizona or a North Carolina that will be desperate to get back in the mix after the last five mediocre seasons. 

Lloyd has no bad options here, and he’s playing it to the hilt — just as he should. 

That makes things uncomfortable for Arizona fans, who wanted an unmistakeable signal that he’s staying. It does not appear they’re going to get it. 

But if you’re Lloyd, why do anything at this point to tamp down the pressure on Reed-Francois and school president Suresh Garimella? Why undercut your own negotiating position? 

Bob Drebin via Getty Images

A lot of coaches would feel uncomfortable taking a team to the Final Four under these circumstances. Roy Williams often seemed miserable in 2003 when a similar situation was unfolding at North Carolina and he had Kansas in the Final Four. After losing the championship game to Syracuse, he snapped at CBS’ Bonnie Bernstein when she asked the obvious question about North Carolina, saying: “In tough times people should be more sensitive. I could give a [expletive] about North Carolina right now.”

Roughly a week later, Williams returned to his alma mater. 

Lloyd obviously feels comfortable heading to the Final Four with this level of uncertainty hanging publicly over his future, and he’s not straying from the script. But the world has also changed since 2003. 

In the era of an unfettered transfer portal, there is no need for a coach’s loyalty test. Lloyd knows that most of his rotation this year will be in professional basketball next season. As much as they may love what the school has done for them, many of them came to Arizona in the first place because it was the best business decision. Where Lloyd coaches in 2026-27 is of little consequence to what they’re trying to accomplish this weekend at the Final Four. 

Everyone in college basketball these days is on a one-year contract. 

Reed-Francois has said the right things publicly, telling reporters last week that she wants Lloyd to retire as a Wildcat and that they have been engaged in contract negotiations since before the NCAA tournament. She was also brought in to do a difficult job, with the mandate to get back to financial solvency at a place that was running a $39 million deficit. Cutting costs never makes for a popular boss, particularly in college athletics where the ethos has long been to spend your way out of problems and figure out how to pay for it later. 

With NIL and revenue-sharing responsibilities, those days are over at most places. A championship-contending basketball roster is probably going to cost upwards of $10 million, and Arizona is one of a small number of places in the country where filling up the basketball arena is mandatory to make the numbers work. 

But so is North Carolina, which is why the tug of war over Lloyd is going to be tense — and expensive. 

Life is leverage, and the way Lloyd has handled this season — combined with North Carolina’s ability to make a big swing — has put him in position to either take one of the best jobs in basketball or make Arizona one of the best jobs in basketball for a generation. 

That’s the handiwork of a man who knows the meaning of the moment. No matter what happens at the Final Four, Lloyd will have plenty of reason to celebrate.