Wildcats stick the landing after 5 weeks of athletic department turmoil

The past five weeks have reshaped Arizona Wildcats athletics.

And not in a bad way.

In the span of five weeks, amid one crisis of its own making and one that was not, the Wildcats have a new football coach, a new athletic director … and, for good measure on Monday, it threw in a contract extension for men’s basketball coach Tommy Lloyd.

Whew.

It’s all good.

The Wildcats have been tiptoeing along the edge of the cliff ever since Jan. 14, when football coach Jedd Fisch announced he was departing for Washington (and, man, did he want to take every good player with him to Seattle, which would have wiped out three years of successful program-building).

A little over a week later, school president Dr. Robert C. Robbins, dealing with an accounting shortfall of $177 million in the University of Arizona budget, fired athletic director Dave Heeke, whose department has been underwater. The new directive for the athletic department: belt-tightening. Yikes.

While all this was happening, a contract extension for Lloyd – while expected to eventually get done – was put on the back burner to simmer, which was at least a little bit unsettling for some.

But what we’ve seen since then is a series of kick saves that sets up the Wildcats well into the future.

Arizona ended up hiring San Jose State’s Brent Brennan to lead the football program, reviving the Dick Tomey vibes around the program. It was such the right hire that, sorry, Jedd, you can’t have Noah Fifita, Tetairoa McMillan and others.

And then on Monday, Arizona nabbed a sitting SEC athletic director by announcing the hiring of Desireé Reed-Francois from Missouri. Lloyd’s contract extension, through 2029, followed a few hours later.

Sounds like we can all back away from the edge of the cliff now.

I don’t know Reed-Francois beyond what I have read, but I reached out to CBS Sports Senior Writer Dennis Dodd, one of the leading college sports writers in the nation who also is a Missouri grad and lives in the region.

Good news for Arizona is that Missouri fans are unhappy she is leaving their school.

“I think this was a shock to Missouri fans and her staff, alike,” Dodd said.

“It’s curious that you go from an SEC program with a bigger and better budget to a Big 12 program that is having a unique financial problem right now. Arizona got lucky with this because I didn’t think she would be available for something like this.

“She’s a great fundraiser. She just landed a record $62 million gift for Missouri. And Missouri football is in great shape. … Her career arc is still ascending. She is being brought in to right the ship financially. I think she is going to do really well.”

Reed-Francois is taking a pay cut to come to Arizona but she has ties to Tucson – a 1997 law school graduate – and might have been looking for another opportunity after Missouri’s Board of Curators just this month established an oversight committee to monitor the athletic department, which might have been a sticking point for Reed-Francois.

“There are very few institutions that would entice me to leave an SEC athletics department with strong momentum,” she said in a statement. “The University of Arizona has tremendous potential and is an institution — and an athletics program — on the rise, and I want to be a part of shaping that future.”

Reed-Francois led a Missouri athletic department that operated with a budget surplus. She will bring in new fundraising and operating ideas that should help further Robbins’ goal of the need to “modernize” the athletic department.

Dodd said, based on what he’s seen at Missouri, she is likely to “ingratiate herself quickly within the community” in Tucson. And then there’s this:

“I had lunch with her when she got hired a couple of years ago,” Dodd said. “We ate in the training room. It was amazing to see her walk down the hallway, and all these female athletes would stop and say, ‘Thank you.’ At that moment, she was a star, she was a role model.”

So, let’s wrap up. In five weeks:

Arizona brought in a sitting head football coach who actually wants to be in Tucson and established enough immediate good will to retain the foundation of what should still be a team that competes for the Big 12 title in its first year in the league.

Hired a sitting athletic director with fundraising chops and a history of fiscal responsibility from an SEC school.

Kept the good times going with the Lloyd extension.

“That’s a pretty good place to be, considering everything,” Dodd said.

“Reed-Francois is well-qualified. Tommy Lloyd is going to compete for championships. Brent Brennan is going to keep it going. He’s a perfectly logical hire and makes total sense.”

Yep. It all makes total sense.

After all that, the Wildcats are in a good place.

Disaster averted.

Are we finally done here?

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Desireé Reed-Francois addresses Arizona Wildcats athletes on Monday at McKale Center (Photo by Arizona Athletics)