Pac-12 Tuesday: 36 Years After Its First No. 1 Ranking, Has Arizona Basketball Earned Respect?

Arizona heads into a monumental college basketball matchup on Dec. 16 with No. 3-ranked Purdue, the Wildcats sporting the nation’s No. 1 billing.

How long that top ranking will last, we’ll see. But no matter the result of Saturday’s showdown in Indianapolis, a No. 1 vs. No 3 pairing is a huge victory for college basketball.

The sport’s in a great place through the first month of the 2023-24 season, with scoring way up across the nation and some of the marquee games to date delivering.

NBCUniversal is gambling on Arizona-Purdue attracting new subscribers to its Peacock service.

I admit, at first I bristled at this decision as the latest in a long series of television networks treating college basketball dismissively since the outset of the 21st Century, despite the sport continuously drawing a massive audience every year for the NCAA Tournament, and consistently producing regular-season ratings that outpace everything except the NFL, college football and all but a handful of the biggest NBA matchups.

I have since done a 180, however: NBCU brass view No. 1 Arizona vs. No. 3 Purdue as such a draw, it’s positioned as an entryway for new Peacock subscribers. It’s essentially the strategy ESPN used — successfully! — when establishing the network through the 1980s into the 1990s.

College basketball functioned as a reliable cornerstone for the network to such an extent, I dare suggest it may not have endured through its early days of Strongman competitions and powerboat racing without the mainstream appeal of big-time college hoops.

No. 1 facing No. 3 is an inherent draw. That the current No. 1 is a program with one of the more obsessive fan bases — sometimes for better, sometimes for worse — compounds interest.

Arizona and Michigan State drawing more than five million viewers on Thanksgiving Day, while opposite a Commanders-Cowboys matchup, is especially impressive. You can trace the passion for Arizona basketball back to the 1987-88 season, the Wildcats’ first breakthrough to the Final Four under the late Lute Olson.

UA spent portions of that season ranked No. 1, ascending to the top spot in the AP Poll 36 years ago this month.

But on that December day in 1987, Arizona’s program-first No. 1 ranking came with a bitter reality: There simply isn’t a whole lot of respect for State 48.

The following is from the Memories ‘88 documentary that chronicled the Wildcats’ landmark season:

I dug through the Newspapers.com archive to find the headline Steve Kerr read on Christmas Week ‘87. My favorite research resource has its limitations, however, and I couldn’t find the article in question.

I also don’t question the veracity of Kerr’s story one bit, in part because the Arizona/Arizona State mixes up in sports media still occur to this day.

One might be more likely to get the partisans in Congress to agree than finding common ground between Wildcats and Sun Devils. The Territorial Cup rivalry ranks among the most hostile in sports.

However, both Arizona and Arizona State partisans agree, and won’t hesitate to tell you, the misnaming occurs constantly.

It’s vexing in part because 1987 really should have been the national coming-out year for both universities’ athletic programs. In that calendar year, the Wildcats basketball program reached No. 1 in the AP Poll and Sun Devils football qualified for the Rose Bowl less than a year into its Pac-10 Conference tenure.

Navy, red and white. Maroon and gold. Wildcat. Sun Devil. Nothing aesthetically about either school is remotely similar.

Alas…

So long as Peacock manages to make it through its first foray into broadcasting a top 10 college basketball matchup without mislabeling Arizona, the NBC endeavor is already a success.