Arizona football has a chance this week to prove that the feel-good buzz around Brent Brennan’s team is more than a short burst of optimism.
That conversation naturally drifts back to Rich Rodriguez, because those were the last years when Arizona consistently felt dangerous. From 2012 through 2017, Rodriguez’s teams won five bowl games, claimed a Pac-12 South Division title, pulled off plenty of upsets and finished 43-35. Coming after the rough close to the Mike Stoops era, that stretch gave Wildcats fans something real to enjoy: energy, production and enough wins to make the ride worthwhile.
Now, almost nine years after Arizona moved on from Rodriguez, the Wildcats are about to see him from the other sideline when they travel to West Virginia. And while that reunion matters, it’s not the biggest reason this game has so much weight attached to it.
The bigger question is whether Arizona is actually turning the corner.
The answer, for now, is hopefully. And that depends on what you expect Arizona football to be.
If your standard is conference and national title contention, the last several years have been a grind. If you’re satisfied with a program that is competitive, well-coached and winning enough to matter, then the present looks a lot better.
The numbers tell the story. Arizona went 42-54 after Rodriguez, a stretch that included Kevin Sumlin’s disaster and Jedd Fisch’s tenure, which you can decide how to describe on your own.
Brennan has at least stabilized things. Last week’s win over Cincinnati stood out as one of his best, with the Wildcats turning in a complete team effort that suggested the roster he and his staff built belongs in the upper tier of the Big 12.
That’s why Saturday’s trip to West Virginia matters so much.
Arizona faces an early kickoff after a cross-country trip, and it’s going against a dynamic offense. The Wildcats are about a field goal favorite, which hardly makes this a safe bet. They also won’t have their top three wide receivers or their No. 1 tight end, which makes the challenge even trickier.
Still, if Arizona is truly what last week suggested, it should be able to handle it.
“This is what I think: I think if you let that be an excuse, it will be,” Arizona coach Brent Brennan said about the time zone difference. “I think if you let going on the road be an excuse, it will be.
“So we’re not in the excuse-making business. We’re in attacking the challenge ahead of us, which is playing a good West Virginia team at their place on Saturday at 9 a.m. Arizona time.”
It’s the kind of answer coaches give when they want the focus on the task, not the circumstances. But Arizona also has to back that up. If the Wildcats can go on the road and win in that spot, it would add another strong piece of evidence that this team is legitimate.
That matters because Arizona has not exactly been built for sustained success lately. The program’s last consecutive winning seasons came in 2014 and 2015, and the stop-and-start nature of everything since then has made momentum hard to keep. Fans have seen enough false starts to know better than to get carried away too early.
But history doesn’t get to write the ending by itself.
So maybe the smarter move right now is to appreciate where Arizona football stands. If these really are the good old days, nobody wants to realize it only after they’re gone.
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