Brent Brennan doesn’t look like a coach sitting on the edge this fall. He looks like a coach with something better: a real chance to show what Arizona can become under him.
That’s the promise of Year 3 in Tucson. Last season, Brennan may have been coaching for his job. This season, he may be coaching for his future.
College football never makes things simple. With the way rosters turn over and resources can reshape a team overnight, every year has a little bit of one-off energy to it. But Arizona’s recent history keeps pointing back to the same place: the third season is where a coach starts to reveal who he really is.
Dick Tomey’s 1989 team won eight games and reached the first bowl of his tenure. Mike Stoops got Arizona to six wins in 2006, which was a notable step at the time.
Rich Rodriguez’s third year, in 2014, produced a Pac-12 South title and a trip to the Fiesta Bowl. Jedd Fisch’s third season ended with 10 wins and an Alamo Bowl victory in 2023.
There’s a pattern there, even if it isn’t a perfect one. By Year 3, a coach usually has his system in place and, just as important, a roster that looks more like his roster. Some of those players may have arrived before him, but by then the team is supposed to reflect his hand.
Rodriguez is the only one in that group who was coming off a bowl season in Year 3, which makes Brennan a little different from the rest. He’s coming off a nine-win season, and that alone changes the conversation.
Still, this feels like a season that could set the tone for what comes next.
A lot lines up for Arizona. The schedule gives the Wildcats seven home games against five road trips, and at this moment they’d probably be favored in all but a few of them. The opener isn’t exactly a breeze, but it does set up a chance to get rolling early and make the later games at Texas Tech and against Utah carry more weight.
The staff is back in place, too. Offensive coordinator Seth Doege and defensive coordinator Danny Gonzales both return from last year’s group, giving Brennan continuity where it matters most.
And then there’s the quarterback situation, which is as good as any team in the Big 12 can claim. Arizona has a fifth-year senior in Noah Fifita, a quarterback who knows the system and already has First-Team All-Big 12 honors on his résumé.
He’ll have help, too. Tre Spivey, Chris Hunter and Giovanni Richardson are back at receiver, the running back room looks solid, and the Wildcats added a batch of tight ends through the transfer portal.
If the offensive line does its part, Arizona should have enough to move the ball and put points on the board.
Defensively, there’s more work to do. The Wildcats lost multiple members of the secondary to the NFL Draft, which creates obvious questions. But they also return enough talent and spent plenty of time working the portal to rebuild that side of the ball, and there’s no reason to think Gonzales won’t find a way to make it work.
The problem for Brennan is not what Arizona has in front of it. It’s what Arizona has done before.
This program has a habit of making a good season feel isolated. The 1998 Holiday Bowl team followed 12 wins with only six the next year.
The 10-win 2014 Pac-12 South champions dropped to seven wins. The 10-win Alamo Bowl team fell all the way to four, though that came with a surprise coaching change in between.
Arizona hasn’t put together back-to-back bowl-eligible seasons since 2014 and 2015. And those weren’t elite years. They were just consecutive seasons of clearing the six-win bar.
The recent coaching history isn’t much gentler. Kevin Sumlin and John Mackovic are the last two Arizona coaches who never made it to Year 4.
Sumlin’s third season was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic, while Mackovic was fired during his third year because of reasons. Neither one had much success in Tucson, so the endings weren’t exactly shocking.
But even for them, that third season mattered.
That’s why Brennan’s third year carries so much weight.
A complete collapse would be the only thing that really pushes the conversation toward a change, and that’s not where Arizona is right now. That’s the good news. The real question is different: not whether Brennan can coach the Wildcats, but how high he can take them.
Maybe he ends up as the kind of coach who keeps Arizona respectable, year after year, without ever breaking through much beyond that. That would be fine.
Maybe he becomes the latest example of how hard it is to sustain success in Tucson. That would be familiar.
Or maybe this is the year when everything clicks, the roster fits, the system hums, and Brennan proves he can build something bigger than a good season.
That’s the version Arizona is hoping for. And if history is any guide, Year 3 should tell us a lot.
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Arizonas Quarterback Room Carries One Huge Camp Question
Arizona enters training camp on Aug. 5 with the quarterback room still centered on Noah Fifita, who is projected to open his final season as the starter after already putting his name in the school record book for touchdown passes and career yardage. The bigger picture for the Wildcats is what last seasons offensive progress can carry forward, especially after coaching changes helped stabilize the unit and give Fifita a cleaner platform to build on.
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Riley Wilson is also trying to carve out his place after signing with the New England Patriots as an undrafted free agent, adding another name to a Wildcats pipeline that keeps showing up on NFL depth charts. The next chance to spot some of those familiar faces comes with preseason games beginning soon, including the Hall of Fame Game on Aug. 6 in Canton, and Arizona fans will have an especially close eye on the Cardinals-Panthers matchup because of the alumni involved. [Read more 🡒]