What Lute Olson did to build Arizona should never go overlooked or underappreciated

Lute Olson made Arizona what it is in this moment. People forget that, and they shouldn't. So in honor of his memory, we'll talk through it all today.

Today, Arizona is considered one of the best college basketball programs in the country.

They may not be what we thought they were five years ago, before Sean Miller got himself mixed up in this mess with Christian Dawkins, and the program has taken a step back from where it was during the peak of the Lute Olson era, but the Wildcats are still perennially a top 25 team with expectations as high as any program in the Pac-12. 

That is all true today.

That was not the case 37 years ago.

The date was Sunday, March 27th, 1983. Iowa was just two days removed from a loss in the Sweet 16, their fifth straight trip to the NCAA tournament, and three years removed from the program’s third trip to the Final Four. Arizona, on the other hand, was coming off of a disastrous 4-24 season where the program had won just a single Pac-10 game. They had, in program history, reached just three total NCAA tournaments.

And it was late on that Sunday night that Olson accepted the head coaching for the Arizona Wildcats.

It was a one-year deal.

Worth all of $64,000.

He was 48 years old at the time, and he would spend the next 24 years of his life in that same job. It would be the last place that he worked before retiring.

“When the time comes to get out of coaching in five or seven or 10 years, you decide where you want to live, and we wanted to be in the West,” Olson said the day he was unveiled to the media in Tucson. He was a native of North Dakota but he had spent the more than a decade in southern California, bouncing around between high schools and lower level college programs. He was at Long Beach State before he left for Iowa.

“I’m not all worried about a one-year contract. That’s why I have this twitch in my right eye.”

Lute Olson died on Thursday. He was 85 years old. 

I never knew Lute. By the time I graduated college, in 2008, Olson had already coached his last game. I can’t regale you with stories about what he was like on the recruiting trail, or reminisce about blow-ups in practice, memorable press conference moments or share off-the-record quips that became fair game with the passage of time. 

That’s not me.

But what I can do is remind everyone of just how incredible it is that he turned that program into a powerhouse.

Arizona was irrelevant when he got there. This wasn’t a rebuilding job. You’re not rebuilding a program when there was no foundation in the first place. Lute Olson broke new ground. 

Arizona was 4-24 the year before he got there. They won eight Pac-10 games his first season. They went 21-10 and reached the NCAA tournament his second season. He won the league in his third season. In Year 5, Arizona went 35-3. They spent six weeks ranked No. 1 in the AP poll. They won their second Pac-10 title in three years. He reached the tournament for the fourth straight season, eclipsing the number of times Arizona earned a bid in all the years before he arrived. 

And he had reached the first Final Four in program history. 

In his 24 seasons at the helm of the Wildcats, Lute Olson won 11 Pac-10 regular season titles. He won four Pac-10 tournament titles, an impressive feat considering that the conference did not hold a tournament from 1990-2002. He reached four Final Fours. He made it to the 2001 national title game. 

His crowning achievement?

Winning the 1997 national title. The Wildcats were just a 4-seed that year, and they became the first team in NCAA history to win the title while beating three 1-seeds. They picked off Roy Williams’ Kansas in the Sweet 16, Dean Smith’s North Carolina in the Final Four and Rick Pitino’s Kentucky, the reigning national champions, in the final. 

No one thought that this was possible at a place like Arizona.

It’s one thing to be great at an establish program. Roy Williams is a legend, but doing what he’s done at schools like Kansas and North Carolina is one thing. Building a juggernaut in the desert is another. 

Think about it like this: Five years.

That’s all the time he needed to take a 4-24 program that had fired two coaches in two years and turn it into the class of a conference that was only eight years removed from John Wooden when he showed up. Olson took over in 1983. From 1986-1994, he won seven regular season titles. From 1984-2005, the only season that he finished outside of the top three in the Pac-10 standings came in 1997, when he won the national title.

It was a remarkable stretch of dominance made all-the-more incredible by the fact that he built it all himself. 

To one of the best to ever do it.

RIP Lute Olson, 1934-2020.