Arizona Basketball: 2024-25 season preview for the Wildcats

Schedule Outlook

The first season in the Big 12 won’t be easy for an Arizona team that didn’t regularly face many of those schools, but there’s plenty of action to worry about long before conference play. Their first two contests are easy mid-major outings at home, but the Wildcats travel to Madison to play at Wisconsin on November 15th and have a tough home game against Duke a week later against a Blue Devils team trying to avenge last year’s upset.

The Wildcats then head to the Bahamas, facing Davidson on November 27th to kick off the Battle 4 Atlantis. They’ll play two more games in the tournament the following days, and might see Indiana or Gonzaga in that third game.

Just four nonconference games remain for the Wildcats and all of them come in the state of Arizona. Three of those contests are much easier matchups, though December 14th will be a little trickier. The Wildcats head to Phoenix, facing off against former conference rival UCLA in their last big tune-up before league play.

There’s no such thing as an easy Big 12 schedule, though the schedule certainly does the Wildcats no favors in their debut season. There’s only a few schools that they’ll see both home and on the road and that list includes Baylor, Iowa State, and BYU, three teams ranked in the preseason polls. Honestly, every road game is a challenge in this conference, starting from their first one at Cincinnati in early January.

Among other notable parts of their league schedule, they will get a pair of matchups with Arizona State and actually host both Colorado and Utah, the other teams that bailed on the Pac-12 with them. Their game against Houston comes February 15th in Tucson, but the regular season ends at Kansas on March 8th. Senior Night is four days earlier against the Sun Devils.