Arizona men’s basketball set to face peak Big 12 opponents: Iowa State and Kansas

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On their first tour through the Big 12 this season, the Arizona Wildcats have traded visits to glamorous West Coast cities with towns on the Plains, taken mostly longer trips and dealt with every sort of adverse winter weather imaginable.

That was to be expected. But so is this: The competition and arena environments have been better than Arizona found in the Pac-12, and both will likely peak for the Wildcats over the final two Saturdays of the regular season.

Already facing mostly strong competition throughout their new conference, the Wildcats now get a chance to face No. 9 Iowa State on Saturday, in front of 14,000 fans at the Cyclones’ renowned Hilton Coliseum and an ESPN audience. Former Iowa State star Tyrese Haliburton is scheduled to be on hand and celebrated for his Olympic gold medal.

A similarly atmospheric and adverse environment also awaits the Wildcats on Saturday, March 8, at Kansas’ storied Allen Fieldhouse.

They won’t be Saturday afternoons at Pauley Pavilion, with all the tradition an Arizona-UCLA game used to carry. But the environments will likely be louder, certainly more so than the Saturday games the Wildcats played in Eugene or Berkeley or even Seattle in years past.

They will be tough for the Wildcats, of course, but maybe also a lot of fun.

“Let’s go,” UA coach Tommy Lloyd said of Saturday’s game at Iowa State. “It’s going to be an awesome. We’re excited to go see what this deal is all about. Obviously, we’ve heard a lot about it, and I’m sure it’s going to be awesome.”

What they may have heard: That Iowa State has won 32 of 33 games over the past two seasons at Hilton Coliseum, where an average of 14,035 fans tend to maximize the building’s noise-friendly engineering.

Iowa State says Hilton Coliseum, named after a former ISU president who pushed for the construction of the facility that opened in 1971, was specifically built to hold in sound with a solid concrete structure, steel doors and fan seating that extends to just a few…

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/article/arizona-mens-basketball-set-face-233834517.html

Author : AZCentral | The Arizona Republic

Publish date : 2025-02-28 23:38:00

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