Wilner – Arizona football outlook: After a breakthrough season, the Wildcats must avoid another downturn

Arizona’s season ended with a loss in the Holiday Bowl, but everything else was an indisputable success.

A team projected for the bottom rung of the Big 12 finished two games out of first place.

A head coach on the hot seat retooled his staff, re-established accountability and secured his future.

An in-state rivalry that tilted north was dramatically rebalanced.

It all suggests the highest grade possible for the Wildcats as we assess the season. And yet, there’s a complication: 2025 was a major success, in part, because 2024 was such a dud.

If the Wildcats hadn’t crashed and burned in the first year of coach Brent Brennan’s tenure, their upturn in Year 2 would not have been as surprising, pronounced or lauded.

The credit for winning nine comes with comparable responsibility for winning four.

Brennan is well aware of the mistakes made in 2024, when he took over for Jedd Fisch late in the offseason cycle and sacrificed culture in a desperate attempt to keep players from entering the transfer portal.

In fact, he spoke publicly about “kissing everyone’s ass, asking them to stay” — and the poor chemistry that followed —  before the 2025 season.

The subsequent clean-up, which included major changes to the coaching staff, shrewd additions from the transfer portal and higher standards for accountability, resulted in a great leap forward and the Wildcats’ third bowl appearance in the past decade.

Can it continue?

The Wildcats will undoubtedly have their sights set on the Big 12 championship, and there’s nothing wrong with aiming high. But Arizona needs something more rudimentary: It needs consistency.

Few programs anywhere have endured as many twists and turns in recent years as the Wildcats, from the collapse in the final season under Kevin Sumlin to the stunning ascent under Fisch to the unexpected implosion and then rapid recovery under Brennan.

Arizona has produced a four-game swing (at minimum) in each of the past four years:

2021: 1-11
2022: 5-7
2023: 10-3
2024: 4-8
2025: 9-4

That’s enough to induce permanent motion sickness. And it certainly isn’t ideal for ticket sales, roster construction, staff retention, and media exposure.

From our vantage point, the Wildcats should land on the high side of .500 next fall unless they get on the wrong side of the football gods. (They haven’t produced back-to-back winning seasons since 2014-15.)

The coordinators who played a vital role in the turnaround, Seth Doege (offense) and Danny Gonzalez (defense), are set to return.

So is Noah Fifita, the reigning first-team all-Big 12 quarterback.

The non-conference schedule is more than manageable with NAU and Northern Illinois at home and Washington State on the road.

And the conference schedule seemingly favors Arizona, which hosts three of the Big 12’s best programs (Arizona State, Iowa State and Utah) and only plays two on the road (Texas Tech and BYU).

Put another way: The road to seven wins — to another bowl berth, to a modicum of consistency — is wide and smooth.

At least, that’s how it appears 236 days before the first kickoff.

In the Big 12, very little unfolds as expected. The Wildcats are bound to face a few twists that seem entirely reasonable and a few that cannot be imagined at this early stage.

The teams best equipped to navigate the tumult are those with a returning head coach, quarterback, offensive coordinator and defensive coordinator.

Those four pillars are in place in Tucson.

At least one is not in place at Arizona State (missing piece: quarterback), Utah (head coach and coordinators), BYU (defensive coordinator), Texas Tech (quarterback), TCU (offensive coordinator, quarterback), Cincinnati (defensive coordinator, quarterback) and Iowa State (everything).

It seems the risk mitigation calculation favors Arizona.

That doesn’t come close to guaranteeing a conference title or high-level bowl bid.

After all, the Sun Devils had their four pillars in place last summer and finished off the pace in the conference race.

But it does give the Wildcats a vastly better chance to finally, after years of highs and lows, gain valuable traction.

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