It’s almost the end of December and Arizona is nowhere near where it wanted to be. Ranked No. 10 in preseason polls, the Wildcats have taken unexpected blows despite their strong trio of Caleb Love, KJ Lewis, and Jaden Bradley. Coach Tommy Lloyd’s squad is in trouble and despite the mandatory break he has given to his team for Christmas, Arizona needs a miracle.

Discussing what’s going on with this team on The Field of 68: After Dark, Randolph Childress doesn’t even know where to begin criticizing. Christmas gifts? They shouldn’t get any. “On the first half of the year, you get nothing. We ain’t even putting a tree in the house…no gifts, no nothing. We just fast forward until the following year, that’s what we doing with Arizona right now with Christmas…We gonna celebrate New Year and then we gonna hit the reset button,” Childress says.

Early losses to Wisconsin and Duke should have pumped the team up, but it became a prophecy of what the season would look like. Going into the Battle 4 Atlantis tournament, the Wildcats renewed hope with their first-round win against Davidson. But that was all. Then followed back-to-back losses against Oklahoma and West Virginia in a worst-ever record for the coach, even with their former 5-star recruit Jaden Bradley.

“Where do you even start? This team was 10th in the country…how do you fix what’s going on in Arizona? I wonder how honest Tommy Lloyd would be if we were to ask him what’s going on, what is going on in his locker room, with his players right now,” asks Childress. The Battle 4 Atlantis tournament losses put them, for the first time in 14 years as well as in the Tommy Lloyd era, under .500. The Big 12 will not be won this way, and Lloyd knows it.

Childress does point out on the podcast, “I think Jaden Bradley has been their most consistent player on both ends of the floor, compared to some of these other guys.” Last year, Bradley was averaging 7.0 PPG, 2.4 RPG, and 2.0 APG during the regular season and was even better in the NCAA tournament. His comeback was important for Arizona and while the former Alabama player has been consistent this season even in a rough nonconference schedule, the rest of the team needs to match with him too.

As Rob Dauster says on The Field of 68: After Dark, he’s not a point guard but he can defend. His influence should help the team but for now, the coach has ordered a strict rest.

Tommy Lloyd’s “homework” for Arizona Wildcats this Christmas break

When the trip to the Bahamas ended in disaster for the Wildcats, Tommy Lloyd had said the squad would head back to Tucson and figure out what was not working for them. They had a break to rest and recover and “do some soul searching, ” as the coach put it, and he wants the team to do it again.

Per Bruce Pascoe of The Arizona Daily Star, Lloyd said recently before his team went into the holidays, “Rest, relax, love your family, hang out. That’s the homework. Get hungry. Get hungry because we know when we come back — we’re excited to be starting this Big 12 thing we’ve been talking about for about 20 months. We’re fired up.”

The non-conference schedule should be put behind for now and focus on January because Big 12 opponents are now coming. Selection Sunday won’t be far after that and if the Wildcats want to survive, they will have to win more than lose.