Arizona Board of Regents to vote on Adia Barnes, Tommy Lloyd contracts on June 10

Tommy Lloyd has been on the job for nearly two months, yet the 5-year contract he agreed to when agreeing to become Arizona’s men’s basketball coach has yet to be formally approved.

That’s about to change.

The contracts of Lloyd and women’s basketball coach Adia Barnes are on the agenda for the Arizona Board of Regents meeting set for June 10 in Flagstaff.

For Barnes, the new contract is actually the second she’s received this year. In April the ABOR approved a 5-year, $3.345 million contract, an increase of 34 percent from the deal she’d been working on. But that deal was negotiated at the outset of the NCAA Tournament, before Barnes led the Wildcats to the national championship game in San Antonio.

That run put her in the sights of several major women’s programs looking for new coaches, including Baylor, which lost Hall of Fame coach Kim Mulkey to LSU. This resulted in Arizona offering Barnes a revised deal in early May that will pay her more than $1 million per season from the start.

Barnes will earn $1 million in 2021-22, $1.1 million in 2022-23, $1.2 million in 2023-24, $1.25 million in 2024-25 and $1.3 million in 2025-26. Her average compensation is $1.17 million per season.

The enhanced deal also comes with a major uptick in the buyout Barnes would have to pay if she left Arizona. She would owe $3 million if she left the school at any point during the first two years of the contract, dropping to $700,000 during the third year and $300,000 during the fourth year. The same numbers exist for her buyout if Arizona were to fire her without cause.

For Lloyd, the contract terms set to be approved by the ABOR are almost exactly what were announced prior to his introductory press conference on April 15. The former Gonzaga assistant will earn $2.9 million for the 2021-22 season, the same amount Sean Miller was set to earn for the final year of his contract, and increase $100,000 per year for an average of $3.1 million.

The only change is to the clause that was included related to extending the deal due to major NCAA sanctions imposed against the program. The original agreement had Lloyd earning an extra one or two years (at $3.4 and $3.5 million, respectively), if Arizona were hit with penalties such as a postseason ban, loss of scholarships or restrictions on recruiting days.

Now Lloyd would get that sixth year only if all three of those penalties were imposed, while he’d get the seventh year if all three penalties were imposed on the 2021-22 season and any extended into 2022-23.