As Tommy Lloyd weighed UNC offer, an Arizona walk-on — the AD's son and potential future coach's agent — saw it from all sides

INDIANAPOLIS — As the drama around coach Tommy Lloyd’s future extended into Final Four week, there was one person in the Wildcats’ locker room who understood how all this works. It’s the athletic director’s son, whose résumé includes a line that gives him an even more incisive view into the sometimes uncomfortable business of college sports: Intern for super agent Jimmy Sexton. “I’d seen it from my mom’s perspective for years,” said Jackson Francois, whose mother Desiree Reed-Francois left Missouri to become Arizona’s AD in 2024.

“And then you’re like, ‘Oh, wow. This is why he’s so good at his job. ’” Of all the unique dynamics at play in Arizona’s first trip to the Final Four in 25 years, this has been arguably the strangest: As North Carolina pursued Lloyd up until his decision Friday to sign a contract extension , speculation about whether Lloyd and Reed-Francois had a contentious working relationship took center stage in the public discourse about their ongoing contract negotiations.

Caught in the middle was Jackson Francois, who became a walk-on for the Wildcats shortly after his mother took the job. Though he’s undecided which end of the sports business spectrum his career will take him — coach, athletic administrator and agent are all on the table — he knows what leverage looks like. When he went to Nashville last summer to work for the Sexton-led coaching division at Creative Artists Agency, he learned from the best.

“Jackson did a great job for us,” Sexton told Yahoo Sports. “He was very inquisitive. He worked on several projects with our basketball analytics and research people.