“You’ve Got To Figure This Out”: Leadership Autonomy In March Madness

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA - MARCH 28: The Arizona Wildcats celebrate after defeating the Purdue Boilermakers 79-64 in the Elite Eight of the 2026 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament at SAP Center on March 28, 2026 in San Jose, California. (Photo by Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images)

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According to the morning-after news, Arizona University’s men’s basketball, a popular favorite for the NCAA tournament championship which crowns the best Division One basketball team in the nation from a starting field of sixty-eight conference champions and regular season high-flyers, abandoned its coaching presence and left it up to the team to “figure it out,” in the second half of their “Elite Eight” game against Purdue. “Abandoned” may be too strong a term, but head coach Tommy Lloyd apparently told his team it was up to them to win the game, as they began the second half, down by seven points, and mindful of prior Arizona teams inability to get past this point in tournament competition in 2003, 2005, 2011, 2014, and 2015. According to The Athletic, Lloyd told the team: “Guys, the coaching staff and I are going to leave right now. You guys got a few minutes to talk among yourselves and kind of figure this deal out.” He added: “Let’s go kick their ass in the second half.”

What followed, again according to the The Athletic, was startling: “No diagrams. No screaming. No over-coaching. Just space.” Anyone familiar with college basketball knows that “over-coaching,” is part of its charm, but this sounds like “madness.” In fact, it’s happened before: four or five times at least, already this season, at Arizona. Lloyd credits their success --Arizona beat Purdue by fifteen points at the end of the game – to trust, ownership, and implicit accountability. To Lloyd’s mind, “The most powerful thing in a team sport is a player-led program. The coach, you have to help them navigate it, but when you can get the players to kind of own these moments, you are just so much better.”

This calls to mind a moment in Pyongyang, North Korea, in 2008, when the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, under the directorship of veteran conductor Lorin Maazel, witnessed the maestro, in his final appearance, stepping down from the conductor’s spot, after dedicating the Overture to Candide to it’s author and mentor Leonard Bernstein; inviting the ghost of Bernstein, dead nineteen years at that point, to lead the now conductorless orchestra, while several hundred million viewers around the world watched the moment. Conductorless, perhaps; but certainly not “leaderless.” As with the Arizona basketball team, the highly disciplined New York Philharmonic, professionals to the core, were more than able to self-organize even under such pressure and dazzle the onlookers.

It’s hard to imagine two groups so organizationally different than the Arizona Wildcats and the New York Philharmonic; yet, both have highly visible and engaged managerial control. Both are also characterized by “reciprocal task linkages,” in James Thompson’s typology of how work takes place. The Philharmonic orchestra has a conductor; baton in hand; have practiced endlessly, and typically play set classical pieces. Reciprocity in task performance certainly takes place, but typically under the conductor’s guidance. Basketball, on the other hand, exhibits fluidly-reciprocal task linkage, with players making decisions on the fly, although after exhaustive practices, and a game interspersed with coaching interruptions. In both cases, the leadership seems to be held by the conductor-coach, but in these two highly visible illustrations, we have autonomy vested in the performers, themselves; both exhibiting trust, ownership and real accountability.

There is good reason to believe that bureaucracy and top-down control, which were so important in the twentieth century to mass-production and mass-consumption, under relatively standard contexts, are beginning to lose their allure in the often chaotic and unforeseen market contexts of the new Artificial Intelligence era. We can expect reciprocity in team-oriented task-performance to continue to expand,; but what we are seeing in vastly different contexts is that leadership and performer autonomy are eminently suitable compliments for organizing in a world of abundant surprise.

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