Those Zags, always the show-stopper.
They’re at it again, splashing up insane offensive numbers, cozying up to triple digits routinely, sending Drew Timme off to win national player-of-the-week honors on a weekend of 27-for-32 shooting.
This year, they started No. 1, were all the rage after clowning Texas and UCLA, and then receded from the national conversation by losing to Duke and Alabama. But they followed with an underrated win over Texas Tech before touching off the current run of ridiculousness against WCC teams.
They're 14-2. And yes, they’re No. 1 again.
Meh, you say.
It’s true that the Holy Grail continues to elude the Zags. Some of their achievements put them shoulder-to-shoulder with the blueblood programs, but they’re always the outlier, never having won a national championship.
Let’s allow that the Gonzaga administration, the coaches, the fan base and the recent rosters will perpetually lament not having won a title if it never happens. It’s the star atop the Christmas tree.
But, for however long it takes you to negotiate this sermon, let’s put aside what hasn’t happened and focus on what has. Beneath GU’s latest foray to the No. 1 spot are an array of numbers that shout perspective even as some fans scream for the ultimate banner.
Like: Beginning with Gonzaga’s first No. 1 ranking in 2013, the Zags have been voted to the top of the AP poll in six different seasons, a number equaled only by Duke. Kentucky and Kansas trail with four apiece.
This season’s four weeks at No. 1 makes it 38 weeks over those 10 seasons, good for No. 8 on the all-time list. And when Gonzaga chases down Cincinnati’s 45 in seventh, the six programs ahead will be Duke, UCLA, Kentucky, North Carolina, Kansas and Indiana.
Consecutive weeks at No. 1? Gonzaga’s 17 last year rates seventh all-time.
Courtesy of the NCAA record book, Gonzaga is 12th all-time in winning percentage (.931, or 95-7) over a three-year period and 12th over a two-year period (.954 or 62-3).
The Zags’ 61 straight victories at the McCarthey Athletic Center brings them within hailing distance of Arizona’s 71 at No. 10 in history.
There are the other standbys: The Zags’ 22 straight NCAA tournaments is No. 5 all-time, and its 12 consecutive victories in the tournament’s first round is history’s sixth best, behind North Carolina (18), Kentucky (16), Kansas (15), UCLA (14) and Kansas again (14).
Six successive Sweet 16 appearances is the longest ongoing streak and tied with UCLA for fourth all-time behind North Carolina and two Duke teams.
You get the idea. The Zags keep exceedingly good company these days. Now they’d like to separate from the crowd, elite as it is.
A couple of years ago, a provocateur tweeter took note of Gonzaga’s 20 straight NCAA-tournament appearances and single foray to the title game, and tapped sarcastically, “Pretty nice return.”
I took the bait and replied to the effect that the tournament is insanely competitive, annually.
And Saturday night, that’s what struck me about Gonzaga’s 91-82 defeat to Alabama. It was evident even up in the cheap seats at Climate Pledge Arena, which aren’t so cheap.
This was going to be the year Gonzaga broke through the glass ceiling and won its first NCAA championship. It had a premier player-of-the-year candidate coming back in Drew Timme, it had the No. 1-rated recruit in the nation incoming in Chet Holmgren, and it had significant other pieces like Andrew Nembhard and Anton Watson and a handful of gifted newbies.
This was going to be the year.
It still may be.
But Alabama showed the Zags just how fragile the presumption is. And how fragile the presumption is that Gonzaga will win a national championship in your lifetime.
‘Bama got into the lane too easily, it kicked the ball to perimeter shooters adroitly, and the flurry of treys thrust the Tide into a lead Gonzaga never could overcome. And Alabama defended, holding GU to 45-percent shooting.
It left Gonzaga with so many things to address: Dribble penetration, defensive rotations. Timme’s sudden need to force his own offense. The all-too-frequent evidence that the Zags got less than the best shot available. Free throw shooting, which was horrendous.
It’s too early to say definitively that this team can’t shoot as well as the primo 2020-21 edition. The latest Zags shoot threes at .340, that club shot .368. But Nembhard is at .281, four percent off last year, and the combo of Timme and Holmgren are only eight of 31, which means either they figure to be better, or they need to find something closer.
Against Alabama, Timme said, they came out flat.
Huh? In a parlay of the biggest building with the most partisan Gonzaga crowd possible in the nation, they came out flat?
Strange as it sounds, maybe Timme was right. I felt there was sort of an odd vibe of Gonzaga appreciation in the place, as if the occasion – splashy new arena meets college hoops monolith – was bigger than the competition.
‘Bama, where’d it come from? It lost to Iona. But then, where did Purdue come from? Yeah, it was No. 7 when the Zags were preseason No. 1, but now people are seeing the Boilermakers’ offense as unstoppable. And here we thought the long-term threat was going to come from Duke or Villanova or UCLA. But wait, there’s Calipari’s guys, and Kansas is perennially tough, and here’s Baylor, back for more.
Point is, there’s nothing guaranteed anybody, which amplifies something I’ve believed for a long time: The national-title talk around Gonzaga is overstated – not because the Zags aren’t capable of it but because it’s not necessarily the inevitable culmination of their generation-long ascent. Aspire to get to the Final Four, and if you’re good enough then to go 2 and 0, God bless you.
The good news for the Zags is, there ought to be a mountain of upside. Julian Strawther is just a pup. Nolan Hickman and Hunter Sallis are fresh out of high school. Rasir Bolton is adjusting to a new system. And Holmgren is just scratching the surface.
None of this even accounts for the expected bump when Mark Few makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts.
Gonzaga still has as good a chance as anybody to win the ’22 championship. It’s just that there are a lot of anybodys out there.
These days, there are a lot of things I don’t get. For example, I don’t get how conservative America decided to throw in with an oily, grifting con artist from New York.
My latest puzzler is the saga of Mark Few’s DUI arrest. Well before the Gonzaga men’s basketball coach’s season started, the turnovers have been piling up, seemingly with every entity that touches the incident.
You know the particulars. The night of Sept. 6, a fire truck in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho trailed Few’s vehicle and reported an SUV weaving to the city police. Few, driving alone, was subsequently stopped. He blew breathalyzer readings of .119 and .120, a healthy amount above the legal limit of .08, and was charged with DUI.
In mid-October, he appeared in court, and I loved his statement: “I plead guilty because I am guilty.” He was fined $1,000 and ordered to perform 24 hours of community service. He has expressed deep remorse, and knowing Few pretty well, I would imagine his chagrin over this to be massive.
That doesn't excuse the fact a guy significantly impaired should still have the good sense to make other accommodations for a ride.
The process of putting it behind him probably only peters out after he’s visited a few hostile gyms in the West Coast Conference. That was hammered home last week, when a couple of Spokane TV stations spent minutes of newscasts airing dashcam video of Few’s arrest.
In it, you can see things like Few declining a field sobriety test, lying to the arresting officer about how much he’s had to drink, and getting handcuffed. It’s prickly but I wouldn’t term it combative, and I suspect it’s very much like the vast percentage of such arrests. Few tries to explain his way out of it, as the overwhelming majority of us would do.
I felt uncomfortable watching it, as if I were peeping in a neighbor’s bedroom window.
Is Few a public figure? As public as it gets in Spokane. Are news outlets in the right to air such releases? Absolutely.
Does it show a whit of judgment to show the video AFTER THE CASE HAS BEEN ADJUDICATED? I don’t think so. (I assume the public-records request was made weeks ago.)
This will not be a universally held opinion. Deadspin, for example, said the footage of Few reflected “a drunk and annoyed man that acted like he could do no wrong, and that the police were beneath him.”
I worked in the news biz for decades, and there are things you know but don’t report – not because you’re protecting somebody, but because the things don’t rise to the level of what constitutes news. If, say, Few had cursed at the officer or done something else unbecoming, then air it. But running with the story about 10 days after sentencing is odd.
“We asked for the footage because he is a public figure, and we wanted to learn more about what happened in the moments before he was arrested,” the anchorman at KREM-TV explained as the station led its newscast with the video. “We wanted to see how the police report of Few’s arrest lined up with what actually happened in the video.”
No, what you wanted was clickbait, something sizzling on Spokane’s most recognizable figure (but not so recognizable that the arresting officer in nearby Coeur d’Alene had any idea who he was).
Then there’s the school itself. Few issued a statement three weeks ago announcing a three-game suspension. Except the games are Eastern Oregon (played Sunday), Lewis-Clark State – both exhibitions, and thus non-counters for NCAA record-keeping purposes -- and Dixie State Nov. 9.
That, frankly, seems almost silly. The elephant in the room looms as the Texas game Nov. 13, a big-time early-season matchup of national interest and the next game after Dixie State. Like it or not, the appearance the Zags are giving is that they’re trying to move mountains to have Few coach that game.
Two factors that no doubt have affected the administration’s course: A belief that Few will have suffered enough, and over three decades, he’s been an exemplary citizen and a pillar in the community.
A three-game suspension seems within the bounds of propriety, but not when two of the games are trifling exhibitions far off the radar to most of the public. So in essence, here’s what the school has done: By letting Few off easy – and that’s the consensus out there – the whole saga has taken on more ridicule. The narrative becomes, Few got a DUI, the school let him skate, and what a lamentable mess it was from start to finish.
In such suspensions, two thresholds need to be addressed. First, and narrowly, Few has to be called to account for his behavior. Second, the school must send a message that it doesn’t countenance missteps like this. Even if the school is satisfied Few deserves a break for a track record of being a good soldier, it needs to consider that other component.
Gonzaga threw this pass out of bounds. The operative philosophy seems to have been “Don’t mess with Texas.”
Meanwhile, in complete incongruity, the Zags begin the season ranked No. 1 in the country. What a hell of a promotional campaign it’s been.
Most of the chatter around Mark Few these days has to do with what he might have done to somebody else when he was picked up on suspicion of drunken driving the other night.
Once that was reconciled, I was drawn to the question of what the arrest does to Mark Few.
What broadsided me most was how un-Few-like this was. Not that he’s a saint, but that he rarely leaves himself vulnerable. Almost exclusively, those moments have been in the athletic arena, when one of his teams couldn’t score down the stretch or he waited too long to switch defenses. But he’s got a ridiculous 630-125 record as a basketball coach at Gonzaga, he’s been to 22 straight NCAA tournaments and two national-title games, so there’s precious little to nitpick.
A lot of that is because Few is intensely private. His down time is nobody else’s. Before transfers became such so predominant in college basketball, he would disappear for much of the spring. Gonzaga helped there, too. Those glad-handing May caravans that occupy coaches at big-time schools wouldn’t be part of his job description – and indeed, that understanding was part of the allure in staying put in Spokane when he could have gone damn near anywhere.
So it’s no surprise that he doesn’t do social media. He’s not on Twitter. He’s long disdained sports-media yardbarking, the pat conclusions and the lazy narratives. In 2017, when the Zags marched to the school’s first Final Four, he scoffed at the popular notion that he managed to get a monkey off his back.
All of this is by way of saying that with his DUI arrest, he just invited all that conversation, all the yakkers, into his living room. The cloak of invincibility came crashing down, and suddenly, Mark Few looks a little different to a lot of people.
He issued a statement, mentioning a “lapse in judgment.” A lapse in judgment? That’s what you say when you forget to bring sunscreen. This is more like an egregious, confounding lapse in judgment.
Somebody said blowing a .12 blood-alcohol reading (as documents report) might have reflected a third beer, instead of two, at dinner. Not even close. Somebody else lamented that Few didn’t wait an hour before driving, as if that would have dropped him below the legal .08 limit. That’s another figurative air ball, minimizing the reality that .12 is a pretty stiff number, one and a half times the legal limit.
So, the cold facts: It’s September and college basketball preparations are ramping up. And the coach at the school people are picking to win that coveted national championship just got busted on a DUI charge.
It’s impossible to know whether Few’s arrest could impact recruiting, which has been boffo lately at Gonzaga. At the very least, it puts him in the position of having some explaining to do.
We can say this definitively: Chris Standiford, the new GU athletic director, scarcely had time to straighten the photos on his office wall before this crisis hit – he had been on the job all of two working days. As introductories go, Few’s was not ideal.
I wondered whether this could affect what has evolved into a likelihood that Few makes the Naismith Hall of Fame. Bob Huggins, with a DUI in his background and more wins than Few, hasn’t been selected. It took the Hall so long to enshrine Eddie Sutton, also with a DUI and 806 victories, that it came posthumously.
But an old crony in my biz with a sense for the Hall selection process draws a distinction between Huggins, Sutton and Few. The first two acquired reputations as rogues, whereas this is Few’s first blemish on an exemplary career. He’s been a pillar in the Spokane community; he and his wife Marcy helped raise millions in the Coaches Versus Cancer campaign.
Few is a good man who did something colossally dumb. My guess is, this is a searing, traumatizing moment for him.
It may be that’s a good thing.
When Mike Roth walks out of his Gonzaga athletic director’s office for the last time Aug. 31, he’ll graduate to a lengthy, personal, to-do list.
At least he can mark another list “don’t-bother” – the 2021 athletic administrator’s mountain of challenges, including the thorny Covid crisis, the newly implemented name-image-likeness world, realignment and the more global issue of whether – and how – the NCAA will even exist.
“The timing of being an AD right now is not great,” Roth told me Thursday, a day after he had begun attacking bookshelves and a file cabinet to get the digs ready for his successor, longtime deputy AD Chris Standiford.
For a short while, Roth, with 24 years in the chair, has been the most senior AD in the country. He’s got Oklahoma’s Joe Castiglione by a year. Yet it’s not the years, but Gonzaga’s dizzying advancement, that has marked Roth’s tenure. It’s hard to imagine any more head-spinning quarter-century than the one to which Roth has borne witness and helped orchestrate.
For most of us, it’s almost as difficult to remember the flavor of Gonzaga of the late ‘90s as it is to recall the campus layout. You know, the one without the McCarthey Athletic Center, and the Patterson Baseball Complex, and the Hemmingson Center, and the Integrated Science and Engineering building, and the Volkar Center, and the new bookstore, and . . .
None of those things were even on the outskirts of imagination when Roth took over as interim AD back in 1997. Years later, he could say he and basketball coach Mark Few began to share a vision that the program – yes, Gonzaga – could win a national championship. But it was a troubled university and a scandal-scarred athletic department when he slid into his role in ’97, and the beliefs were slightly more modest.
“I believe I hoped I’d have a job the next day,” Roth joked.
Yes, it’s true that Roth’s timing was fortuitous; for 22 years, he was boss of a coach who went against the grain and didn’t seek out the next big job. Alone, that might have greatly altered the narrative of Roth’s career.
But there was considerable foresight at work, too. A little before the earth-moving Elite Eight run of 1999, the Zags had changed colors, changed logo, subsidized TV time on Fox and tipped season-ticket holders to the reality they were going to have to pay for seat licensing. Gonzaga was entering the 21st century, and it couldn’t be accused of rank opportunism when the product on the floor caught fire in ’99.
“We were crazy-lucky,” Roth concedes. “But you define luck as when preparation meets opportunity.”
The rest is happy history – the new arena, the brick-by-brick improvement and the prodigious effect of basketball on the university at large. Now Gonzaga attracts the top-rated player in the nation, Chet Holmgren, and the belief nationally is that, yes, one of these first Monday nights in April is going to belong to the Zags.
“I do believe we’re gonna win the national championship,” Roth said. “I think it might be this year.”
It hasn’t been easy, and Roth talks about leaving the manifold stresses of the job behind. One was the Josh Heytvelt affair of 2007, when the GU big man was busted for drugs and the whole Gonzaga story seemed in peril. Roth flew to Phoenix to explain himself to the board of trustees, a hell of a way to celebrate a 50th birthday.
But GU’s handling of the mess was adroit – discipline, yet a path forward for the player. Roth says that when the late mega-donor Myrtle Woldson bequeathed millions to the school, she cited its treatment of the incident as a factor in her generosity.
“You never know how the decisions we make or the things we do over our careers impact other people,” he says.
Yes, college athletics is fraught with abuse and excess and misplaced priorities, from cheating programs to overpaid coaches. But like a lot of us, Roth believes that at the core, there’s a fundamental goodness in the enterprise.
“I completely buy into changes that have to be made, I completely support NIL,” he says. “I just want us to make sure we don’t make so many wholesale changes that we lose college athletics, and instead of it, we just have some version of the G League. Or just some version of minor-league baseball or minor-league soccer.”
Roth, 64, decided on retirement about a year and a half ago, and it was kept quiet until an announcement in June, surviving an attempt by GU president Thayne McCulloh to talk him out of it.
That to-do list? Roth and his wife Linda love the outdoors and have a place up on Lake Pend Oreille. There’s bird-hunting in his future, an archery pastime introduced to them by a son, snow sports, woodworking, maybe even a return to trying to play piano, something he gave up as a kid when an exasperated instructor “fired” him.
Few long ago surpassed him as a fly fisherman, but Roth aims to make up ground. Referring to the extended, Covid-caused precautions at the 2021 NCAA tournament in Indianapolis, Roth says, “When I was sitting in a hotel room for 24 straight days, I sat there and tied dozens and dozens and dozens of flies.”
Of course, that stay ended in crashing disappointment for Gonzaga, and what a storybook ending it would have been for Roth if the Zags had overcome Baylor. Instead, swingman Joel Ayayi, one of the few who knew of Roth’s impending departure, threw himself into Roth’s arms leaving the floor and kept saying, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
No apologies needed, either that night or for Mike Roth’s 24 years.
For about as long as I can remember, the end of a Gonzaga basketball season has been accompanied by a paean of thanks from the coach, Mark Few, about what a pleasure it was to be around his team all year. How it was a joy to travel with these guys, how the egos were manageable, how they put the good of the group ahead of their own agendas.
Now, as school again convenes at Gonzaga and coaches begin to lay the spiritual groundwork for Few’s 20th season as head man, Few has what could be his greatest challenge ahead.
Or it may be no challenge whatsoever, so seamlessly do almost all Gonzaga teams come together for the greater good.
I don’t have any doubt that this will be Gonzaga’s most gifted roster in history. When, this week, I ran that proposition by Dan Dickau, the former Zag-turned-TV-radio-analyst, he mentioned the 2013 Kelly Olynyk-led club and the Jeremy Pargo-Josh Heytvelt-Micah Downs teams. And you can’t overlook the 2017 team that broke the glass ceiling to the Final Four, led by Nigel Williams-Goss.
“But I think what you see with this one, it’s being talked about by NBA people as being legitimately talented,” Dickau said. “In the past, diehard Zags might say, ‘There’s five or six pros on this team.’ Well, slow down, maybe there’s one.
“Now they’ve got (multiple) legitimate NBA pros on the team.”
It’s hardly a stretch to project that if Rui Hachimura, Killian Tillie and Zach Norvell decide they’re NBA-ready next spring, they all get drafted. In itself, that would be a ringing endorsement for the level of talent on the 2018-19 team.
Now comes another graduate transfer, Geno Crandall of North Dakota, to test the exquisite chemistry that seems to be part of the program, like the Bulldog sculpture outside the arena doors.
Gonzaga has had astonishing success with transfers – Dickau and Williams-Goss became first-team All-Americans – and in recent years, has been active in the hunt for grad transfers. In 2014-15, Byron Wesley came from USC to average double figures and not only make his first NCAA tournament, but help the Zags to their first Elite Eight since 1999.
Then Jordan Matthews climbed aboard, fresh from Cal, for the Final Four run, and his three to thwart West Virginia in the 2017 Sweet 16 ranks among GU’s biggest shots in history.
Now Crandall (6-4) arrives to an unprecedentedly loaded roster. Inevitably, every shot he takes means that’s one less for Norvell, or Josh Perkins, or Hachimura.
At some places, that could be a problem. But we’re so conditioned to hoops as a shared enterprise at Gonzaga, we assume it won’t be.
“I don’t think so,” Dickau says. “The guys you mentioned are all team-first guys. You look at Zach – for a freshman, he came in and had a huge impact. But there were games he realized, you know what, the ball needs to go to Rui today, the ball needs to get to Tillie. The same could be said for Tillie.
“When you have such a talented roster and guys who buy in, they know, they understand it’s gonna come back to them at some point.”
It's all about doing homework. Dickau points not only to GU's process of vetting a grad transfer's reason for wanting out, but well before that, a read taken on every recruit's love of the game.
"Unfortunately, something not enough people look at these days is, does this person love to play basketball," Dickau says. "If somebody loves it, it's going to be easy to get them to improve as a player, to buy into the team mentality to be in the gym, and be happy with two minutes or 40 minutes."
If Gonzaga's pros-in-waiting were ever to get antsy about how many touches they’re getting, well, Dickau figures it should help that Few’s connection to the NBA has grown in recent years, with summer work with USA Basketball, most recently in late July. Along with Villanova’s Jay Wright and seven NBA assistants, Few worked a national-team mini-camp under San Antonio coach Gregg Popovich.
Meanwhile, in Crandall, the Zags could have a piece that helps get them, and him, back to his hometown. The ’19 Final Four is in Minneapolis.
You could read his numbers at North Dakota as both impressive and a tad disquieting. Gonzaga, of course, knows first-hand the upside: Crandall gunned in 28 points last Dec. 16 and UND did everything but upend the Zags before succumbing in overtime on his way to averaging 16.6 points in ’17-18. But he was held in check by Nebraska and Creighton and had modest contributions of 13 and 12 points against Eastern Washington, a fellow Big Sky member.
Turnovers were a persistent issue. He had 105, against 114 assists last season, and the season before, 102 with 136 assists. There’s a suspicion that at times, he had to do too much.
Both seasons, he shot .503 and junior year, he kicked up his three-point percentage to .417.
Crandall saw both glory and gloom at North Dakota. Two seasons ago, he was part of a team that played in the NCAA tournament (he was second-leading scorer at 15.5 points). In his last season for the Fighting Hawks, they slogged to 20 losses.
He shot the ball a team-leading 356 times last season, but for comparison’s sake, Adam Morrison launched 617 in 2006 for the Zags. And Crandall had four teammates who logged 260-plus shots.
“He can make point guard reads and point guard decisions,” says Dickau, who has seen Crandall play several times. “He’s a good shooter and can shoot with range. He’s athletic enough to get into the paint. Defensively, as good as Josh (Perkins) and Silas (Melson) were at times, I think these two guys, Josh and Crandall, are going to have the same opportunity. They’re both long, physically strong and quick.”
Left unsaid is that Crandall is expected to match the Gonzaga unselfishness gene.
On the eve of an NCAA round-of-32 matchup in San Diego in 2014, Gonzaga coach Mark Few took the liberty of calling his program and Arizona “kind of the two marquee teams out West, yo-yoing back and forth the last 10 years.”
If anything, on that afternoon, his words seemed to take some chutzpah. The Zags, after all, were in a semi-rut -- as their ruts go -- not having cracked the Sweet 16 in five years. Meanwhile, Arizona, in its fifth season under Sean Miller, had already crashed the Elite Eight and Sweet 16.
Programs like San Diego State and even Washington might have disputed Few’s calculus, which seemed even more questionable when Arizona, top-seeded, throttled the Zags 84-61, in a game that didn’t even feel that close.
Designations such as best in the West, though, tend to have a short shelf-life. Today, with the prospect that the Zags and Arizona could meet in the Maui Invitational in November, there’s little doubt that Gonzaga has surpassed the Wildcats, at least until Arizona sheds the turmoil lately surrounding the program.
There’s no question Arizona has more cachet over the broad sweep of history. It has a national title in 1997, and in the past 30 years, three other Final Fours. Gonzaga broke through to its first Final Four in 2017.
What’s happened to Arizona since that 2014 night against the Zags is almost description-defying. In 2014 and 2015, the Wildcats lost in skin-crawling fashion to very good Wisconsin teams led by Frank Kaminski, each game denying Arizona the Final Four.
In ’17, Arizona was on the precipice of another meeting with Gonzaga to earn the school’s first Final Four under Miller (and its first since 2001). But it coughed up an eight-point lead in the last three minutes and lost to Xavier -- of all programs, the one where Miller earned his coaching chops.
Then came 2017-18, and if you can recall a more bizarre, star-crossed, confounding season in college basketball than Arizona’s, raise your hand. It began with three losses in the Battle 4 Atlantis, with swingman Rawle Alkins on the bench with a broken foot.
Before then, thunder struck with Arizona’s implication in an FBI investigation. Late in a season in which the Wildcats rebounded to blow through the Pac-12, an ESPN report alleged that Miller had been recorded on an FBI wiretap having discussed paying primo prospect DeAndre Ayton $100,000 to come to Arizona.
Ex-Washington coach Lorenzo Romar stepped in for Miller at Oregon, and the world assumed that Miller had coached his last game at Arizona. Well, surprise. He cast a defiant demeanor at a press conference and returned to the bench, while a couple of touted, committed recruits said thanks, but no thanks.
All that doesn’t even address a long-running, on-off story of guard Allonzo Trier’s suspension for PED use.
Ayton stayed on the floor. Miller, after his brief interregnum, returned. And when the Wildcats roared through the Pac-12 tournament field, there was more than a little belief that they were ready for a deep run in the NCAA.
Right up until they got blistered by 13th-seeded Buffalo, 89-68. I said then that of all the upsets by low seeds in the history of the tournament, it was the most resounding and decisive. (That held up at least one night, until Maryland-Baltimore County upended No. 1 seed Virginia.)
Meanwhile, the engine purrs smoothly at Gonzaga, which has been to four straight Sweet 16s, and where controversy is a player deciding whether to turn pro or stay.
“The mix just wasn’t right,” said longtime Arizona Daily Star columnist Greg Hansen of the Wildcats. “They had all these talented bodies. The responsibilities overlapped. They weren’t hard workers, they weren’t tough. When Buffalo just crushed ‘em, it was embarrassing. Ayton would disappear at times. It just looked like he (Miller) should have got so much more out of them.”
I sought out Hansen, who knows as much about Arizona hoops -- and the lay of the land in the Pac-12 -- as anybody, both to take the temperature of the Wildcats and to get a read on personnel in advance of what could be a Maui matchup with Gonzaga. The Zags open with Illinois, and Arizona meets Iowa State in openers.
The Wildcats will be virtually starting anew, with their top five scorers having departed. The turnover is massive, but it could be that success will depend on the arc of heretofore bit players like Brandon Randolph (6-6) and Emmanuel Akot (6-7). They combined to average 5.5 points in 2017-18.
“Randolph was really highly rated, but he played like he was scared last year,” said Hansen. “The same with Akot. He looked great in person but played like a deer stuck in traffic. They’ve got to have him and Randolph (develop) or they’re not going to be any good.”
Chances are, if you’ve heard of any of the Wildcats, it’s because one of them is Brandon Williams, the guard Gonzaga tried desperately to land in the spring before he re-upped on a commitment to Arizona.
Hansen figures a reasonable guess at a starting lineup would be Williams; grad transfer guard Justin Coleman, who averaged 13.5 points at Samford after spending two years at Alabama; 6-9, 225-pound Pitt transfer Ryan Luther, who averaged 12.7 and 10.1 in a season truncated by a foot injury; Chase Jeter, the 6-10 transfer from Duke -- another player the Zags recruited on the bounce -- and probably Akot.
Either of necessity or design, there’s talk of Miller implementing a system of slashing wings and guard-heavy basketball, as opposed to the recent reliance on big men. If that takes place, it would contrast with Gonzaga’s expected strength up front.
The great unknown, at Arizona and elsewhere, is the status of the much-discussed investigation of college hoops by the FBI. Has there been a pullback of the probe, after widespread criticism that there was overreach, or is the FBI working methodically and quietly, with more revelations to come?
Yahoo Sports.com, which has been out front with the FBI-probe story, suggested strongly Monday that it’s more the latter than the former, writing, “Many coaches and administrators have equated the lack of headline news with a potential lack of action. That notion has been greeted with a chuckle for those experienced with federal cases.”
Arizona athletic director Dave Heeke, a former lieutenant to ex-Oregon and Washington State AD Bill Moos, “talked about it last week for the first time,” Hansen says. “He didn’t brush it off, but he sounded like, ‘No big deal.’ If he’s worried, he gave a different impression.”
Who knows? Maybe that’s the residue of Arizona’s strangest season, where you’re best to take it one day at a time.
On the eve of an NCAA round-of-32 matchup in San Diego in 2014, Gonzaga coach Mark Few took the liberty of calling his program and Arizona “kind of the two marquee teams out West, yo-yoing back and forth the last 10 years.”
If anything, on that afternoon, his words seemed to take some chutzpah. The Zags, after all, were in a semi-rut -- as their ruts go -- not having cracked the Sweet 16 in five years. Meanwhile, Arizona, in its fifth season under Sean Miller, had already crashed the Elite Eight and Sweet 16.
Programs like San Diego State and even Washington might have disputed Few’s calculus, which seemed even more questionable when Arizona, top-seeded, throttled the Zags 84-61, in a game that didn’t even feel that close.
Designations such as best in the West, though, tend to have a short shelf-life. Today, with the prospect that the Zags and Arizona could meet in the Maui Invitational in November, there’s little doubt that Gonzaga has surpassed the Wildcats, at least until Arizona sheds the turmoil lately surrounding the program.
There’s no question Arizona has more cachet over the broad sweep of history. It has a national title in 1997, and in the past 30 years, three other Final Fours. Gonzaga broke through to its first Final Four in 2017.
What’s happened to Arizona since that 2014 night against the Zags is almost description-defying. In 2014 and 2015, the Wildcats lost in skin-crawling fashion to very good Wisconsin teams led by Frank Kaminski, each game denying Arizona the Final Four.
In ’17, Arizona was on the precipice of another meeting with Gonzaga to earn the school’s first Final Four under Miller (and its first since 2001). But it coughed up an eight-point lead in the last three minutes and lost to Xavier -- of all programs, the one where Miller earned his coaching chops.
Then came 2017-18, and if you can recall a more bizarre, star-crossed, confounding season in college basketball than Arizona’s, raise your hand. It began with three losses in the Battle 4 Atlantis, with swingman Rawle Alkins on the bench with a broken foot.
Before then, thunder struck with Arizona’s implication in an FBI investigation. Late in a season in which the Wildcats rebounded to blow through the Pac-12, an ESPN report alleged that Miller had been recorded on an FBI wiretap having discussed paying primo prospect DeAndre Ayton $100,000 to come to Arizona.
Ex-Washington coach Lorenzo Romar stepped in for Miller at Oregon, and the world assumed that Miller had coached his last game at Arizona. Well, surprise. He cast a defiant demeanor at a press conference and returned to the bench, while a couple of touted, committed recruits said thanks, but no thanks.
All that doesn’t even address a long-running, on-off story of guard Allonzo Trier’s suspension for PED use.
Ayton stayed on the floor. Miller, after his brief interregnum, returned. And when the Wildcats roared through the Pac-12 tournament field, there was more than a little belief that they were ready for a deep run in the NCAA.
Right up until they got blistered by 13th-seeded Buffalo, 89-68. I said then that of all the upsets by low seeds in the history of the tournament, it was the most resounding and decisive. (That held up at least one night, until Maryland-Baltimore County upended No. 1 seed Virginia.)
Meanwhile, the engine purrs smoothly at Gonzaga, which has been to four straight Sweet 16s, and where controversy is a player deciding whether to turn pro or stay.
“The mix just wasn’t right,” said longtime Arizona Daily Star columnist Greg Hansen of the Wildcats. “They had all these talented bodies. The responsibilities overlapped. They weren’t hard workers, they weren’t tough. When Buffalo just crushed ‘em, it was embarrassing. Ayton would disappear at times. It just looked like he (Miller) should have got so much more out of them.”
I sought out Hansen, who knows as much about Arizona hoops -- and the lay of the land in the Pac-12 -- as anybody, both to take the temperature of the Wildcats and to get a read on personnel in advance of what could be a Maui matchup with Gonzaga. The Zags open with Illinois, and Arizona meets Iowa State in openers.
The Wildcats will be virtually starting anew, with their top five scorers having departed. The turnover is massive, but it could be that success will depend on the arc of heretofore bit players like Brandon Randolph (6-6) and Emmanuel Akot (6-7). They combined to average 5.5 points in 2017-18.
“Randolph was really highly rated, but he played like he was scared last year,” said Hansen. “The same with Akot. He looked great in person but played like a deer stuck in traffic. They’ve got to have him and Randolph (develop) or they’re not going to be any good.”
Chances are, if you’ve heard of any of the Wildcats, it’s because one of them is Brandon Williams, the guard Gonzaga tried desperately to land in the spring before he re-upped on a commitment to Arizona.
Hansen figures a reasonable guess at a starting lineup would be Williams; grad transfer guard Justin Coleman, who averaged 13.5 points at Samford after spending two years at Alabama; 6-9, 225-pound Pitt transfer Ryan Luther, who averaged 12.7 and 10.1 in a season truncated by a foot injury; Chase Jeter, the 6-10 transfer from Duke -- another player the Zags recruited on the bounce -- and probably Akot.
Either of necessity or design, there’s talk of Miller implementing a system of slashing wings and guard-heavy basketball, as opposed to the recent reliance on big men. If that takes place, it would contrast with Gonzaga’s expected strength up front.
The great unknown, at Arizona and elsewhere, is the status of the much-discussed investigation of college hoops by the FBI. Has there been a pullback of the probe, after widespread criticism that there was overreach, or is the FBI working methodically and quietly, with more revelations to come?
Yahoo Sports.com, which has been out front with the FBI-probe story, suggested strongly Monday that it’s more the latter than the former, writing, “Many coaches and administrators have equated the lack of headline news with a potential lack of action. That notion has been greeted with a chuckle for those experienced with federal cases.”
Arizona athletic director Dave Heeke, a former lieutenant to ex-Oregon and Washington State AD Bill Moos, “talked about it last week for the first time,” Hansen says. “He didn’t brush it off, but he sounded like, ‘No big deal.’ If he’s worried, he gave a different impression.”
Who knows? Maybe that’s the residue of Arizona’s strangest season, where you’re best to take it one day at a time.
On the eve of an NCAA round-of-32 matchup in San Diego in 2014, Gonzaga coach Mark Few took the liberty of calling his program and Arizona “kind of the two marquee teams out West, yo-yoing back and forth the last 10 years.”
If anything, on that afternoon, his words seemed to take some chutzpah. The Zags, after all, were in a semi-rut -- as their ruts go -- not having cracked the Sweet 16 in five years. Meanwhile, Arizona, in its fifth season under Sean Miller, had already crashed the Elite Eight and Sweet 16.
Programs like San Diego State and even Washington might have disputed Few’s calculus, which seemed even more questionable when Arizona, top-seeded, throttled the Zags 84-61, in a game that didn’t even feel that close.
Designations such as best in the West, though, tend to have a short shelf-life. Today, with the prospect that the Zags and Arizona could meet in the Maui Invitational in November, there’s little doubt that Gonzaga has surpassed the Wildcats, at least until Arizona sheds the turmoil lately surrounding the program.
There’s no question Arizona has more cachet over the broad sweep of history. It has a national title in 1997, and in the past 30 years, three other Final Fours. Gonzaga broke through to its first Final Four in 2017.
What’s happened to Arizona since that 2014 night against the Zags is almost description-defying. In 2014 and 2015, the Wildcats lost in skin-crawling fashion to very good Wisconsin teams led by Frank Kaminski, each game denying Arizona the Final Four.
In ’17, Arizona was on the precipice of another meeting with Gonzaga to earn the school’s first Final Four under Miller (and its first since 2001). But it coughed up an eight-point lead in the last three minutes and lost to Xavier -- of all programs, the one where Miller earned his coaching chops.
Then came 2017-18, and if you can recall a more bizarre, star-crossed, confounding season in college basketball than Arizona’s, raise your hand. It began with three losses in the Battle 4 Atlantis, with swingman Rawle Alkins on the bench with a broken foot.
Before then, thunder struck with Arizona’s implication in an FBI investigation. Late in a season in which the Wildcats rebounded to blow through the Pac-12, an ESPN report alleged that Miller had been recorded on an FBI wiretap having discussed paying primo prospect DeAndre Ayton $100,000 to come to Arizona.
Ex-Washington coach Lorenzo Romar stepped in for Miller at Oregon, and the world assumed that Miller had coached his last game at Arizona. Well, surprise. He cast a defiant demeanor at a press conference and returned to the bench, while a couple of touted, committed recruits said thanks, but no thanks.
All that doesn’t even address a long-running, on-off story of guard Allonzo Trier’s suspension for PED use.
Ayton stayed on the floor. Miller, after his brief interregnum, returned. And when the Wildcats roared through the Pac-12 tournament field, there was more than a little belief that they were ready for a deep run in the NCAA.
Right up until they got blistered by 13th-seeded Buffalo, 89-68. I said then that of all the upsets by low seeds in the history of the tournament, it was the most resounding and decisive. (That held up at least one night, until Maryland-Baltimore County upended No. 1 seed Virginia.)
Meanwhile, the engine purrs smoothly at Gonzaga, which has been to four straight Sweet 16s, and where controversy is a player deciding whether to turn pro or stay.
“The mix just wasn’t right,” said longtime Arizona Daily Star columnist Greg Hansen of the Wildcats. “They had all these talented bodies. The responsibilities overlapped. They weren’t hard workers, they weren’t tough. When Buffalo just crushed ‘em, it was embarrassing. Ayton would disappear at times. It just looked like he (Miller) should have got so much more out of them.”
I sought out Hansen, who knows as much about Arizona hoops -- and the lay of the land in the Pac-12 -- as anybody, both to take the temperature of the Wildcats and to get a read on personnel in advance of what could be a Maui matchup with Gonzaga. The Zags open with Illinois, and Arizona meets Iowa State in openers.
The Wildcats will be virtually starting anew, with their top five scorers having departed. The turnover is massive, but it could be that success will depend on the arc of heretofore bit players like Brandon Randolph (6-6) and Emmanuel Akot (6-7). They combined to average 5.5 points in 2017-18.
“Randolph was really highly rated, but he played like he was scared last year,” said Hansen. “The same with Akot. He looked great in person but played like a deer stuck in traffic. They’ve got to have him and Randolph (develop) or they’re not going to be any good.”
Chances are, if you’ve heard of any of the Wildcats, it’s because one of them is Brandon Williams, the guard Gonzaga tried desperately to land in the spring before he re-upped on a commitment to Arizona.
Hansen figures a reasonable guess at a starting lineup would be Williams; grad transfer guard Justin Coleman, who averaged 13.5 points at Samford after spending two years at Alabama; 6-9, 225-pound Pitt transfer Ryan Luther, who averaged 12.7 and 10.1 in a season truncated by a foot injury; Chase Jeter, the 6-10 transfer from Duke -- another player the Zags recruited on the bounce -- and probably Akot.
Either of necessity or design, there’s talk of Miller implementing a system of slashing wings and guard-heavy basketball, as opposed to the recent reliance on big men. If that takes place, it would contrast with Gonzaga’s expected strength up front.
The great unknown, at Arizona and elsewhere, is the status of the much-discussed investigation of college hoops by the FBI. Has there been a pullback of the probe, after widespread criticism that there was overreach, or is the FBI working methodically and quietly, with more revelations to come?
Yahoo Sports.com, which has been out front with the FBI-probe story, suggested strongly Monday that it’s more the latter than the former, writing, “Many coaches and administrators have equated the lack of headline news with a potential lack of action. That notion has been greeted with a chuckle for those experienced with federal cases.”
Arizona athletic director Dave Heeke, a former lieutenant to ex-Oregon and Washington State AD Bill Moos, “talked about it last week for the first time,” Hansen says. “He didn’t brush it off, but he sounded like, ‘No big deal.’ If he’s worried, he gave a different impression.”
Who knows? Maybe that’s the residue of Arizona’s strangest season, where you’re best to take it one day at a time.
Oregon State’s inspiring -- no, after a foul pop that couldn’t find a glove, make it mind-frying -- march to a national baseball championship got me to thinking: Of the athletic programs I was around in 45 years of sweating deadlines and jousting with editors at three Northwest newspapers, which are the most unlikely, improbable, you-gotta-be-kidding accomplishments by those teams?
It’s said that nothing about sports resonates quite like a season, or a succession of them, that comes out of the blue, and I’d buy that. If the ’95 Mariners, for instance, had surged to the AL West lead in April and held it most of the season . . . sure, their fans would have been appreciative, but it wouldn’t have attained nearly the cachet as it unspooled, with Ken Griffey Jr. sitting out a long stretch with a broken hand, eventually the rundown of the Angels with a whole cast of varying leading lights, and essentially the salvage of baseball in Seattle.
I came up with three sagas that deserve scrutiny. (Maybe there are more, but they’re obfuscated by too many IPAs in dimly lit dives.) My candidates are: Oregon State baseball, Gonzaga basketball and Oregon football.
If you want to take issue with my conclusions, feel free. This is a highly subjective exercise, and indeed, one that’s impossible to quantify, a side-by-side of apples and oranges. (But hey, that’s what we do.) Keep in mind, this isn’t a measurement of which program, which entity, has the greatest name recognition nationally, even internationally -- I’m pretty sure that’s Gonzaga -- but whose story is flat-out the most unbelievable.
1. Oregon State baseball. Here’s some backing for my argument, a 2005 piece I did while at the Seattle Times putting into perspective an achievement by OSU.
https://www.seattletimes.com/sports/osu-squad-ends-world-series-drought/
And that was when the Beavers were about to make their first trip to the College World Series since 1952. The story details how the program was very nearly axed in the 1970s, accounts I remember writing.
Starting with that ’05 appearance, OSU has been to the CWS six times, winning three. Even that, as a stand-alone percentage, is impressive.
LSU, amazingly, won six of these things from 1991 to 2009, but today, you’re safe in saying there’s no more dominant baseball program in the country than Oregon State. To me, given the historical perspective, that’s beyond comprehension.
Little-known fact, unless you’re a Beaver baseball savant: This didn’t come easily for Pat Casey, the University of Portland grad who has engineered the rise of the program. The first 10 years he was at OSU (1995-04), the Beavers were 16 games under .500 in conference play.
2. Gonzaga basketball.
So let the debate begin. The Zags have been to 20 straight NCAA tournaments after having spent much of the ‘80s and ‘90s as a mid-level WCC program. Since 1999, they’ve been to an NCAA championship game, two Elite Eights and seven Sweet 16s. In other words, in half those tournament appearances, they’ve made it to the Sweet 16 or better. That’s breathtaking.
If you don’t think trying to compare Beaver baseball to Zag basketball is like attempting to throw a four-seamer coated with Pennzoil, think about this: You’d figure the Zags’ staccato consistency ever since that 1999 Elite Eight run is a plus for this discussion, right? Well, you could also argue that OSU’s decade-long travails in Casey’s early years there only serve to accentuate how unlikely that ascent has been.
How much does weather play a part? Never mind that basketball is played indoors; a kid choosing between Gonzaga and Arizona might like the idea of wearing cargo shorts around campus in January in Tucson. But weather has a much more pronounced impact on baseball, and one of Casey’s crowning accomplishments is in proving (again and again) that you can win in a drippy, cool climate.
What about proximity to recruits? The Zags seem more disadvantaged here, as the nearest significant talent pool is 300 miles away in the Seattle area (and, as I’ve documented before, even that has been a tough nut to crack for Gonzaga). Casey has flourished with a lot of Northwest kids, and some major pieces from California, whereas Gonzaga has had to go international to remain a major force.
How about roster instability, per the rules of each sport? Gonzaga has to withstand NBA early entries, while OSU benefits from a certain three years in baseball if an athlete enrolls. But baseball coaches also have the challenge of high school signees blowing up as seniors and opting for pro baseball. As well -- and this is purely my guess -- the college athlete who’s a moderately successful junior and is drafted by baseball is probably more likely to sign a pro contract than the basketball player of the same ability level.
Another imponderable: How competitive is the landscape around each sport? College basketball has more contenders for national recognition; witness Loyola of Chicago and countless others in recent years. So Gonzaga has to weather a serious storm in the 2018 NCAA tournament against UNC-Greensboro, whereas the Beavers have a relatively comfortable time with home games through the super regional.
And what about that playoff format? Baseball allows for some breathing room. Super regionals are best two of three, as are the College World Series finals, climaxing a double-elimination event. You hit a rough patch in an NCAA-tournament first-round game in March and you’re liable to be gonzo.
My bottom line: OSU baseball by a nose.
3. Oregon football.
You might raise eyebrows at this, but not if you were around in the 1970s, when Autzen Stadium was a dreary mausoleum sometimes inhabited by 15,000 people with nothing better to do. The Ducks were awful, and the facilities, other than the stadium itself, were sub-par. Coaches would stage position meetings in the runways and draw Xs and Os not on a whiteboard, but on the concrete walls of the tunnel -- latter-day cavemen.
So desperate was the overall picture that there was more than scattered opinion on the West Coast that Oregon, Oregon State and Washington State ought to be jettisoned from the Pac-8 Conference.
There was always extensive, chicken-and-egg debate over how much the wet weather impacted ticket sales at Oregon, and thus revenue, and thus resources. So much that there was an idea advanced that local lumber barons might finance a dome on Autzen Stadium. I’m not making this up.
Well, they never domed Autzen. But Oregon did have a succession of good football coaches, from Rich Brooks to Mike Bellotti to Chip Kelly. It had continuity on its staff, and it capitalized on two New Year’s Day bowl appearances in the mid-‘90s.
And that was before Phil Knight got involved. There’s no minimizing Knight’s impact, but it came after things had gotten rolling, and he took it to a new level. But he didn’t ignite it.
Over time, a lot of time, Oregon got good. And we haven’t seen the likes of that 0-0 tie in 1983 with Oregon State since (when it was raining hard, with no dome over Autzen).
In all three instances, the bad old days are over. Or at least, distant memories.
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