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.
“Just put a quarter in me,” Mike Roth would say self-deprecatingly, in reference to his facility for waxing long in answer to media questions.
Well, Roth just announced his retirement after 24 years as Gonzaga athletic director, and it would take a lot of quarters to describe properly how GU has changed since he came to campus.
If 24 years sounds like a long time, it actually shorts Roth. He’s been at the school in various athletic capacities since the mid-‘80s, and he pretty much knows every paver on every walkway around every athletic facility in the place.
The continuity at Gonzaga – unparalleled nationally for the combination of athletic administration and men’s basketball – is slowly being chipped away, victim both of its own excellence and the years that brought it about. First, Tommy Lloyd, a 20-year basketball assistant, to Arizona, and now Roth, who did three and a half decades at Gonzaga. But nothing is forever, not Roth’s vision, high standards or simple willingness to call you back.
Born in Easton, Pa., he grew up in Moses Lake and followed a sister to Gonzaga, where he played JV basketball briefly when Adrian Buoncristiani was varsity head coach.
“I went in and sat down with Adrian at my request,” Roth told me several years ago as I researched for my Gonzaga book, “Glory Hounds.” I said, ‘Adrian, I want to play. What are my chances? Am I going to get to play?’ “
“No,” Buoncristiani replied.
That set Roth toward Willamette University and a college experience he relished. He would end up back at Gonzaga to get a master’s degree in athletic administration before a short stint as a grad assistant to basketball coach Jay Hillock. But his first real apprenticeship to his current job was director of the newly refurbished Martin Centre in 1986.
One can only marvel at the GU landscape then. The school played at the NAIA level in all but basketball and baseball. Only a couple of sports even had full-time assistant coaches – baseball and women’s hoops not among them.
Roth came to wear a number of different hats in athletics. One of those was compliance, and in that role, he assumed a tortured position when Dan Fitzgerald, the basketball coach and athletic director, was whacked for NCAA violations over mismanagement of department funds. Fitz was a dynamic figure with diehard supporters, and some of them were convinced Roth, initially replacing him as interim A.D., had to be complicit in Fitzgerald’s demise.
“There was a very, very small, vocal and aggressive group,” Roth told me. “I took some heat, more than I would have liked, to be quite honest. There were some personal attacks that were really painful.”
At basketball games, Roth would sometimes try to start a conversation with one of those Fitz loyalists and be met with stony silence.
Summer of ‘98, he and athletics survived a financial crisis at the school, during which there was a push to de-emphasize sports to NCAA Division III.
(Yeah, this is the same program that in the past five years, played in two NCAA basketball championship games.)
Basketball hit the mother lode in 1999, stayed steady and – unlike other one-hit wonders – found a way to build on it, brick by brick. Mark Few’s perseverance was paramount, but Roth proved an able steward of the enterprise, even if sometimes you wondered if he could be fully simpatico with a train roaring downhill. If ever that was the case, Roth could point to GU’s routine department-wide APR success in the classroom.
Around Roth, the landscape evolved dramatically in program advancements and facilities upgrades. GU has constructed two basketball-related buildings in the last 17 years and a top-of-the-line baseball park.
If some of the glory fell to Roth, it also became his purview to rationalize the athletics boom to wary Gonzaga trustees; you could almost feel the eye-rolls over the phone when Roth would reference such meetings on his calendar. Imagine the crossfire at one of those the weekend in 2007 when Josh Heytvelt got busted for drug possession.
Roth had another role as well. Few guards his privacy zealously and slips into a bunker, not to be rousted even during some basketball-related issues. In those times, it was frequently the Tommy Lloyds or Mike Roths offering up Gonzaga’s public face.
The Zags’ “hunt” for Roth’s replacement was a short one. If ever there was a no-brainer, this was it. Chris Standiford has been at the school since the early ‘90s, starting with his time as an undergrad. He’s been a low-key, behind-the-scenes stalwart.
About that Gonzaga continuity: There’s a fine line between the value of institutional knowledge and the danger of becoming stale. The Zags, with Mike Roth having overseen their transformation, seem to get that as well as anybody.
March 26 – not so long ago, right? It was spring then, it’s spring now. How to get vaccinated, and how to get everybody vaccinated, was an issue. It is now.
A certain diminished head of state was bellyaching that he got his office stolen from him. Nothing’s changed there, either.
But Gonzaga hoops . . . in the span of less than eight weeks, the Zags have metamorphosed into something different – something promising, something . . . yes, ominous.
Of course, we know that since March 26, the Zags crashed their second Final Four, won a game for the galaxies against UCLA, and then fizzled ingloriously against Baylor in the NCAA championship game. Subsequently, Tommy Lloyd, wingman to Mark Few over much of his 20 years at GU, left for Arizona.
By themselves, those would be momentous shifts. But it’s off the floor that Gonzaga has entered a stunning new firmament.
March 26 was the day that Hunter Sallis, five-star guard from Omaha, announced he would attend Gonzaga. On April 19, Chet Holmgren, the consensus No. 1 prep player in the country, indicated he’d be moving his precocious, seven-foot talents west from Minneapolis to the Zags. And then Nolan Hickman, another five-star guard from Seattle’s east side, threw in with GU over the weekend after having committed earlier to Kentucky.
Things that took years to happen at Gonzaga now materialize in the span of fortnights.
(This would probably be a good time to include guard Rasir Bolton, a 15-points-a-game scorer at Iowa State, who is also transfer-bound for Gonzaga, hell-bent to prove he deserves more than parentheses.)
This is exactly what Dan Fitzgerald, the godfather of Zag basketball, predicted back in the ’90s, when he got up from sleeping in his car on recruiting trips to sign a second-team West Alameda League standout who’d also made the honor roll.
Not so much. If Fitz, who died in 2010, would still recognize the place today, he surely wouldn’t recognize the personnel.
Suddenly, everybody wants to come to Gonzaga. Rumor has it LeBron James wants to end his career there. Giannis Antetokounmpo probably wants to go fly-fishing with Few. Nikola Jokic is intrigued by Bloomsday and wants to try the ribeye at Clinkerdagger.
This is crazy. This is bananas. This is 2021, and Gonzaga is assembling enough talent to rival an NBA expansion team.
There’s little doubt that this is a new Gonzaga, a different Gonzaga, bigger and badder and purveyor of possibilities once unimaginable on Boone Avenue.
And, let’s face it, something far less than that.
As we know, in some quarters there’s always been an impatience with Gonzaga, as if it jumped the velvet ropes of college basketball without blueblood ID. To those folks, it doesn’t matter how many straight Sweet 16s you get to (six now), or Final Fours. You have to win a title (although when that happens, they’ll likely stipulate you have to win another one).
The Zags haven’t yet won that title, having gotten to the doorstep twice before tripping. Naturally, that turns up the scorn, and the heat. Now, with Holmgren and Co. incoming, that temperature gets turned up to pizza-oven intensity.
This is what Gonzaga hath wrought: Anything short of a national championship, in 2022 or the very near future, will be seen as a failure. Of course, like the Zags’ recent recruiting success, that’s nuts.
But it’s the state of things in Spokane, where GU has orchestrated roughly this evolution in its golden age of hoops: Huggable upstart; dependable, steady if unspectacular force; high-level, Final Four threat; and now, colossus.
It’s a high bar. And one of the intriguing subtexts concerns whether the exquisite culture built by Few sustains any corrosion with the onset of recruits who might put less priority on a championship banner than being one-and-done. You know he guards that culture like it’s the nuclear football.
Indulge Gonzaga fans. In this wild, unfathomable realm, they can’t wait to see.
As a kid in the Midwest, my very first brush with college basketball was with the Ohio State Buckeyes, with Jerry Lucas and John Havlicek and Larry Siegfried and Mel Nowell. I believed they hung the moon. They beat everybody, usually badly. And when it came to the 1961 national-championship game and they lost as an undefeated team in overtime to Cincinnati, it was beyond my comprehension. How could it even be?
Sixty years later (good grief), I’m guessing Gonzaga faithful feel similarly today. How could something that seem so predestined end so poorly? How could a team that passed so intuitively, cut so sharply, shared so collaboratively, fall so nakedly to Baylor?
Largely, the Zags were dysfunctional against the Bears, and it was shocking to the eye. I couldn’t recall when Gonzaga was just schooled like that. Not by BYU last year in Provo. Not by Saint Mary’s in the WCC tournament in 2019, although the Gaels have their own understated way of spinning a web of superiority. Not at North Carolina in 2018, even as the Tar Heels put up 103.
There were times in this Final Four when Gonzaga energy seemed wanting. Baylor bludgeoned the Zags on the glass, 38-22, 16 of those offensive rebounds. UCLA outrebounded Gonzaga by six – this after a tournament in which the Zags outboarded USC by 12, Creighton by seven, Oklahoma by eight.
The popular narrative is that UCLA stripped Gonzaga of its bounce and emotion in the 93-90 semifinal screamer two nights earlier. We’ll never know. But when Duke upended unbeaten UNLV in 1991 in the national semis, it had enough to come back and finish against Kansas. In 2001, after Duke overcame a 22-point first-half deficit to Maryland, it summoned what it took to beat Arizona in the final.
But, Baylor. While the Zags cruised through February -- the undefeated story gathering momentum -- Baylor’s season skidded to a stop with a Covid outbreak. That, and two losses soon after, served to obscure the fact this team was a force otherwise highly capable of its own unbeaten season.
The Bears might have been the most formidable title-game underdog ever. They left the Zags to reckon with an 86-70 loss, a 31-1 season and a dream eviscerated.
By now, it’s obvious the bar is ridiculously high at Gonzaga. In this dreamy season, it almost escaped notice that the Zags made their second Final Four in four years – once a Holy Grail in Spokane -- so preoccupied were we at the pursuit of the championship. The six consecutive Sweet 16s, the 20 NCAA-tournament victories since 2015, those were footnotes to the grander mission. But the destination turned out meh. It was the journey, gamely forged in the rigors of a pandemic, that proved unforgettable.
A radio host in Seattle asked on Monday: Did the Zags need to win the natty to validate the program? No, not even close. The validation came a long time ago. Now, is there unfinished business? No doubt. Will Gonzaga be less than fulfilled if it fails to win a championship? Of course.
It can be a process. Mike Krzyzewski first took Duke to a Final Four in 1986, losing to Louisville in the final by three. He got to the Final Four again in 1988 without a title. And in 1989. And in 1990. It wasn’t until his fifth one, in ’91, that he won the big trophy.
People remember Michael Jordan’s jumper to win North Carolina the championship in 1982, but it’s often forgotten that was a first title over 21 years for Dean Smith, one of the greatest coaches in history, a guy whose breakthrough came in his seventh Final Four. A fellow who had once been hung in effigy on the Carolina campus.
Today, social media doesn’t countenance such procrastination. It doesn’t matter that the Zags ran a more gorgeous offense than I’ve ever seen, whirring, zipping, laying the ball in. The WCC doesn’t get them ready, Twitter barks. What did you expect?
The Zags will keep sawing wood, as Mark Few likes to say. Meanwhile, you hear the opinion that right now, in this moment, it’s Gonzaga as much as Duke or Kentucky that’s the college-basketball program of choice. Guys are lining up to join the program. It’s indicative that there’s been little public consternation over whether Drew Timme opts out for the NBA, because the Zags are likely to add 7-1 Chet Holmgren, perhaps a generational talent. And wouldn’t that be some one-two up front?
As they say, it’s hard to win one of these things. Once, probably even Coach K despaired over that. But it says here the question at Gonzaga isn’t so much if, but when.
The question for Mark Few curled out of Rece Davis’ mouth, needing to be asked yet somehow the uninvited guest at your party.
“Would it be a disappointment,” posed Davis Sunday on ESPN, “if you don’t win the national championship?”
Few parried the question, leaving us to debate nuance. Of course it would be a disappointment – especially if Gonzaga made it all the way to the 2021 basketball title game and came up short.
But would it be a failure? No.
It’s a pretty wacked-out station we’ve come to, this all-or-nothing, zero-sum reckoning for the Zags -- champs if they win it, chokers if they don't. Not sure Dan Fitzgerald saw this coming, back when the late Gonzaga head coach used to stage victory dinners for his staff as a .500 season was assured.
I guess you could say: They did it to themselves. They got to a national-title game four years ago, they’ve been to every Sweet 16 since 2015. This year, they outlasted Kansas, they found a way against West Virginia, they strafed Iowa and schooled Virginia. Since then, they’ve been playing against themselves as much as anybody else.
I’ve watched college hoops for about half a century, covered it for 45. This is the most pleasurable basketball I’ve ever seen, the most fluid, selfless, squeaking symphony in memory.
And Sunday, it was hard to find a naysayer. Davis and Jay Bilas picked the Zags to win it all. Over on CBS, so did Clark Kellogg and Seth Davis. Dickie V hollered his affirmation. So did Stephen A. Smith.
Such consensus is unusual. You probably have to go back to 2012, when Kentucky ruled with Anthony Davis, and to 2006-07, when Florida was dominant.
But today’s consensus is tomorrow’s crumpled bracket. Let’s not confuse the inclinations of analysts with certitude when the ball goes up. The tournament is fraught with peril, and it seems almost silly to have to point that out. Nobody is talking about Oklahoma as a threat, and this is a team that in seven days of January, beat Kansas, Texas and Alabama. And it has a probable Hall of Fame coach in Lon Kruger.
Somebody tweeted that Gonzaga’s path is so favorable, it likely wouldn’t be favored by less than eight points until it got to a title game. Are you kidding?
Speaking of wagering, the William Hill Sportsbook lists Gonzaga at plus-220 to win the title, which means a $10 bet wins $22 (and you collect $32). Which also means that the barstool debate of Gonzaga-versus-the-field tilts to the field, and fairly convincingly.
I’m of the belief that the presence of Iowa, Kansas and Virginia in Gonzaga’s region favors those teams the Zags have vanquished (assuming the Kansas and Virginia Covid problems are reconciled). Yes, the Zags will know they’ve beaten those teams. But the psychology lines up with the underdog. Moreover, think about this: Gonzaga has a long, long history of jumping on teams unfamiliar with GU’s offensive wiles in the tournament. In 2006, Gonzaga, a 37-20 start against UCLA (sorry to bring it up). In 2010, 22-7 against Florida State. In 2012, 27-10 against West Virginia. In 2018, 15-0 against Ohio State. Does that edge diminish in a potential rematch?
For months, I’ve felt a key to the Zags’ future in the tournament was Oumar Ballo. If the big guy could contribute 10 or 12 minutes in a pinch if Drew Timme got in foul trouble or tweaked an ankle, it could be pivotal. But Ballo has been slow to develop, and his February was a dud with a thumb injury. That means Few is left with a seven-man rotation, which cuts it thin.
Not only do the Zags have to think about Oklahoma and potentially, Baylor and Illinois, but Indiana. You know, the ’76 Hoosiers, the last team to win a championship by going undefeated. That's a burden that could get heavy.
For many reasons, it would be very cool for the Zags to get this done. It would be a grand culmination to one of sports’ greatest stories. It would set off a raging discourse about whether GU’s season in the outgunned WCC stacks up to Indiana’s ’76 run through the Big Ten. Against the backdrop of a world pandemic, and all its cruelty and inconveniences, it would be unforgettable.
It would silence those who like to deny Gonzaga’s legitimacy. In that vein, there’s something noble about the Zags heading into this thing undefeated, not only covetous of a championship but in pursuit of history.
They seem to be saying: Bring it on. Yeah, it’s a lot. But bring it on.
Far beneath the surface of anything that really matters in college hoops is the relationship between Oregon and Gonzaga. The Zags’ Mark Few, of course, is an Oregon grad, and at least during much of Gonzaga’s prominent years, hasn’t been a proponent of scheduling his alma mater. At times, the Ducks have been mildly receptive to the idea, but hardly gung-ho.
Here we are now in the weirdness of 2021, and for a little while, at least, there’s the vague specter of Gonzaga and Oregon meeting again, something they did early last season in the Bahamas as the Zags squeezed out a one-point overtime victory.
For Zagnuts, I’m thinking it was a good thing that Oregon came to life and ran down UCLA Wednesday night in Eugene, to take the inside track on the Pac-12 regular-season title.
The setup is this: Assuming Gonzaga doesn’t misstep against a No. 16 seed in the first round of the NCAA tournament, it obviously would prefer the best possible matchup for its 8-9 opponent.
That isn’t Oregon.
True, it’s been something of a fits-and-starts season for Oregon, partly due to Covid (it played one game in 26 days in January and February) and partly because of injuries – to center N’Faly Dante (out for the season) and guard Will Richardson (back since Feb. 4). But Dana Altman is renowned for his teams peaking late, and one can imagine a second-round game against GU – another Northwest team that gains more national acclaim – stirring the Ducks to their competitive ceiling.
Fact is, Oregon’s resume is relatively thin; it has only two victories against teams we know will make the tournament (Colorado and UCLA), and a third against Seton Hall, which is on the bubble. Thursday, even after the Oregon win over UCLA, Joe Lunardi has the Ducks as a No. 8 seed and Jerry Palm puts them at a 9 seed.
Oregon could advance, backslide or stay the same. Ahead are games against Oregon State Sunday and in the Pac-12 tournament. But given Oregon’s ascending arc – four straight wins, nine of the last 10 – and Altman’s habit of his teams making a late move, it was likely a good thing that the Ducks got past UCLA vis a vis Gonzaga. The guess here is that a couple of wins in the Pac-12 tournament would push Oregon up to perhaps a seven seed, maybe a six, no matter what happens against the Beavers. Alternatively, a victory over OSU to clinch the Pac-12 title, and another in Las Vegas, should keep Oregon clear of Gonzaga’s path.
All this is speculation, including the chance of Oregon, even as an 8 or 9, getting placed in Gonzaga’s region, and whether the Ducks would be a serious threat to end the Zags’ season anyway. Drew Timme would be a handful for Oregon (but so might Chris Duarte for Gonzaga).
I think Oregon might be dangerous. Best to let Baylor or Michigan or Illinois have the honor.
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