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 turn...

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...

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 ...

“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 ch...

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 an...

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...

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...

This being the era of hot takes, we'll take the bait. Those Zags: If only they could shoot. Hot enough for you? OK, there’s supposed to be a kernel of truth in the hottest of hot takes, and we’re taking some liberties here. But, even as Gonzaga leads the nation in field-goal percentage at .554, the...

The conversation began with the obligatory smack chatter. “I haven’t watched you play a whole game,” Ray Giacoletti said over the phone to Mark Few following Gonzaga’s beatdown of Brigham Young earlier this month. “Holy s---.” “Well, whatya been doing?” Few challenged. “What the hell you think I’ve...

Heard a TV announcer the other night note that Gonzaga was No. 4 in the nation in shooting percentage. Which elicited nothing much more than a “Meh.” After all, two recent Zag squads – the 2019 Elite Eight team eliminated by Texas Tech, and the 2015 team ousted by Duke in the round of eight – led t...