Had a long conversation late last week with Mike Roth, the Gonzaga athletic director, about the unsettled state of affairs in college athletics. And while he never addressed it specifically, I find myself wondering if not just one, but two legitimate shots at a Gonzaga men’s national championship c...

When news broke the other day in the Spokane Spokesman-Review about a home-and-home series between Kansas and Gonzaga in the 2022-23 and 2023-24 seasons, it was met with predictable huzzahs from Zag fandom. Kansas. While Zagnuts debate the qualifications for blueblood status, there’s no question Ka...

As I’m writing this, between sessions of thatching the lawn, the first basketballs of the NCAA men’s tournament were to be bouncing in Spokane. Thursday and Friday, the best two days of the sporting year, were upon us. Damn. If you love college hoops, you can’t help but be a little wistful. But it’...

My last dream on the night before Selection Sunday went like this: The office called and proposed doing a story on how the tournament might have looked, were it not wiped out. When I woke up, I realized that not only was there no tournament, there was no office, either. I left newspapering a few ye...

So you’ve wondered about those funky, end-of-October closed scrimmages that college basketball teams stage at neutral sites? The ones unfettered by media coverage, fans or fanfare? What must the atmosphere be like? Well, I guess we’re about to find out, to the deep chagrin of Gonzaga fans and the S...

Once the BYU students had stormed the floor, and coach Mark Pope had gotten done lavishing praise on just about everybody in the house wearing a “Y” sweatshirt, a thought occurred to me: BYU’s dominating 91-78 victory Saturday night over Gonzaga wasn’t a zero-sum game, as in the benefit to the Coug...

For Gonzaga basketball fans, it was an unusually enlightening Saturday. The Zags learned all sorts of things, starting with the morning’s annual basketball-committee bracket top-16 reveal, and ending with the obliteration of a good Saint Mary’s team 10 hours later in Moraga. In the morning, Gonzaga...

We’ve been hearing for years about what it’s like on the road for Gonzaga in the West Coast Conference. So I decided to find out for myself. Well, my...

A pro scout I’ve known for a long time lamented the other day the state of the college game in 2020 – the mediocrity of it. He said he wasn’t viewing it from the lens of pro prospects available, but merely the quality of play. If he were issuing grades, he said, the best teams he’s seen – and he’s ...

So Gonzaga is No. 1? Again? Meh. (If this website had a "facetious" emoji, right now I’d insert it.) I tweeted this earlier Monday: Honk, if back in 1980; or 1993; or 2012 even, you’d believed by the end of the millennium’s second decade that the Zags would have made excursions to the top of the po...