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Johnathan Williams III dispersed some hope around an anxious Zag Nation Wednesday, announcing he’s going to return to Gonzaga for his senior year after submitting his name into the NBA draft.
Some Zag fans had sensed the wheels wobbling on the program that forged a Monday-night date in April for the national championship. For them, not much of the news has been good since about the 38-minute mark of that game with North Carolina, and they were panting for a respite.
It’s not so much that Zach Collins left early for the draft, because surely, GU backers had to know he might heed mid-first-round projections. And it’s not so much that Nigel Williams-Goss also departed a year early. Anybody who knew a little about Williams-Goss, or witnessed how he made this Zag edition his team, might have known he could bolt. (My belief, written weeks ago, was that Williams-Goss would be gone, and that Collins was a 50-50 proposition.)
No, it wasn’t those early entries, not that they aren’t hugely significant. For some, it’s that the Zag brain trust seemed to miss an opportunity to capitalize on the 37-win, Final Four breakthrough and land some reinforcements.
To which I would say: It ain’t that easy.
Wing Elijah Brown, the grad transfer from New Mexico, visited GU but opted for Oregon. After that, Chase Jeter, a conventional transfer who never made it work at Duke, chose Arizona as his second home.
So, did the GU coaches repair to a Baja beach for six weeks after the loss to North Carolina?
Fact is, sporting history is littered with tons of examples of on-field successes failing to yield anything immediately significant with recruits. Rarely is a brief burst of winning something that equates to a big signature from a prospect. A lot of other things are more important to recruits -- proximity to home, weather, conference affiliation, or whether a girlfriend happens to be going to school somewhere close.
Back in 1988, covering college football for the Seattle P-I, I explored a story about what was going on that season in the state of Washington. While the Huskies were lurching through a six-win season, and looking very much like the Don James regime might have run its course, Dennis Erickson was leading WSU to a 9-3 record, including a win in the Apple Cup.
It was one of the more dramatic, simultaneous turns of fortune by the two programs, and I asked some top football recruits in the state about whether they might be more inclined to pick the Cougars. I can’t remember what they said, just that they didn’t. Old loyalties, old perceptions die hard.
Three years later, of course, Washington won a national co-championship. And, you can look it up, it had a small, undistinguished recruiting class in February of 1992, certainly nothing befitting a program that had just won a ring.
In writing “Glory Hounds,” I recall Gonzaga coach Mark Few telling me he was surprised that the 1999-2001 breakthrough by the program -- going to an Elite Eight and two Sweet 16s -- didn’t translate more quickly to recruiting success.
It’s a long, long slog before such trends develop. No question, an appearance in a title game can’t hurt, but recruits have natural predilections -- a coach, a geographic area, a conference -- and it’s often difficult to move them off that position.
I can’t vouch for the particulars on either Brown or Jeter, or whether a passing car might have splashed mud on either of them while they walked down Hamilton in Spokane. But it’s worth remembering that Brown also picked a Final Four participant in Oregon, and Jeter, well, it’s not as if he opted for Texas-Rio Grande Valley.
So to those bemoaning what’s happened since early April, chill. Williams’ return is indeed worth a toast for GU fans. If he had left, Gonzaga would have lost its top five scorers from ’16-17 (Williams was No. 4 at 10.2).
His decision surely seems wise, in that he’s still a little rough around the edges. With improvement, and with a cast up front (Killian Tillie, Jacob Larsen, Rui Hachimura) that will be less dominant but still formidable next season, Williams certainly could blossom into a draftable player. His perimeter shooting can improve, as can his team-leading rebounding figure of 6.4. Moreover, his length and quickness could help him become a high-level defensive player.
In “Glory Hounds,” Williams told me, “I want to be a beast that averages a double-double.” He was talking about his junior year. But that wouldn’t be a bad outcome next season, either.
Last week, I tossed out for debate a provocative topic, completely subjective and indefinable: Who belongs on Gonzaga’s men’s basketball Mount Rushmore?
Judging by message-board reaction, there are a whole bunch of different lenses through which this is viewed, and thus, a wide range of opinion.
So, to restate, and clarify, my criteria: A chosen one could be a player, coach, administrator or any figure who has made a significant imprint on the program. If it’s a player, his impact is measured by what he did at Gonzaga, not in the NBA -- unless he has had some added role with GU.
Here’s the trickier part: Assessing a player’s individual contribution and weighing it in the context of what the team did during his time at Gonzaga. I give great weight to team accomplishment, especially in the post-season, but this exercise requires trying to judge a player’s part in that, as well as taking stock of what kind of supporting cast he had.
Onward . . .
Mark Few. I’d be surprised if anybody doing this didn’t have him No. 1.
Tommy Lloyd. Beyond Few, the candidates are varied and debatable, but I'm certain Lloyd ought to be in this final four. He’s been at Gonzaga since 2000, or virtually the whole of the 19-year NCAA-tournament streak, he’s the longest-tenured GU assistant in history; he established and nurtured the Zags’ formidable overseas recruiting connection; and he has a significant role in strategic input.
Adam Morrison. Here’s where it really gets interesting. Morrison’s three seasons produced modest NCAA-tournament outcomes -- two crushing second-round losses in 2004-05 and the killer Sweet 16 defeat to UCLA. But Morrison’s ’06 season was so dominating, so incandescent, that for me it trumps the post-season underachievement. Remember, he shared a couple of national co-player-of-the-year awards, and his hell-bent, swashbuckling style -- all of it as a diabetic -- captured the attention of the nation. His NBA career was forgettable, but he did enough in college to warrant the No. 3 overall pick in the '06 draft.
Uh, err . . . Przemek Karnowski. I found this to be the toughest call of all. For my money, there has to be a recognition of Gonzaga’s achievement of its first Final Four in 2017. That initially led me to Nigel Williams-Goss, who, after all, was a first-team All-America and led GU in scoring, free-throw shooting, assists and steals.
But then you start splitting hairs. Did any individual lead Gonzaga to the Final Four? In the Zags’ first three NCAA-tournament games, recall, NWG shot 12 for 42 from the field. Even in the gateway Elite Eight win against Xavier when he scored 23 points, he was only 7 of 19 from the floor (albeit with four of seven on threes).
This was really Williams-Goss’ team; he took 115 more shots than anybody else. But as was noted repeatedly throughout the 37-2 season, it was a balanced team with a wealth of scoring options, nothing like the Morrison-dominated club of 2006. Karnowski averaged 12.2 points, second to Williams-Goss’ 16.8.
Karnowski’s career ended on a sour offensive night against North Carolina in the title game. But think about what he was a part of at Gonzaga: He played on both of its teams to attain a No. 1 ranking, in 2013 and 2017. He became the NCAA’s all-time winningest player at 137, and while a lot of those came in the tepid West Coast Conference, it’s still something nobody else can say. He was a key part of the 2015 Elite Eight team and the ’17 Final Four outfit, and if you go by post-season achievement, those are no worse than two of the most decorated three teams in school history.
Other thoughts:
-- I was surprised those on message boards didn’t voice a greater support for Dan Monson, Few’s predecessor. It was Monson who essentially hired Few, who engineered the 1999 Elite Eight run, and who acted as shield between volatile head coach Dan Fitzgerald and Few and fellow assistant Billy Grier, allowing them to grow and recruit.
-- Limiting this to a Gonzaga-achievement discussion takes John Stockton out of it in my mind. Stockton’s NBA cred is immense and indisputable, but he played on Gonzaga teams that combined to go 27-25 in WCC play in 1981-84 (even as he won league player-of-the-year honors in ’84). Stockton has been an understated presence around the program since he retired from the NBA, but I don’t see it as enough to lift him here, given we’re not counting NBA profile.
-- A figure whom I neglected to mention last week as a candidate -- should have -- is Frank Burgess, the late former U.S. District Court judge. Burgess was the nation’s leading scorer in 1961 at 32.4 points a game (and was No. 5 in ’60, when the No. 1 man was Oscar Robertson). This was an era just after Gonzaga had become NCAA Division I and the Zags played as an independent, with no post-season play.
-- Casey Calvary could make a convincing case to be among the top four. He was part of seven NCAA victories from 1999-2001 and his tip-in against Florida in ’99 is still front-and-center in the discussion as the most famous shot in Zag history.
-- Those who put Courtney Vandersloot on this Rushmore would have a point if I hadn't specified this to be a discussion of the men’s program only. But since we’re entertaining it here, if you opened it up to both men and women, wouldn’t you have to give serious consideration to Kelly Graves over Vandersloot?
Not so long ago, when the absolute dog days afflicted a sports-talk radio station -- no buzz, no hot topic, crickets -- the host inevitably would drag out this old standby and ask for input from listeners: Should Pete Rose be in the baseball hall of fame?
I hope the Glory Hounds blog hasn’t descended to that abyss, but it’s possible. Anyway, I’m going to entertain the notion of who should be on Gonzaga’s men’s basketball Mount Rushmore.
Actually, I think the subject is fascinating, it’s just that it’s one of those out-of-season reveries apropos of not particularly anything at the moment.
Seems to me that Gonzaga makes for a fairly unusual Mount Rushmore, just as the Gonzaga story is highly unusual. Let’s go ahead and violate the journalist’s unwritten credo and call it unique.
Why? If we’re to chisel out features of the top four people responsible for the phenomenon that is Zag hoops -- including players, coaches, presidents, donors -- I suspect you’ll find more than the average nuance, sub-theme and sidebar that populate other programs. That's because the program came from nothing to within two minutes of a national championship.
Say, for example, we did this for, oh, Ohio State. From a great distance, I’d suggest you’d have Fred Taylor, who coached the 1960 national champions. And probably guys like Jerry Lucas and John Havlicek, stalwarts of that era, would draw heavy support. And in more recent times, players like Evan Turner, Greg Oden and Mike Conley.
But it would probably be a pretty orderly procedure, because while the Buckeyes have a reasonably robust basketball heritage, its story is hardly striking or especially notable.
Then there’s Gonzaga, bound up by all sorts of figures and forces and phenomena that, in the words of Sports Illustrated, have made it a “nouveau power.”
So onward. I’m not going to declare myself on this post (partly because I haven’t decided). But I’ll do so in a week. For now, I’ll throw out some candidates and some thoughts.
Before the Zags’ crazy 19-year streak of NCAA appearances got so long, it was easier to single out players as Mount Rushmore operatives. There were simply fewer of them. Countervailing that, as the skein got longer, the player list got more and more selective, and it was easier to look at overarching factors like coaches and administrators. Then, in 2015, the Zags returned to the Elite Eight for the first time since ’99, winning 35 games. And of course in 2017, they won a school-record 37 and marched all the way to the NCAA title game, so it seems logical certain players who made that happen demand a closer look.
That said, I think we can all agree on the only automatic bid on this Rushmore: Mark Few.
These are others to chew on -- certainly not the only ones whom we should vet:
Dan Monson, who coached that ground-breaking 1999 team, the first of the young lions who pulled up the program by the bootstraps, and essentially hired Few.
Dan Fitzgerald, whose supporters will argue that he laid the solid foundation and gathered assistants like Monson, Few and Bill Grier.
Tom and Phil McCarthey, whose largesse of some $9 million enabled construction of the arena that essentially made GU basketball a major player.
Mike Roth, the athletic director whose steady stewardship over two decades provided Few a reason to stay put.
Robert Spitzer, the former Gonzaga president who bought into the idea that upgrading basketball was a wise choice for the university. What if the sitting president back in the formative years had been a stuffy, non-believer in the power of athletics?
Casey Calvary, the implacable forward who was the key big on the 1999-2001 teams, and whose ’99 tip to beat Florida is one of the two or three biggest shots in GU history.
Dan Dickau, both for becoming an athletic and academic first-team All-American, and also symbolizing the phenomenon of the transfer whose game expands when he sits out.
Ronny Turiaf, with Dickau part of that key second wave of players that sustained the NCAA run, and maybe the most popular Zag in history.
Adam Morrison, whose game -- and persona -- gathered more spotlight than any other GU player.
Kelly Olynyk, who went from lost redshirt to first-team All-American.
Nigel Williams-Goss, whose transcendent, first-team All-America season helped trigger Gonzaga’s first Final Four.
By no means is this a complete checklist, just some obvious candidates.
I’ll be back with my picks in a week. Might even include somebody not on this list.
Last week’s purge at ESPN was so staggering, so pervasive, as to make you wonder where to assign the cause. Was it a simple (though cruel) case of course correction, a business shifting assets? Or was it merely one more assault on the media industry and its printed-word wing?
Some of both, apparently. Aside from the shutdown of an entire enterprise, I can’t recall any more wrenching change within a media company. Andy Katz, probably the most connected figure in college-basketball media, gone. Jayson Stark, witty and imaginative baseball insider, gone. Dana O’Neil, author of insightful and poignant college-hoops pieces, gone.
ESPN followed the business model, the one so counterintuitive to good journalism. To hell with the idea of institutional knowledge, of people with deep, nuanced understanding of a beat. You cashier those people because they’re making the most money. Instead, you follow what somebody called the 24/24/24 template. You go for 24-year-old people making 24 grand a year, willing to work 24 hours a day.
It shouldn’t need saying, but we’re all the poorer for this.
ESPN’s move upends the notion that sports, as presented by the World Wide Leader, was a bottomless well of plenty. ESPN developed so many platforms -- ESPN2, ESPN3, ESPNU, ESPN News, ESPN Deportes, 30 for 30, etc., etc. -- that its reach and its resources seemed limitless.
Instead, it flung itself so blindly at the NFL, in part, that it demanded austerity elsewhere. So we’ll get wall-to-wall coverage of OTAs. And the combine, of course (ohmygawd, who did best in the cone drills?). And the draft. And free agency. All this while Browns offensive tackle Joe Thomas, still playing, noted recently that he sometimes forgets the reason he went to the grocery store.
For those of us who prefer a change of seasons, not only in the climate but our sports, is there no time to squeeze in something on the NCAA Elite Eight before we bury ourselves in Todd McShay’s latest mock draft?
We began getting a hint at the guillotine coming when ESPN frequently implemented the weird practice of college-basketball game announcers not at the, uh, game, but holed up in studio in Bristol, Conn.
ESPN did what the average Joe does when times get hard. You decide what you can live without, while aiming to make everything seem the same. You know, what newspapers have been doing for years now.
Here’s where I tell you to do something that might seem to make no sense: Go subscribe to a newspaper. Not because of ESPN cutting back, but because they’re part of the soul of your community, and that’s important.
Go against the grain. Go against a president who, when he’s not spouting something that’s demonstrably false, regularly accuses the “corrupt” media of fake news.
I’m not saying it’s easy in these times, when newspaper pages are dwindling. My old paper, the Seattle Times, decided to abandon coverage of Gonzaga basketball this year -- nice timing -- save for the nuts and bolts of what Associated Press provides and an occasional update from the Spokane Spokesman-Review.
So when the Zags made the Final Four -- the first time a school in the state had been there since the Eisenhower Administration -- the paper, on Thursday before the national semifinals, had nary a word on Gonzaga. Maybe it was in good company. Neither did the Los Angeles Times.
I always wondered how intense the workload would be, covering a team that made the Final Four. Never got to find out. But when Gonzaga did it in March, the Times sent one writer to Phoenix. Incredibly, the News Tribune of Tacoma had nobody there.
(If a program with about 11,000 alums in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties falls in the forest to North Carolina, does it make a sound?)
I hate that there are people at newspapers who don’t know the difference between “refute” and “rebut.” And when somebody’s story is built from quotes from a press release rather than a phone call, I cringe.
Yet, the benefits of a buck-fifty a day -- a dollar in Spokane -- far outweigh the negatives. If there are a lot of reasons today to abandon newspapers, there are a lot more reasons to keep reading them.
The watchdog function of newspapers remains immeasurable. There’s a reason the Times has won 10 Pulitzers. And, two words if you think so-called “neighborhood bloggers” could replace professional journalists: Get serious.
By and large, the people who populate newsrooms are the kind of people you’d want to be around, the kind you want in your corner -- curious people, people who ask questions that need to be asked. Committed people that aren’t making a lot of money doing what they do. Real people.
Check out sometime the web hits a newspaper gets in a time of crisis -- say, a police shooting. They go through the roof, as if readers are saying, “We know where to go. This is serious.”
We live in a time of division. And, perpetually, it seems, of belt-tightening. If ESPN needs to do that, well, OK. If in any way its cuts are giving you less reason to watch and read, try filling that void with a newspaper.
The NCAA announced future NCAA subregional and regional sites Tuesday, and it was good news for Northwest college hoops fans -- Seattle (2019), Spokane (2020), Boise (2021) and Portland (2022) all got first- and second-round action, which is merely the best weekend in all of sports. Essentially, it means that anybody in three Northwest states can drive to see the Madness.
(I’m not quite sure how the assignment of games to Seattle’s KeyArena would dovetail with two proposals to do massive renovations to the building in the ongoing -- make that never-ending -- discussion of attracting the NBA and NHL to the city. Either players are going to be executing crossover dribbles amid wrecking balls and exposed rebar, or the successful NCAA bid only serves to underscore how interminable this process is.)
This will be the sixth time the Spokane Arena has hosted an NCAA men’s subregional, and the award reminds us of an oddity in Gonzaga’s glory years of 19 straight NCAA tournaments.
Never have the Zags played an NCAA-tournament game there. And they could have.
Sending them elsewhere in years when Spokane Arena is hosting isn't the slam-dunk you might think. Essentially, it could have happened -- more than once -- if three thresholds were reached:
-- The subregional’s host school can’t be one of the eight teams assigned to the site. Gonzaga qualifies there; Idaho is now handling the chores of hosting, while Washington State did it in the past.
-- A school can’t play more than three games at the arena in question -- or that’s considered a home floor, and about three decades ago, the NCAA took tournament games off home floors.
-- A team must land one of the basketball committee’s so-called “protected” seeds -- that is, top four (16 overall). The NCAA couches this in terms of protecting those teams from a “potential home-crowd disadvantage,” but what it equates to is, putting them in the most friendly site available.
Offhand, I can’t think of a much friendlier place for the Zags than Spokane Arena. It’s about a mile and a half from the GU campus.
At any rate, it’s more than a little quirky that, in 19 years of making tournaments, Spokane Arena has never lined up for them.
Consider: Seven times since 2003, the first time Spokane Arena hosted the men’s sub-regionals, Gonzaga has earned a No. 4 seed or better. And five times the Arena has hosted. That’s a bunch of occasions when it could have happened.
Except: Every time Spokane has had the event, Gonzaga has had one of its less dominant teams, falling far from the magic No. 4 seed line.
-- 2003: Gonzaga, a No. 9 seed, played in Salt Lake City, beating Cincinnati and playing a memorable, double-overtime loss to top-seed Arizona.
-- 2007: While Kevin Durant’s brief college career was ending in a blowout against USC at Spokane Arena, Gonzaga, a 10 seed, was getting eliminated in the first round in Sacramento by Kelvin Sampson’s Indiana team, only weeks after Josh Heytvelt’s arrest left GU short-handed.
-- 2010: Michigan State and Maryland advanced to the Sweet 16 in Spokane, while the Zags were sent east to Buffalo as a No. 8 seed.
-- 2014: Michigan State (hello again, Jud Heathcote) and San Diego State reached the round of 16, while Gonzaga went to San Diego as an 8 seed.
-- 2016: Top-seeded Oregon survived a big upset bid by St. Joseph’s in the second round at the Arena, while the Zags were off to Denver (and damn happy to be in the tournament at all) on their way to the Sweet 16.
I always wanted to see the look on the face of some unsuspecting No. 5 seed from three time zones away when it realized it was going to be matched up in a second-round game at Spokane Arena with fourth-seeded Gonzaga, which could pile in a couple of vans to make the road trip.
I wrote about this a few years ago, and I think it still holds. In the era of no home floors for the NCAA tournament, I believe the nearest an NCAA participant’s campus was to a neutral floor was Georgia State, in downtown Atlanta, maybe a five-dollar cab ride to the Georgia Dome. Make no mistake, Georgia State was no protected seed in 1991; it was a No. 16, and got demolished, 117-76, by Arkansas. (The committee must have figured it really didn’t matter.)
The year 2020 seems a long way off. Who knows what Gonzaga might look like in three seasons? Ostensibly, that’s a roster that could include Killian Tillie, Jacob Larsen, Rui Hachimura, Zach Norvell, Corey Kispert and Jesse Wade. Maybe that’s the season of home cooking in March.
Well, Zag fans, you’ve hit the big-time. You’re now part of the “in” crowd in college basketball, part of a high-rolling, high-wire act just like Kentucky and Duke.
Congratulations, I guess.
When Zach Collins declared Tuesday for the NBA draft, he became the first Gonzaga player in history to do so after putting in a single freshman season. The Zags have had a handful of others leave early, but never after a freshman year.
Have to admit, I never thought it was a given that he’d declare after one year -- even with a productive NCAA tournament. He seemed to enjoy the year greatly, and there’s no doubt he’s not ready for the NBA, not needing weight and strength, not having accounted for seven of GU’s 15 total player disqualifications on fouls this year. Indeed, the understated nature of his year is obvious in the fact he wasn't even a starter, averaging 17 minutes.
But readiness is not the NBA yardstick, and no doubt, Collins’ potential is immense. So, too, are NBA paychecks. Here are some for 2016 draftees in the neighborhood of Collins’ projected draft slot: Domantas Sabonis (No. 11), $2.44 million; Taurean Prince (12th), $2.32 million; Denzel Valentine (14th), $2.09 million; Caris LeVert (20th), $1.56 million.
This is the first of what I expect to be a one-two blow. I’m anticipating Nigel Williams-Goss to follow suit -- even as his NBA prospects are far cloudier -- leaving Gonzaga with some rebuilding on its hands. The departure of NWG, in combination with Collins and the exits of Przemek Karnowski and Jordan Mathews, would strip the Zags of four of their top five scorers.
At the very least, Collins’ decision seems to render the possibility of a repeat run like 2017 highly unlikely.
From what I’m gathering, Zag fans are conflicted. There’s obvious disappointment in forfeiting what-could-have-been scenarios for next year. But some are speculating that Collins’ college drive-through makes the Zags elite and augurs a new era in which they can flourish in recruiting because they’ve now shown themselves to be capable of getting a one-and-done talent to the League.
Of that, I’m skeptical.
Old standards tend to be almost immutable in recruiting. Precedent dies hard. I suppose there might be the random case in which a decorated prep player picks Gonzaga over UCLA because of the aforementioned proposition. More likely, that recruit chooses Gonzaga or UCLA for the same reasons a prospect has always selected Gonzaga or UCLA.
Perceptions affecting recruiting tend to happen glacially. In my research of “Glory Hounds,” Zags coach Mark Few told me he was surprised at how slowly the initial burst of NCAA-tournament success -- seven wins in three golden post-seasons in 1999-2001 -- equated to recruiting gains. It wasn’t until later that the accumulated success began to pay dividends.
Similarly, look at Gonzaga’s recruiting in Seattle, a subject I explored in detail in Glory Hounds. We’re now a generation into the Zags’ golden era -- 19 years straight of NCAA tournaments -- and candidly, it’s had very little impact in inner-city Seattle.
More than Collins’ case, I’d expect the Zags to profit by the increased spotlight through the ’17 tournament run on their success with transfers. And in the wake of Collins’ departure, GU coaches will doubtless have a keen ear to the ground on such prospects in the next couple of months.
Other riffs on the Collins decision:
-- Someday, we may look back on the NBA’s 19-and-under rule as a bizarre aberration of the pro-sports labor market (in fact, if you’re so inclined right now, feel free), a stricture that invites a seven- or eight-month stopover at a university between high school and the NBA. I’d favor a baseball-style revision: Be allowed to go out of high school, or wait two seasons (rather than baseball’s three) to be drafted.
-- I regarded Collins as a stealth candidate for college player of the year, had he returned for his sophomore season. He likely would have been a preseason All-American.
-- The Zags’ deep run might have impacted Collins -- as in, they accomplished everything they could accomplish, short of winning the national title. Also of possible relevance, as he weighed staying: While Gonzaga schedules are demanding, they lose punch in the WCC outside Saint Mary’s and BYU. It isn’t unreasonable to wonder how much Collins would gain by dominating Pepperdine and San Diego.
-- Collins’ move shifts the focus to a couple of returnees -- 6-11 Jacob Larsen of Denmark, who redshirted after a knee injury; and fourth-year junior Ryan Edwards. The train may have already left the station for Edwards, who played mop-up minutes this year (48, fewest of his three seasons on the floor) and would seem to fit the profile of a potential grad transfer.
I can’t tell you a lot about the Naismith Hall of Fame selection process; only by describing its renderings can we begin to interpret its thinking. But I would suggest that with Gonzaga’s recent run to the NCAA championship game, Mark Few ought to have done himself a major favor in someday gaining entry into that lodge.
The HOF’s proceedings are notoriously clandestine. Back when I was U.S. Basketball Writers president in 1992-93, I recall being on an advisory committee. We had a conference call, and representatives from organizations like the NBA and USA Basketball weighed in on candidates. I think we took a vote on them, but it may have been merely advisory. And that was that. I don't think we even knew ahead of time who had been selected.
To my knowledge, there are no hard-and-fast markers to aid in consideration of college coaches, and perhaps that’s the way it should be.
What we do know is that annual classes have expanded, both to accommodate the growth of women’s and international basketball. There also seems to be a trend of recognition of “contributors,” those who gave something considerable to the sport apart from playing or coaching it.
The coaching landscape has certainly changed, and not necessarily for the good of Few’s argument. Of the last 13 Division I coaches to be named, dating to 2002, 12 have won national championships. That statistic is in itself a little chilling, because it seems to say that the committee isn’t looking deeper, at circumstance and setting.
But go back from 2001 to 1985, the year former PLU, Washington State and Washington coach Marv Harshman was selected. There were 15 Division I coaches in that group, and seven didn’t win a title, including Harshman or Oregon State’s Ralph Miller. In fact, neither of those two made a Final Four.
Thus, it’s a moving target, or at least a developing one.
Total victories help, but they’re not a guarantee of anything. In fact, look at Nos. 13-15 and 17 on the all-time total wins list at any NCAA level entering the 2016-17 season: Thirteenth is Eddie Sutton at 806; 14th is Rollie Massimino (793); 15th is West Virginia’s Bob Huggins (791) and 17th is Lefty Driesell at 786. And Massimino has Villanova’s stirring 1985 championship (but a checkered record elsewhere, including his last six ‘Nova teams, which were 48-50 in the Big East).
I’d expect retired Bo Ryan (747 wins at three schools) to find a way in soon. You’d also like to think the committee would have been considering somebody like Mike Montgomery, who was pretty much spotless over 32 years, with 677 wins -- an average of 27 in his last seven years at Stanford -- and a worthy antagonist of powerful Arizona in Lute Olson’s best years.
So . . . Few?
With Gonzaga’s dazzling 37-2 season, he jumped the 500-win mark and is now 503-113, a win percentage of .8165. That leapfrogs him two spots to No. 4 all-time among NCAA coaches at all levels, behind two legendary figures, No. 3 Adolph Rupp and No. 2 Clair Bee. (No. 1? Wait for it -- Jim Crutchfield, who just resigned as head coach of your Division II West Liberty, W.Va. Hilltoppers to take the job at Nova Southeastern in Florida. His win percentage of .855 might get bruised as he rebuilds Nova’s 6-20 team this season.)
But let’s not get consumed with total victories or win percentage. The West Coast Conference is a victory waiting to happen, at least when you’re not playing Saint Mary’s or BYU.
Here’s what should matter: That Few has been the driving force in a long, sustained, organic movement of Gonzaga from college-basketball nobody to national player, a phenomenon the extent of which hasn’t happened in recent decades in the game. And maybe ever.
It should matter that Gonzaga has now gone to 19 straight NCAA tournaments, tied for sixth on the all-time list. And that in winning games in nine straight tournaments, the Zags sit at No. 10 in history in that metric.
As I wrote in the book “Glory Hounds,” it might take a deeper look at the Gonzaga story than mere win-loss records and percentages to assess Few’s impact. The committee did just that in naming John Chaney in 2001, minus a Final Four but with a major contribution to African-Americans in his job at Temple; and Princeton’s Pete Carril (1997), a figure who never came close to a Final Four but forged an indelible stamp on the game with his strategic concepts.
A Final Four will only help Few’s case. There’s work still to be done. But it seems ever more doable.
If you’re the average Gonzaga basketball fan, this Final Four is either about preparing for that long-awaited trip to Phoenix, or perhaps just figuring out where the TV is that you’ll be wedded to Saturday at 3:09 p.m.
And you figure the team . . . well, the team will go on the road, like it always goes on the road, and everything will be per usual, save for the momentousness of the surroundings.
Chris Standiford will tell you it’s not quite like that. He, and other operatives in the Gonzaga athletic department, have the bags under their eyes to prove it.
“I don’t think anybody on our staff has probably gotten more than six hours of sleep in any interval,” he told me Tuesday morning. “You’re living on adrenalin and loving every minute of it.”
Simply put, when a school makes the Final Four, the logistical crush is immense with things you’d never think about -- especially for a non-football-playing school with a smaller athletic staff. At power-five schools, more people can be diverted from their regular gigs to address the demands of a Final Four.
Here’s how it works: The day after teams make the Elite Eight, there’s an hour-long “transition meeting” staged by the NCAA for staffs of the two regional finalists. It’s essentially a primer for what to expect if your team wins the next day.
In “Glory Hounds,” the book I recently released on Gonzaga basketball, GU athletic director Mike Roth laughingly recalled his first of those, when the Zags had upset Florida in 1999 and were about to face Connecticut. The Huskies showed up at that meeting en masse, represented by about a dozen suits.
The Zags, well, you were supposed to bring an AD, sports-information director, travel coordinator and a ticket manager.
“Well, guess what?” Roth said. “We had two of those.”
It was different last week in San Jose. This was GU’s third such transition meeting and GU was ready. Except, Standiford says, if you believe at all in omens, you don’t want to be too invested, too presumptuous. So it’s hard to be all-in.
All-in happened just about the time Standiford had finished hugging a couple of coaches on the floor after GU’s 83-59 victory over Xavier the next day.
“As soon as I turned around,” says Standiford, Roth’s long-time wingman as deputy AD and a Zag alum, “a couple of the NCAA staff were there, saying, ‘Here’s some things to work on right away.’ They know what we don’t know.”
What they don’t know is contained in a “giant binder,” Standiford said, and that’s the staff playbook for this week.
After a 6 a.m. rise Sunday, the work began for Standiford and others in the GU athletic department, people like Kim Vore, associate AD for business operations, whom Standiford calls “a rock star that holds us together.” They christened the week with a 16-hour work day.
Gonzaga serviced about 750 boosters for the regional in San Jose. For this weekend, there are more than 3,000, all taken care of via the athletic department’s priority-points system based on annual giving. Hotel space for boosters is partly funneled through travel packages, but the athletic department has a finger on that pulse and must provide continual updates to hotels to hold or release rooms.
Players’ families also score this weekend. For the third straight year, the NCAA has in place a pilot program that allows for $3,000 per player family to attend the Final Four, $4,000 for the teams making the final game.
Gonzaga compliance staff is administering those parent/family logistics, including credentialing them for a salute event Thursday night, a brunch Saturday, and a slick system whereby they get choice seats for their team’s half of the Saturday doubleheader, then swapping with the other two teams’ family seats.
Coordinating for the band and cheer units is Chris Johnson, associate AD for external operations. Todd Zeidler and Barrett Henderson are heading up media requests, and trust me, there are a ton of them. Friday on site, there are podium interviews with head coach Mark Few and players, and a period of open locker room. Teams have a scheduled “workout” at University of Phoenix Stadium, but it’s not much more than a shootaround; they’ll go off to a gym someplace and do the hard, private business of preparation.
Then there are university-related events, socials, pre-game events. In keeping with Few’s hosanna to the guys who built Gonzaga, there’s a Thursday-night get-together for ex-players.
Standiford sees Few as establishing a businesslike mindset in advance of South Carolina. But at the same time, he says, “He has put a lot of thought and effort into being inclusive and making it a family event.”
Over the years, Standiford has had multiple opportunities to go to a Final Four. But, with the Zags annually in the thing since 1999, and occasionally playing the second weekend, he’s never had a yearning to get on another plane to attend one.
“I’m gonna go as a participant,” he always told friends.
It took a lot of years, but he was as good as his word.
Saturday was the most momentous day for Northwest college basketball since, well, when? The afternoon in 1958 at Louisville’s Freedom Hall when Kentucky won the national title over Elgin Baylor-led Seattle University? Maybe March 27, 1939, when Oregon’s Tall Firs claimed the first NCAA championship over Ohio State?
When first Gonzaga marched to its initial Final Four, and then Oregon waylaid Kansas, I couldn’t help but recall what provided the foundation for the entire improbable Saturday. In 2009, the Ducks’ pursuit of Gonzaga coach Mark Few came up empty, Oregon decided to keep struggling coach Ernie Kent (for the time being) and a year later, after a protracted search, the Ducks hired Dana Altman.
“They ratcheted up the pressure hard on that,” Brad Williams, Few’s attorney/agent, told me in “Glory Hounds.” “They had Phil Knight calling. Mark had been on their radar for a long time.”
It’s unlikely either of the 2017 Northwest Final Fours would have come about without Few’s decision to stay put after a meeting with then-Oregon AD Pat Kilkenny at a rather bizarre location. For those who don’t know the story (what, you haven’t bought your copy of “Glory Hounds?” For shame … ), below is the excerpt of the whole scenario:
On an early-spring day in 2009, Mark Few had a mission. He had an important business meeting at an unlikely venue. In fact, it’s safe to say it’s the only time in the history of a nondescript rest stop off Interstate 84 in north-central Oregon that the place has hosted a negotiation that would materially affect the trajectory of two college athletic programs in the Northwest.
Few’s Gonzaga basketball team had just lost to North Carolina in the Sweet 16 and now the routine of postseason housekeeping was upon him. For Few, that frequently has meant entertaining inquiries about vacant jobs. They seem to be nothing he cultivates; the approaches are made to him, by athletic directors – in recent times, more commonly by middlemen – interested in seeing if they could pry Few from his comfortable roost at Gonzaga.
More than half a dozen times, Few has been romanced by programs that have hung national-championship banners. It’s difficult to know definitively how many times he has been those suitors’ No. 1 candidate, but those occasions have been multiple.
By 2009, a decade into Few’s head-coaching tenure, this had become a rite of spring. Front men for Arizona, Indiana, Stanford and UCLA had nosed around, and somehow, Few had rationalized staying at Gonzaga. But now a different force loomed, one with assets unequaled by the others, and this might just be the one to shake Few loose.
The University of Oregon had been trying for some time to uncouple itself from Ernie Kent, in a relationship that reflects the fragile nature of coaching. Kent had been a beloved Oregon player in the Dick Harter era of the 1970s. In 2007, Kent had taken Oregon, a school with a sparse basketball history, to a second Elite Eight in five years. But he had surrounded that latter burst with some fruitless seasons, capped by a last-place, 2-16 finish in the Pac-10 in 2009, and the wolves were baying ominously in Eugene. Through those uneven years, Kent had exhausted capital with boosters in the lingering innuendo related to some personal issues off the floor.
To the northeast, there was another Oregon alumnus who looked like a prime candidate to replace Kent. Few grew up in Creswell, just 10 miles south of Eugene, he had graduated from Oregon, playing pickup games on the courts and ballfields on the UO campus. His parents, Barbara and Norm, had lived in Creswell for half a century.
And then there was the Pat Kilkenny factor. Kilkenny, who made himself a millionaire in the insurance industry in San Diego, was the Oregon athletic director. But he had taken a booster’s route to that chair, and by chance, he had also formed along the way great friendships at Gonzaga, owing to its several coaches with Oregon connections. Kilkenny was sufficiently beneficent to donate to their salaries, and so steadfast that when Zag assistant coaches departed the program to begin their own head-coaching careers, he donated significantly to them, too.
“He’s just an unbelievably benevolent guy,” Few says. “If he didn’t have a cent, he’d be a great friend.”
Behind the scenes, of course, there was Phil Knight, the Nike founder, who had long since befriended Few, and of whom Few says, “Phil, and Nike, really propped this program up. They’ve treated us like the national program it was long before other people came around.”
Even head-slapping happenstance seemed to argue for Few to be headed to Oregon. His Gonzaga team, a No. 4 seed in the 2009 NCAA basketball tournament, was sent to Portland for first- and second-round games, where the host school was none other than Oregon. So as the Zags were toppling Akron in their first game, there at one end of the scorer’s table as one of the regional’s hosts was Kilkenny, stationed close enough to the Gonzaga bench to hear Few mapping instructions during timeouts.
It all seemed perfect, too perfect not to happen.
Until it didn’t.
This wasn’t like many of the advances on Few by other schools, which don’t get past Brad Williams, the Spokane attorney who acts as his agent. This was Kilkenny, and he deserved a more personal hearing.
So they drove, Kilkenny and Few, to meet at a predetermined spot. For Few, it was a four-hour haul, west on I-90, down State Route 395 and then west on I-84. It was as clandestine as clandestine gets – “sunglasses and hats on,” Few says.
At a turnout off the freeway, Few had his come-to-Jesus meeting with Kilkenny. They talked and they talked some more – three hours’ worth, as Few recalls. In front of them, the Columbia River surged to the sea, flush with the winter’s record snowpack.
Kilkenny tried. Oh, how he tried. But in the end, what seemed so right . . . just wasn’t right.
The Fews’ fourth child, Colt, was only three months old. The other kids were settled in their schools. Marcy Few, his wife, was busy with a prominent role in the local Coaches Versus Cancer campaign. But more than anything, the way Mark Few viewed Oregon was the same as he viewed all those other opportunities. He had a better gig.
“I just wasn’t feeling it,” Few says.
Few couldn’t pull the trigger. In his mind, it just never lined up. Yes, there was a new arena on the way at Oregon, but it was going to be a 12,000-seat-plus hulk difficult to fill to capacity, a factor with its own pressures.
Yes, Oregon was fueled heavily by Knight’s largesse. But as a basketball force, it could get lost among other Pac-10 schools like Arizona and UCLA. There was no consistent talent pool in the lightly populated state.
“I never, ever felt that job was better than this one,” Few says, sitting behind his desk at the McCarthey Athletic Center. “Still don’t.”
In the end, Oregon, the place that was finally going to lure Few, became like all the other schools that approached him. In the end, Few made the decision to live in a place where his rustic home on 10 acres has mountain views to the northeast; where the drive to work is a skosh over 10 minutes; where rivers and lakes abound for his fishing jones; where, every year, you go to the NCAA tournament; and where your public obligations to boosters are under control.
The money could be greater elsewhere. But what can you do with four million dollars that you can’t do with two?
It seems inescapable: Dude’s got it figured out.
Final Four. Gonzaga’s Final Four. It seems so incongruous, such a non sequitur.
But there they were late Saturday afternoon in San Jose, the Zags body-bumping, slipping on celebratory T-shirts and ball caps, wearing grins as wide as Hamilton Street in Spokane, where the hoo-rayin’ at Jack and Dan’s must be over the moon right about now.
Gonzaga 83, Xavier 59, which, among other things, was an affirmation of the work Zags coach Mark Few did to reach the program’s first Final Four, which will silence the naysayers at least until Sunday, at which point they’ll begin to cackle that he hasn’t won a national title.
All the fretfulness, all the fits and starts of the first three games of the tournament -- the early deficits against South Dakota State, the late-game officiating controversy against Northwestern, the bar fight that was the West Virginia victory -- suddenly were flushed away in shockingly torrential fashion against Xavier.
That Gonzaga could play so well, not seize up with the magnitude of the moment in such an apocalyptic game, has to spring from Few. In a year in which he has picked up a couple of national coach-of-the-year awards, it was the latest in a lengthy series of victories.
Think about the makeup of the team that a year ago lost to Syracuse in a disheartening, late-game breakdown in the Sweet 16. That club was dominated by Kyle Wiltjer and Domas Sabonis, with a load of athleticism from Eric McClellan and some glue from Kyle Dranginis.
At that point, Nigel Williams-Goss was in a boot, recovering from ankle surgery midway through a redshirt season. Johnathan Williams III, also redshirting after transferring from Missouri, was amid strength coach Travis Knight’s school of tedious body-shaping sessions in the weight room.
Jordan Mathews wasn’t even a rumor yet. The Cal transfer didn’t visit until Hoopfest weekend in late June.
Ultimately, Few melded all those abilities. He persuaded Josh Perkins, whom Few had personally recruited tirelessly, that he could still flourish with Williams-Goss dominating the ball. And he squeezed some rogue tendencies from Williams-Goss’ game, leftovers, perhaps, from his free-lancing days at Washington.
He orchestrated those spokes to revolve around the hub of Karnowski, who sat out almost the entire 2015-16 season and eventually required back surgery, so he didn’t hit a basketball floor to play in his new surroundings until sometime well into summer.
And yet, Few, aided by assistants Tommy Lloyd, Donny Daniels and Brian Michaelson, made it all look seamless. The Zags strode to an unbeaten non-league record, therein beating Florida (now in the Elite Eight), Iowa State (Big 12 tournament winner) and Arizona (granted, without Allonzo Trier).
Before long, as the Zags were smothering the outclassed West Coast Conference, they were ranked No. 1, which, of course, augured a whole ‘nother level of national scrutiny. Nobody seems to inspire as much derision as these guys, typified by CBS’ Wally Szczerbiak’s Selection Sunday observation: “I don’t trust them.”
Surely, Gonzaga’s trek through the first four games of the NCAA tournament weren’t always artful. It shot sub-40 percent against South Dakota State, and after a blistering first half against Northwestern, retreated as the national-darling Wildcats menaced in the second half. Then came West Virginia, and a game of survival pocked down the stretch by Mathews’ memorable three-point dagger and a Gonzaga defense that choked off the Mountaineers on their last possessions.
That brought Gonzaga to Xavier, which had swatted aside Maryland, Florida State and Arizona. Yeah, the Musketeers were an 11th seed, but that’s a four-month portfolio. The real-time snapshot was a team that had bludgeoned third-seed Florida State by 25 and taken out Pac-12 champion Arizona in the Sweet 16.
The pressure on the Zags was thus immense, no matter that they had reached a second Elite Eight in three seasons. This would be labeled choking, of course, if they didn’t advance. One Seattle radio host on Friday staked out what remaining anti-Zag turf could be found: They were meeting a No. 11 seed, after having disposed of a 16 and a 4. So the naysayers could have it both ways: If they lost, they were folding again. If they won, well, it was a primrose path.
It would have been possible for Gonzaga to freeze in the moment, and indeed, when Perkins threw a lazy bounce pass on GU’s first possession, hijacked and dunked by Xavier, it was briefly ominous. But shortly, Perkins threw in a couple of threes, and his teammates joined him, and Gonzaga seemed to be playing free and easy and mostly enjoying the whole afternoon.
They didn’t defend much in the first half, getting beat off the bounce, which caused their big men to get in foul trouble. So Few and Co. dusted off a zone defense, which the Zags had employed rarely this year (but had also trotted out against West Virginia). And it seemed to work.
Along the way, Gonzaga limited one of the tournament’s sensations, Trevon Bluiett, to a mere 10 points on 3-of-14 shooting.
In the end, the Zags made 12 of 24 threes, when they were just 16 of 56 in the tournament’s first three games. They looked a lot like the team that was the rage of January and most of February.
It was a credit to a lot of people, none more than Mark Few. After all the brickbats, he's due a few bouquets.
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