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Or, you could title this: “Now The Lifting Gets Really Heavy.”
Spokane Arena in March plays host for the sixth time to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament first and second rounds, and although nobody is saying it, a reasonable goal for Gonzaga ought to be getting there. It takes a protected seed in the tournament – that’s a No. 4 or better, although you’ll hear basketball committee members sometimes fudge a little and begrudge a No. 5 seed – and that would seem a realistic aim for the Zags, now ninth-ranked and 9-1 after a rout of Texas Southern Wednesday night.
It would be a hoot to see it happen, just to hear the yowling from some poor, unsuspecting fan base in Ohio or Pennsylvania, when it finds out it’s journeying to a gym that’s only a good walk from the Gonzaga campus. (And, if you’re wondering, by rules of the bracketing procedure, the committee only has so much latitude in opposing those principles. In other words, if Gonzaga earns the home cooking with a protected seed, it shouldn’t be denied the placement.)
Funny, but during Gonzaga’s gilded run of 21 straight NCAA-tournament appearances, the Zags have managed to miss the Spokane Arena host years – almost uncannily so. GU has been a No. 4 seed or better nine times – in 2004-06, 2009, 2013, 2015 and 2017-19, and none of those lined up with the five Arena host years. The Zags play a mean game of basketball, and in this case, seemingly, dodgeball.
A refresher on Spokane Arena’s host years:
2003 – The Zags, a nine seed, were off playing that double-overtime hair-raiser against Arizona in Salt Lake City.
2007 – This was the Heytvelt-bust season, when a drained and thin roster got a 10 seed and lost to Indiana.
2010 – An eight seed got the Zags shuffled to Buffalo, where they got schooled in the second round by Syracuse.
2014 – Kevin Pangos’ turf toe, another eight seed in San Diego, a plucky win over Oke State before a blowout at the hands of Arizona.
2016 – Only a late-season awakening got Gonzaga in at all, as an 11 seed that crashed the Sweet 16.
So the years when the Arena has hosted have been almost a curse to Gonzaga’s outlook for a deep run.
What’s dead ahead of the Zags figures to go a long way toward determining whether they can end that long trend. Next up, in a 10-day stretch starting Sunday, are Washington and Arizona on the road and North Carolina at home. It’s a treacherous enough run that the possibility exists of going 0-3.
It’s a fool’s errand to try to project in early December how the three games could impact the chance of a four seed or better, but what the hell, let’s be foolish. Here’s how I’d handicap it:
If Gonzaga can win two of three, that’s a major step toward a protected seed.
Win one of three, and it’s an iffy future unless the Zags dominate the WCC, which logically means a handful of wins and no more than one loss (WCC tournament included), two max, against the Saint Mary’s-BYU bloc.
Winless, or 3-0, against the Huskies, Wildcats and Tar Heels will pretty much speak for itself.
None of these propositions comes with a guarantee. There are always unseen, one-night provocateurs in the WCC. There’s the befuddling string of injuries that hit recently. But a move on Spokane Arena in March would cross off another box on Gonzaga’s to-do list.
Gonzaga may or may not play Oregon this week in the Battle 4 Atlantis. It depends on whether the Zags can vanquish Southern Miss (2-3), which seems likely, and whether 11th-ranked Oregon has an answer for 13th-rated Seton Hall, which is iffy.
Gonzaga and Oregon. For two teams that have achieved considerably in the Northwest, it might seem like crickets is the best way to describe their relationship, even as the Zags' head coach is an Oregon alum who grew up 10 miles from Eugene.
Indeed, they haven’t played in 20 years. Yet under the surface, there are a good many might-have-beens and coulda-shouldas and even a little unseen rivalry simmering.
First, to 2017. How cool would it have been if Oregon and Gonzaga had each found its way into the national-title game? (Never mind the TV moguls, who would have cringed.) As it was, of course, only the Zags made it; Oregon stalked North Carolina the entire second half, got within a point, saw UNC’s Kennedy Meeks miss two free throws with five seconds left – and promptly allowed an offensive rebound that sealed it for the Tar Heels.
Stat-wise, it was hard to separate Oregon and Gonzaga that year, cosmetically, anyway. Each had five scorers in double figures, Oregon led by Dillon Brooks’ 16.1, Gonzaga by Nigel Williams-Goss’ 16.8. The Zags shot .382 on threes, Oregon .380. GU hit .717 of its free throws, the Ducks .712.
What might have materialized if they’d met? Could GU have found a way to guard both Brooks and Tyler Dorsey? Or would Williams-Goss or perhaps Zach Collins been the difference?
We’ll never know, obviously. So we’re left to the sketchy history of the “rivalry,” and the scheduling subplot beneath the surface.
About 12-15 years ago, I asked Zags coach Mark Few about playing Oregon, and he responded about as enthusiastically as if I’d recommended to him a 5-8 guard who can’t shoot. You know, turf-war considerations, coaches staking out territory, etc. What was in it for them?
Not that he was alone, of course. Ernie Kent, back when he had it going with Oregon, may have set the tone first. Asked, well before my conversation with Few, about playing Gonzaga, Ernie said he’d only do it if the GU home game were at Spokane Arena; the 6,000 seats in the McCarthey Athletic Center was too small-time for the Ducks. Kent was willing to make it a Spokane Arena-Portland series but Gonzaga never got on board, saying it was already playing annually at the University of Portland.
After that, silence. Then Kent got fired after the 2009 season and Dana Altman came aboard. He said he was open to playing the Zags, and at one point, there was a tentative agreement to get together – in Seattle and Portland. Then – as Oregon told the story – Gonzaga agreed to a late addition by another opponent and turned its back on the Ducks, quashing that series and leaving Altman feeling less than cozy about the Zags. Scheduling in late summer, the Ducks had to scramble for a stand-in.
I’m only speculating here, but as long as Gonzaga is committed to playing Washington, another worthy Northwest opponent, that probably dims the chance of anything happening with Oregon. Right or wrong.
Here we sit then. Failing the would-be ’17 title meeting, or a Battle in Seattle confrontation before that, the last game Oregon and Gonzaga played was in the semis of the 1999-2000 Rainbow Classic and Oregon won, 70-64. Matt Santangelo and Richie Frahm were held to a combined 11 points and the Zags essentially did it to themselves at the foul line, shooting 15 of 27 while Oregon was 13 of 14.
Oregon leads the series 19-3, and the last time Gonzaga won was almost 90 years ago. In fact, it’s been so long ago that the details are in doubt. Gonzaga’s press guide doesn’t list year-by-year results that far back, and Oregon’s guide has Gonzaga winning that game, 29-27. Aha, but the Eugene Guard newspaper of Feb. 20, 1930, had a two-paragraph Associated Press story from Spokane under the headline “Gonzaga Defeats Webfoot Quintet in Tilt Wednesday, in which the score was said to be 36-28. So there.
The rest of the Duck-Zag series, as they say, is history. What there is of it.
With about seven minutes gone in Gonzaga’s game at Texas A&M Friday night, I got a text message that had frown wrinkles. The Zags had come out flat, it said. The chemistry wasn’t quite there yet.
True enough. In its first real test of 2019-20, the Zags fell behind 14-11. They looked disconnected.
And right about then, they turned on the jets, blew away A&M with a 20-0 run and won by 30 points on the home floor of a Power Five school. What looked like a grinder turned into a night on Easy Street.
Granted, A&M isn’t a team that needs to be checking bracketology every week to see where it’s headed. For much of the night, it looked like it was playing with a medicine ball, not a basketball.
Still, it’s hard not to give props to a Gonzaga team that, despite a wholesale makeover, put the throttle down against an outfit from the SEC.
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. One of the standards of the Gonzaga program over the years under Mark Few is the ability to start the season fast. It’s almost a necessity, given that the Zags play an inverted schedule, zigging when a lot of other folks zag. The tough games are in November and December, and then the schedule turns mushy in January and February.
Think about some of the pelts Gonzaga has accumulated early in the season. As far back as 2003-04, it won a tournament in Washington, D.C. by beating Maryland. The next year, its first signature victory in the McCarthey Athletic Center was a thunderous 99-87 conquest of a ranked Washington team. In 2005, in Maui, it upset Maryland and won the memorable triple-overtime screamer over Michigan State.
And on and on. There were two championships in the Old Spice Classic, a Maui title in 2009, and then last year, the mother of all November accomplishments, a second Maui title won by beating No. 1-ranked Duke.
Want to go really retro? About the time Gonzaga was clearing its throat for its improbable burst onto the national scene under Dan Monson, it won the Top of the World Classic in Fairbanks in stunning fashion, in what turned out to be the last season (1997-98) before going to the NCAA tournament was a regular deal.
So, to tonight. A&M has a new coach, Buzz Williams, assembling his own system. Few is trying to replace three players who went to the NBA, plus Josh Perkins, GU’s career assists leader. There’s some continuity for GU with players like Filip Petrusev and Corey Kispert and Joel Ayayi, but . . . a 30-point margin?
For me, the most palpable aspect of the game was, after those first several fragile minutes, GU looked connected. It still has guys who pass the ball, seek the best shot and have a knack for finding the open man. That’s an unexpected quality when you’ve just remade your roster. At times, the Zags’ interior defense let them down, but still -- a 30-point road victory. The guard tandem of Ryan Woolridge and Admon Gilder matched each other with 16 points and seven rebounds, and I thought Joel Ayayi was a revelation with eight points, seven rebounds and six assists.
Pat Forde, the writer, tweeted the other night in the wake of Kentucky’s shocking loss to Evansville that he believes Kentucky coach John Calipari “undercoaches” intentionally in the early season, the implication being that he likes to let players struggle so as to allow them to see the error of their ways, then get them ready for the important part of the season. At Gonzaga, Few doesn’t have that luxury. If the first six weeks of the season pass without notable victories, it’s a 10 seed waiting to happen in March.
The Zags are going to face a whole bunch of teams better than Texas A&M, and soon. In the Battle 4 Atlantis tournament later this month, Oregon and North Carolina could await. But by now, we shouldn’t be surprised when Gonzaga, new cast or old, starts fast.
So awhile back, I ran across an item related to University of Arizona hoops. Shockingly, it had nothing to do with indictments, depositions or taped phone conversations. It was a Wildcats all-villain team – you know, a writer’s cast of scofflaws who had foiled Arizona’s appointed mission to victory through UA’s rich recent decades. Offhand, I can think of several – Jerry Tarkanian, Isaiah Thomas, Frank Kaminsky.
Well, if ‘Zona can have an all-villain team, then surely so can Gonzaga. I’m sure Hank Anderson, Adrian Buoncristiani and Dan Fitzgerald had their own personal bete noires, but this one will be focused on the last couple of decades at GU, since (a) that’s my timeframe of (relative) expertise, and (b) that’s when most of you began paying attention, anyway.
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First team
Randy Bennett – Bennett probably deserves to be MVP of this exercise, as the CEO of the outfit that jousts most regularly at a high level with the Zags. Think about this: When Duke plays North Carolina, you think of Coach K and Roy Williams, and you might not even be able to recall when the rivalry featured anybody else on the bench. Well, consider that the Saint Mary’s-GU series features two head coaches, Bennett and Mark Few, who have been going at it against each other a full THIRD longer than Krzyzewski and Williams – 48 games to 36. Few has a 37-11 record against Bennett, and yes, Zag fans love to twit Bennett for post-game blow-by handshakes and soft non-league schedules, but he deserves major props for carving out a fiefdom in Moraga. And that mammoth upset over GU in the ’19 WCC tournament left a mark.
Verne Harris – He’s recognized as one of the best officials around, but I don’t know what got into him the night Gonzaga played North Carolina for the national title in 2017. He was part of a crew that turned in an uneven (both ways) performance unbefitting the season’s climactic game. Zach Collins got to play 14 minutes before fouling out; I contend that if he’d been allowed to play 20, Gonzaga would have hung a banner.
Corey Belser – The former San Diego Torero was a defensive specialist who had unforgettable one-on-one duels with Adam Morrison. When they went at it, it was anything-goes, arm bars and half-nelsons, including rampant trash talk. When they lined up before the 2006 WCC tournament at Gonzaga, Morrison greeted Belser with: “It’s nice that your family could be here for your last game.” I wrote in "Glory Hounds" about Belser, who went on to coach (he’s head man of the national team in the country of Maldives) and he was well-spoken and charitable. “At the end of the day, I’ve always wanted Adam Morrison to be successful,” he told me, “kind of like a piece of me was in Adam.”
Omar Samhan – What would an all-villain team be without Samhan, the former Saint Mary’s center, and his repartee with GU students, in person and on the Interweb? He said things like, at least Saint Mary’s got to leave when it was done playing Gonzaga; the students had to stay in Spokane.
Luc Richard M’bah a Moute – Somebody has to answer for Gonzaga’s most excruciating, win-that-became-a-loss, roundhouse-to-the-gut defeat in history, right? There were several conspirators in UCLA’s 73-71 Sweet 16 victory over the Zags in the 2006 NCAA regionals, but the chief instigator was M’bah a Moute, who not only had 14 points and 10 rebounds, he scored the go-ahead basket in UCLA’s wild comeback (after Cedric Bozeman tipped the ball from J.P. Batista’s elevated grasp), and then raced downcourt and knocked the ball from Derek Raivio to prevent a potential go-ahead basket. The memory still aggrieves Zag fans.
Second team
Lorenzo Romar – It almost seems like piling on to include LoRo, a fine man who tapped out at Washington. But in 2006, he raised GU hackles by announcing a cessation of hostilities in the Zag-Husky series. A decade’s hiatus didn’t do much for Romar or the UW, which, after his cease-fire proclamation, lost by 20, 16 and 27 to the Zags. Exiled by Washington in 2017, Romar has set up shop in a second run at Pepperdine.
Bronson Kaufusi – Yes, Kaufusi’s annoyance was brief for Gonzaga fans – just 20 games for Brigham Young in the 2012-13 season. But why did he have to unleash his 6-6, 280-pound self – a body headed to an NFL defensive-end job, currently with the Jets – on the innocents of the WCC? Kaufusi fouled 28 times in 128 minutes that year – that’s a lot – and at times, he seemed more hell-bent on wreaking destruction than making baskets. Today, there are extended-family Kaufusis all over the BYU map, three of them on the 2019 football roster. Side note: Bronson Kaufusi’s mother Michelle is the mayor of Provo.
Ron Baker – We hate to single out Baker, an earnest, hustling off-guard. But there has to be a culprit for one of Gonzaga’s most devastating losses, the 76-70 defeat as a No. 1 seed to Wichita State back in 2013, and Baker was as culpable as anybody, with 16 points, 6 rebounds, 4 assists and 4 of 6 on three-point shots. The Zags had scrapped back from a 13-point first-half deficit to lead 49-41, at which point the staggered Shockers called timeout. Baker hit a three and the battle was rejoined. Survive that game, and Gonzaga had a great path – LaSalle and Ohio State – to get to a Final Four four years before it first happened.
Rex Walters – The former San Francisco coach seemed to have a way of getting under the skin of Zag fans – and vice versa. Some of that owed to USF’s three straight home wins against Gonzaga from 2010-12, the first two in overtime, the third by a point, in often-bizarre circumstances. You could say Walters fought the Dons job to a standstill; when he got fired in 2016, he had a 127-127 record at the school. Since then, he’s been on the move, working as Grand Rapids Drive coach – that’s the Detroit Pistons G League team – then an assistant with the Pistons, an aide to Eric Musselman at Nevada, and he’s currently assisting Danny Manning at Wake Forest.
Matthew Dellavedova – Lot of Saint Mary’s representation here, but why not? Ol’ Mouthpiece was a persistent thorn in GU’s side before he landed in the NBA.
Honorable Mention
Matt Mooney – Texas Tech was the team that denied the Zags a second Final Four last March, and Mooney, a double transfer, had more to do with it than anybody, with 17 points, five assists and three steals.
John Clougherty, Curtis Shaw and Kerry Sitton – John Clougherty was one of the game’s most respected officials, especially late in the 20th century, doing 12 Final Fours. Shaw worked six, including every one from 2006 to 2010. But if you asked Zag coaches which of their NCAA games they feel were most affected by officials, they’d recall the 2004 second-round blowout at Seattle’s KeyArena against Nevada. Ronny Turiaf and Cory Violette figured to be the two-headed “big” attack the Wolf Pack couldn’t contain, but Turiaf was whistled for his third foul with 11:08 left in the first half, and played a mere 15 minutes, scoring 13 points. Violette told me in 2015, “If you go back and watch it, it’d really make you mad. Turiaf had two phantom fouls.”
Jimmer – Enough said. He had 34 points the day BYU torched Gonzaga out of the 2011 tournament in the second round in Denver. To this day, I’ve never seen a team – the Cougars – that looked more confident in warmups.
Lee Fowler – A beer on me at Jack and Dan’s if you can identify this man. OK, Fowler was the athletic director at North Carolina State and chairman of the NCAA basketball committee in 2002, when Gonzaga, expecting a seed in the 3-5 range, got assigned a No. 6, and worse, was sent to high-altitude Albuquerque to take on 11th-seeded Wyoming. After three introductory years of success in the tournament, this was the year of lost innocence for the Zags; not only was their seeding disappointment palpable, they fell to the Cowboys in an upset – one of just three first-round exits in the 21-season streak of NCAA appearances.
Already, on the subject of college athletics’ percolating name-image-and-likeness issue, Gonzaga occupied a position in the sporting landscape that was distinct, perhaps unique (much more on that later).
Then this week, GU basketball coach Mark Few threw a spotlight onto the topic in his interview with writer/analyst Jeff Goodman, saying it was “totally disappointing and disgusting” that the matter should have fallen into the hands of the California state legislature and governor Gavin Newsom, in the form of the Fair Pay to Play Act to take effect in 2023.
It was an odd intro into saying that he indeed supports athletes being able to profit on the NIL front, with a means to regulate it and somehow ensure a level playing field. Perhaps the most egregious error in his foray into “grandstanding” politicians is, it’s beside the point. What matters here is that the NIL issue is upon us and it deserves to be. The NCAA’s 19-person working group on the matter is due to deliver proposals to the NCAA board of governors later this month.
And a final word on “grandstanding”: The NCAA operates at about the same template as major league baseball playoff games – slow, slower and slowest. If it takes elected officials to apply a kick in the butt to college athletics’ august governing body, so be it.
But to Gonzaga’s stake on the proper landing place for the NIL debate: Two elements are at work that make GU’s station particularly intriguing.
One is the laser focus in Spokane on Gonzaga basketball, which has been known as the pro team in the city. We might be about to find out how fitting that description is.
The point has been made that a lot fewer athletes are going to be impacted by Fair Pay to Play than the doomsayers believe. Turning the example to my side of the state, think about the University of Washington football team of a year ago, one that won the Pac-12 and played in the Rose Bowl. The quarterback of any team is always a likely candidate (although in promoting him, you wouldn’t want to show any of Jake Browning’s turn-and-run-the-other-way videos against a pass rush). Myles Gaskin was a 5,000-yard career rusher who would have been worthy. But who else? Maybe one or two guys.
On the other hand, consider Gonzaga’s wildly popular outfit of 2018-19, with Brandon Clarke, Rui Hachimura, Josh Perkins, et al. It wouldn’t be unrealistic to envision four or five players hooking some type of endorsement deal in Spokane – although those last two words are pivotal. A city of about 200,000 proper has only so many business and corporate opportunities. Still, as Gonzaga athletic director Mike Roth points out, wouldn’t a guy nicknamed “Snacks” (Zach Norvell) have a great opportunity to cash in?
Or think about the cult-hero status Gonzaga’s last man off the bench attains (paging Rem Bakamus). It wouldn’t be out of the question that some sandwich shop enlists him to swear by its cold cuts. The pay obviously would be modest, yet it would need to be accounted for.
Did somebody say Rui? Or in past years, Domas Sabonis? Ronny Turiaf? Roth says of Hachimura, a folk hero in Japan, “Last year his endorsement deal probably would exceed his first year’s NBA salary. All you had to do was come to a post-game press conference. There were 20 media outlets in Japan there.”
Yeah, Sabonis might have snared a contract with a local car dealership. But he might have also done well in his homeland of Lithuania, especially as the son of Arvydas Sabonis. No doubt there are other overseas Zags who might cash in. (And an aside: Imagine, more than a decade ago, how Adam Morrison, a local kid with a national following, could have made out.)
Over the phone, I could almost hear Roth shuddering.
“Something’s going to change, there’s no doubt in my mind,” he says. “I’m a big fan of, we need to get more to our student-athletes. It’s been that way before we started cost-of-attendance (the NCAA upgrade that a few years back brought scholarships in line with actual costs). But I’ve never been in favor of pushing the envelope to professionalize. I don’t want to make the student-athlete an employee or anything like that. I don’t know how you capitalize on name-image-likeness without becoming a professional.”
Roth scoffs at the notion that the star quarterback is going to get in his car and drive out to the local auto dealership to pitch his value. Instead, he fears, the recruiting visit in the prospect’s living room “will include an agent. The question won’t be what major or what the schedule looks like or the shoes you’re wearing, but how much you’re guaranteeing the son or daughter in name-image-and-likeness at your institution.”
The debate sparks a recollection. Back in the ’70s and ‘80s, schools going rogue with the NCAA rule book had boosters who would hire the star halfback, and he’d make big bucks for turning on the automatic sprinkler system and turning it off on his way home from the golf course. Then two things happened: The NCAA eventually cut back on allowing jobs, and schedules in most college sports got so jammed year-round, holding a job was out of the question anyway.
Name-image-likeness revisits this. The athlete, by lending his name, abets the business enterprise in the same general manner as he would if he were working in the company’s warehouse. And now the NCAA has to make it all work.
Is it a given that NCAA enforcement must increase, that schools’ compliance staffs will be bumped up?
“Either it’s increase compliance, or you do away with compliance,” Roth says. “You just say, ‘Why bother?’ “
One model likely to get some run is that of requiring athletes to put endorsement gains in a trust fund that can’t be accessed until he/she leaves college. Then there’s the notion of putting a cap on what athletes can earn. Those are concepts that, if enacted, seem certain to find their way into a courtroom.
Lots of imponderables. You could imagine this working group working overtime.
Oumar Ballo, Gonzaga's 6-foot-10, 245-pound freshman center from Mali -- nicknamed "Baby Shaq" -- hasn't yet been declared eligible for the 2019-20 season, as the Zags and the NCAA assess his academic years prior to his enrollment at GU late this summer.
"We're still working on that," GU athletic director Mike Roth said Friday. "He's here, he's enrolled, he's practicing, now it's just a matter of, let's figure this last piece out. Eventually, no matter what, he'll be eligible. The question is when. Is it next week, or after the semester [which ends in December], or is it after the season?"
Ballo spent part of his high school years at a British private school in Spain, Later, he moved to the NBA Training Academy Latin America in Mexico City, There, he obtained his high school diploma.
Ballo turned 17 only in July. In the summer of 2018, he averaged 21 points and 17 rebounds at the FIBA Under-17 World Cup, and in the summer of '19, helped Mali to a second-place finish behind the U.S. in the FIBA Under-19 World Cup, leading all rebounders with an average of 11.8.
Rivals.com rated Ballo a five-star prospect and 247 Sports assigned him four stars.
"He's going to be special," said GU assistant coach Roger Powell.
It's not unlikely that Ballo's playing time would be limited in 2019-20 in any case. GU coaches have described him as being raw -- as well as young -- and the Zags' strength this season appears to be in the frontcourt.
A longtime friend has expressed to me his angst over the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of college athletes, compared to, you know, the good old days. He’s a Cal guy who long ago appreciated the stability of a program that won the Bears an NCAA basketball championship in 1959.
Guys came, they stayed, they were there long enough to be part of the fabric of the university. Freshmen were ineligible, the process was measured, guys paid their dues, they stuck together to form unbreakable bonds. No transfer portal then. And mostly, no transfers.
My old friend squirmed when Jordan Mathews opted out of Cal for Gonzaga in 2016-17, and no doubt was further unnerved when Mathews hit, what, maybe the most important shot (at least No. 2, anyway) in GU history to beat West Virginia in the NCAAs.
I feel his pain. As a kid, my team was the Cincinnati Reds, and back then, rosters usually changed only slightly year-to-year. But you held out hope doggedly, and when one season it all came together, the joy was unmatched.
So there were the Zags, in April adrift without proven guards for 2019-20. And two months later, here came grad transfers Admon Gilder and Ryan Woolridge, from Texas A&M and North Texas, respectively. Magically, a new backcourt.
Is this what James Naismith intended? Phog Allen? Henry Iba?
One of the side benefits – a massive one – in Gonzaga’s rise over a generation is that it flipped its station in life from college basketball have-not to “have.” So instead of being the victimized mid-major seeing its best players walk out the door, it’s been scoring major pieces for its roster in players like Byron Wesley, Mathews and Geno Crandall.
It’s occurred to me: What if the grad transfer rule had been in effect when Gonzaga began turning the ship 20 years ago? Might we have seen Matt Santangelo bolt the program for, say, a Pac-10 school? Could the whole Gonzaga aria have been muted before it ever broke out in song?
“Personally, I was trying to play in the NBA,” Santangelo told me. “I probably would have reflected on that: Hey, this is my last year, these are the knocks on me, and if I go to a bigger school, this is a way (to increase visibility).”
Still, he concedes, “There weren’t very many schools doing much better than what we were doing. Looking back, I would never ever think to trade that experience.”
I reached out to Santangelo and Dan Dickau, a couple of Gonzaga's best guards, to pick their brains on the grad-transfer phenomenon. Dickau admits to being conflicted over it, seeing the damage it causes lower-level programs.
“You look at Geno Crandall’s situation, and he was their everything at North Dakota for three years,” he says. “You take him off and all of a sudden, they’re not that good anymore. I do like it because it’s helped Gonzaga – absolutely, without a doubt.
“The rule is what it is. If these student-athletes buckle down and graduate early, why not make the most of it? I see both sides.”
As GU’s opening salvo toward renown played out a generation ago, it seems unlikely that either Santangelo or Dickau would have left Gonzaga early.
Santangelo was a junior on the 1999 team that crashed the Elite Eight. Having pushed Connecticut in the game to get to a Final Four, with key pieces returning, the Zags were in get-back-here mode the next season. Santangelo might have perceived a greater individual showcase out there, but suddenly, Gonzaga had carved out a platform of its own.
By the time Dickau came along from Washington, GU was established. Or at least, the foundation was in. His junior year was the third straight Sweet 16 season, so there was ample motivation to stay and see how far Gonzaga might take this thing.
Santangelo mentions Quentin Hall, the sparkplug senior on the 1999 team, but adds, “It would have been hard to fathom a better situation somewhere (after 1998). For us, we were such under-the-radar overachievers. We could barely describe what was happening to us, let alone dream bigger. We were all shocked.”
It’s possible that Gonzaga’s noted chemistry, then and now, has curbed egress to other programs. GU has been a good reason to be careful what you wish for.
Back to the bigger picture: The grad transfer rule was imperiled in the spring, when a proposed NCAA rule change would have required schools to commit a scholarship to such players for two years unless the player completed the graduate program in one year (which isn’t happening very often). The proposed change fell flat.
It’s the way of the world, folks. It’s a form of free agency, and in case you hadn’t noticed, NBA players are conspiring to form future champions, and Bryce Harper gets signed for $330 million by the Phillies (why, I’m not sure, but that’s another story).
Yes, it was wonderful to pull for the Reds in the days of Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson and Gus Bell, and as a fan, you fought the good fight, learning to live with the valleys while savoring the peaks. It was all a noble exercise, until you realized those guys were earning eight or 10 grand a year and it was the owners making out while the players were chained to their franchises.
At the college level, increased freedom is the watchword these days. Seemingly every decision made is a nod to the student-athlete, and it’s hard to say that’s a bad thing.
Santangelo can even rationalize the hurt that comes to mid-majors when they lose a player like Crandall.
“What’s the expression? He gave at the office,” Santangelo says. “He did a lot to build that program up. There’s a sense of fair trade, even. He left the program in a better place than where he found it.”
As good as the grad transfer trend has been to GU, you can easily make the case it kept Gonzaga out of a second Final Four a few months ago.
When the Zags met Texas Tech in the Elite Eight, Matt Mooney had 17 points and five assists for the Red Raiders, who advanced. He was a grad transfer from South Dakota. Tariq Owens, a grad transfer from St. John’s, had nine points, seven rebounds and three blocks.
Meanwhile, Crandall played eight scoreless minutes. He never quite seemed to be what he might have been at Gonzaga, probably owing to his late arrival.
Now come Admon Gilder and Ryan Woolridge, the insta-backcourt, a major part of Gonzaga’s makeover.
“It is a makeover,” agreed Dickau. “But you know what? Coach (Mark) Few has done a masterful job remaking rosters. I don’t think he gets enough credit for that.”
And these days, the remaking comes fast and furious.
I was there at KeyArena for the “launch” of Gonzaga basketball in 1999. Sat courtside in Lahaina for the triple-overtime screamer against Michigan State in ’05, probably the best game I ever covered. Bore witness to many of the GU highs as well as the heartbreaks.
But maybe it’s the very first time I covered a Gonzaga basketball game that I’ll remember the most – not for anything the Zags or their opponent did, but just for . . . the night.
(Side note: I’d love to be able to tell you which school Jalen Suggs is going to choose or how much of a force Oumar Ballo is going to be, but failing that, this is what you get in this space in the dead of July, from a waiting area while a Subaru Forester is being serviced.)
I figure I probably saw Gonzaga live a couple or three times in the late ‘60s as an undergrad at Washington State. But as a senior, it was my privilege to “string” WSU home football and basketball games for the Seattle Times.
That brought me to Dec. 1, 1969, the date not only of the season opener for WSU and Gonzaga at Bohler Gym, but also a small slice – little-remembered and roundly unlamented, I suspect – of Americana.
This was near the height of the Vietnam War. Protests raged in the U.S. Students got “2-S” deferments while enrolled, but once out of school, they were fair game for the Selection Service System and the military draft.
Both to try to equalize an inherently uneven playing field and to ramp up numbers to support the war effort, Congress passed HR 14001, a bill proposed by the Nixon Administration that included a draft-lottery system, the first of which would affect those born between 1944-1950. Later lotteries – and they lasted only until the draft was abolished in 1973 – targeted 19-year-olds.
In mid-November, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird stipulated that once the bill was passed, the lottery would take place within 45 days. A voice vote in the Senate completed passage on Nov. 19, 1969.
The Selective Service chose Monday, Dec. 1 for the event, which took place at its Washington headquarters. It didn’t appear to give a lot of thought to the fact the Cougars and Zags were opening the basketball season that night.
I probably don’t need to underscore here how momentous the night was for millions of people who would be draft-eligible in 1970. By the most arbitrary of circumstances, your first post-college experience could be toting a rifle in the Mekong Delta, with all the ominous and life-altering implications therein.
The lottery was televised nationally. Memory says the mechanics of it were something like today’s NBA draft lottery. Some 366 draft capsules containing a year’s dates were placed in a deep glass container and pulled out, one-by-one.
It must have started at 4 or 4:30 p.m. Pacific time; I recall seeing the early stages. But then I had to be somewhere – Bohler Gym, for the GU-WSU freshman game.
The varsity game approached. A friend or two came by my station near courtside to compare notes on what numbers we’d gotten. I knew nothing. I also knew the last thing I wanted was to have somebody come up and tell me my number.
Of course, this wasn’t Generation Z. Think of it: No phones, no texts, no quick Google search to ferret out your lottery number in a moment’s break during a timeout. You could go hours upon hours blissfully (if edgily) unaware of where in the queue your capsule was grabbed.
I batted out an 11-paragraph story on that game, referring to “the tall Spokane team, at times sporting a front line of three 6-foot, 8-inch players.” GU’s skid toward an 85-69 defeat was greased by an alarming 21 turnovers in the first half. The Zags would make 28 before it was over, beating their total of field goals by one.
Gonzaga was led by the 15 points apiece of big guys Bill Quigg and Blaine Bundy. Jim Meredith, a productive Montanan, had 19 for WSU’s Marv Harshman in Harsh’s penultimate season at WSU.
Hank Anderson coached the Zags, who went 10-16 that year. The Cougars went 19-7, Harshman’s best record in 13 seasons at WSU, and tied for second behind UCLA in the Pac-8. Today, that team is about a No. 6 seed in the NCAA tournament. Not then.
They had announced that lottery results would be posted at a couple of locations on campus. One was at Arts Hall (renamed Murrow Hall in the 1970s).
I drove up the hill. By now it was well past 11 p.m. The campus was quiet, Arts Hall deserted. There, on a stairway landing, were the lottery results, illuminated dimly by an overhead light.
I scanned down to April 20 (some carefree kids from San Rafael High would one day codify my birthday). There it was: No. 345. The Selective Service system would get down through No. 195 in 1970.
I headed downtown to Rico’s, bought a six-pack of Lucky Lager, and like Jim Valvano, looked for somebody to party with. Like him, I couldn’t find anybody. I drove back to the apartment and drank in the darkness, no gloating, just grateful.
This blog is coming to you courtesy of the mysteries of computer technology, 2019. Specifically, you’re reading it now after (a) I lost some computerized notes awhile back, and (b) I found them the other day. I’m not especially tech-savvy – OK, not at all – but for the life of me, not only do I not know how I lost the notes, I don’t know how I found them.
But there they were, background on a subject I’ve always seen as fascinating – Gonzaga’s struggles penetrating the consciousness of the west side of the state of Washington. Despite the 21 straight NCAA tournaments. Despite the 11 straight seasons of winning in the NCAA tournament. Despite five straight Sweet 16s and three Elite Eights among those five.
Here’s how I perceive it: Against all odds, Gonzaga hoops occupies a bigger place in the psyche of fans two or three time zones away than it does in the world of the fan-but-not-a-GU-fan west of the Cascades. Or maybe what I’m feeling is the notion that a basketball follower in Indiana or Pennsylvania probably envisions Zag hoops as being a bigger deal along the I-5 corridor than I sense that it is.
Recruiting remains a challenge in that sector, and there's precious little discussion of Gonzaga hoops on the airwaves, whether it's good times or bad at Washington.
I wrote about this in some detail in “Glory Hounds.” But what revived the subject last season was the what’s-wrong-with-this-picture juxtaposition of two east-side Division I hoops programs in the Seattle radio market.
One was Washington State, which was slogging through an 11-21 season, and which, for the love of Isaac Fontaine, hasn’t won a game in the Pac-12 conference tournament in a decade.
And the Cougars were broadcast on 710 ESPN in Seattle, a 50,000-watt station that, even before its transformation to all-sports radio a decade ago, was one of the region’s heavyweights.
Because of WSU’s tie-in with 710 ESPN, you were able last winter to pick up the Cougars’ game at Stanford, in which they trailed 52-15 at the half to a club that finished with a losing record.
Then there are the Zags, who are on KIXI in Seattle, a retro-music station that cuts power at night. In fact, it cuts power so much that, despite the fact I live about 20 miles from Seattle, the signal fades and weaves and is sometimes unintelligible. If you want to pick up a coach’s post-game radio comments, it can be difficult.
Let’s acknowledge a couple of things: First, there are a lot more WSU alums in the Seattle area than Gonzaga alums. Second, it’s questionable how many fans of either ilk follow their team on a radio station. Still, there are times when you’re in your car, say, and that’s the stop-gap.
As it happens, there’s a sub-plot.
In essence, when you hear the Cougars on 710 ESPN, it’s an infomercial. Because WSU is footing the bill.
Let’s go back in time.
Not so long ago, like 20-25 years ago, the arrangement for carriage of colleges’ athletic teams went like this: Stations bid for the rights, which went to the highest bidder, and then the station’s salesmen sold the advertising to recoup the investment. In Seattle, Washington football always commanded a jaw-dropping number, sometimes tops in the nation, owing to the excellence of the program and the fact that the UW held a major place in the region’s sporting consciousness despite all the pro competition.
Then things changed, as multimedia companies like IMG College and Learfield set up shop. They represented schools and negotiated with stations for a broader-based contract that includes things like stadium and arena advertising. (Those two entities merged several months ago.)
A WSU spokesman forwarded details of the school’s arrangement with 710 ESPN. The Cougars are in the middle of a three-year contract that requires them to pay $119,000 annually to have 710 broadcast all football and men’s basketball games. Some $40,000 of that commitment annually is picked up by IMG.
All I can envision is a station executive at 710 gritting his teeth for two hours as the WSU basketball team is losing to Montana State. Or as the Ernie Kent coach’s show is airing (that’s part of the deal, too.)
One of those execs is Dave Pridemore, and I asked him if it would be a non-starter to split football and basketball (opening a spot, ostensibly, for GU basketball) since WSU football prospers and basketball struggles mightily. Via e-mail, he responded: “It’s a fair question, but if ‘struggling’ programs/teams/clubs were a criteria for our play-by-play partnerships, since 2000 and up until now we would have no Seahawks, no Mariners, no Huskies nor Cougars on our broadcast platforms . . . “
OK, but the more cogent reason is that in such industry deals, it would be highly unusual to make football and basketball separate entities. As Pridemore acknowledges, “IMG understandably won’t separate them and we’ve never asked . . . so no room on 710 for GU.”
Mark Livingston, general manager for Gonzaga’s Sports Properties – the Learfield/IMG arm of the department – confirms that’s industry custom, saying, “When I talk to my peers at IMG, I haven’t talked to anybody that’s broken it up.”
Indeed, another radio exec says in some negotiations, Learfield/IMG will even attempt to bundle other programs, like women's basketball and baseball, with football and basketball.
Any sort of apples-to-apples comparison is impossible here, because GU, as a private institution, doesn’t release its contract terms. And conceptually, the obvious driver for 710 ESPN is football, which Gonzaga doesn’t offer. As Livingston puts it, “If I’m at WSU and I’m writing them a six-figure check (annually), you’re taking both.”
Is $119,000 annually a substantial check in the realm of such deals? “Yeah, it is,” replied Livingston.
So, for Gonzaga, the question is: How badly do you want your games aired on a major player in the market? “Currently,” Livingston says, “we are not writing a check to be on the airwaves. Some schools do and some don’t.”
I’m making the assumption that’s simple cost/benefit math – that the Zags aren’t convinced there’s enough to be gained from buying the exposure.
That may merely reflect the difficulty in penetrating a large market. Says Livingston, “It is tough in the major markets. These markets are really tough to crack.”
He says some schools in those markets have to satisfy themselves with getting basketball games streamed because the demand is low. “You’re not going to bump Jim Rome or Rush Limbaugh or somebody like that to get on the air (in a major market),” Livingston says.
I ran the phenomenon by Rich Moore, the station manager at KJR in Seattle, another all-sports station that might seem a likely candidate to carry GU.
Said Moore, “I mean, I would be interested . . . it’s hard with college basketball. The games are so inconsistent time-wise, and late at night. They’re all on TV for the most part now. The value is not what you think it might be . . . I don’t know how big the audience is on this side of the mountains for Gonzaga basketball.”
There’s also the fact that a lot of GU basketball games are at 6 p.m., which is a nice TV slot, but an invasion of the important afternoon-drive radio window.
“We would probably lose money if we carried the games,” Moore says.
Meanwhile, Mike Roth, the athletic director, takes a generally beatific view of the west-side radio situation. He remembers, pre-streak, meeting with individual radio stations to plead Gonzaga’s case, trying to wring every inch of turf possible.
Now, he says, “We really like the fact people can get the games throughout the state of Washington in your car.” (And, to be precise, apps allow you to avoid the flighty nature of night-time radio signals.)
Roth points to other developments that have raised Gonzaga’s profile on the west side, like the donation by late philanthropist Myrtle Woldson of some prime downtown-Seattle real estate, being leased to provide a steady source of income for the school.
Of course, there’s the Battle in Seattle, which played to generally popular houses at KeyArena – but which is on hold at least until the redo of the facility is complete in a couple of years.
“Compared to where we were in ’95, ’96, ’97, to where we are today, it’s light-years different,” Roth says. “I’m not sure how many people on the west side knew we existed. Now every game we play is on TV. Now, with the ability of streaming, people can watch us all over the place.”
Let’s not overstate the point here. If you asked 100 Gonzaga fans, 100 would probably tell you the ability to see their team on TV far outstrips any concerns about radio. And that’s fully understandable.
It may even be that west-side radio is so distant on the priority list of GU marketers, it’s not even back-burner. Perhaps, in the sweep of media considerations, it's just an accessory, like your belt or pocket square.
So be it. But last winter, the Zags were a team capable of winning a national championship. That, and the media market on the far side of their own state, remain frontiers yet to conquer.
Only the most degenerate among us know this is possible, but it’s true: A college-football fan can, if he’s a risk-taker, get down a bet this summer in some Nevada casinos on any game on his favorite team’s 2019 schedule. You can, for instance, bet on the Apple Cup, with whatever (highly speculative) odds are listed.
Of course, such a bet is fraught with uncertainty, about injuries, about team development, about any number of factors that would affect the line if it were instead the next game. To continue with the Apple Cup example, at this time a year ago you would have had no way to forecast the wonders of Gardner Minshew, or even count on him being named the WSU starting quarterback.
All of this is a roundabout way of getting to today’s treatise: If you could do this in college basketball, what sort of line would you post today on Gonzaga’s visit to Washington?
The spring storm blew through, figuratively, and what’s left at either place is hardly recognizable.
Put it this way: Last December, the Zags escaped with an 81-79 win over Washington on Rui Hachimura’s last-second jumper. In the last 12 minutes of that game, the only points scored by players returning to either team are Corey Kispert’s five (on a three and a couple of free throws) for Gonzaga and Sam Timmins’ layup for Washington. The rest of it – gonzo.
At Washington, that means the top four scorers, the top four rebounders and the top four assist guys have left. Gonzaga loses, as early entries to the NBA draft, Hachimura, Brandon Clarke and Zach Norvell, plus seniors Josh Perkins, Geno Crandall (actually, he was a grad transfer) and Jeremy Jones. Among those six guys are 70.6 points of the 87.7 averaged by the Zags last year.
Right here, we’ll stipulate that there’s no reason for Zag fans to obsess over Washington. A loss to the Huskies surely wouldn’t be a season-breaker. But there’s at least a modicum of interest in them, owing to proximity, GU’s recent dominance of the series, and the fact, as I wrote in “Glory Hounds,” Mark Few was doing some faint murmuring a few years ago about discontinuing the series because of the UW’s lagging competitiveness in the final stretches of the Lorenzo Romar era, something I never got on board with.
The most screaming unknown at both programs is who’s going to play guard. Quade Green, a five-star transfer from Kentucky, gets eligible for Washington only midway through the season, presumably after the UW-Zags game. That means the most obvious candidates in the backcourt are Elijah Hardy, who played all of 18 minutes last season, and a couple of freshmen.
Gonzaga would appear to be better positioned in the backcourt, but it’s not exactly rock-solid. There are holdovers Joel Ayayi and Greg Foster, neither of whose play has jumped up and shouted, “I should be getting more run, dammit!” Fortunately, there’s Texas A&M grad transfer Admon Gilder, and there’s the provocative freshman, Brock Ravet. Still undecided is USC grad transfer Derryck Thornton. Could Kispert steal some minutes as an off-guard in a pinch?
The buzz at both schools is the frontcourt. Washington has attracted two five-star studs in Isaiah Stewart and Jaden McDaniels. They’re dancing with the devil again on Montlake (not that Few wouldn’t do precisely the same thing). Under Romar, the Huskies were famously unsuccessful with translating one-and-done talent to, uh, success on the floor – from Spencer Hawes to Tony Wroten to DeJounte Murray to Marquese Chriss to Markelle Fultz.
(Upon McDaniels’ announcement for the UW, a Seattle talk-radio host said approvingly, “Build a fence around the state.” Hmm. Gonzaga might have something to say about that, since both Ravet and Anton Watson are rated top-100 nationally. But forgive him the slip of the tongue; the same jock awhile back acknowledged Gonzaga as one of the great stories of all-time.)
Not that GU doesn’t have a front-court bounty incoming as well, from Watson to Drew Timme to a couple of others.
The X-factor in this hazy equation is Killian Tillie, who has played 1,599 minutes at Gonzaga; started 35 games as a sophomore; has never shot worse than 50 percent in three seasons; and has never hit less than .438 on three-pointers. He’s the best player on the floor in this matchup, if the Zags can just get him out there healthy. Not to be forgotten is Filip Petrusev, who played well against Washington last December before Killie’s return from injury pushed him to the back burner. (Huskies will counter that they have a couple of forecourt pieces in Nahziah Carter and Hameir Wright.)
Have to say, I’m surprised at the loftiness of some forecasts for Gonzaga, which reflect the Zags’ staccato consistency in recent years. Not that it can’t happen, just that it would need to happen with a roster never so dramatically flipped since . . . since when? Athlon just pegged Gonzaga No. 9. Stadium.com’s Jeff Goodman puts GU 12th.
So many imponderables. That mythical betting line? I’ll give Washington the obligatory home-court points and call it Gonzaga minus one. Without a shred of conviction.
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