About 2001 or 2002, I found myself in Mark Few’s office, having a conversation I never had with any other coach.     The chief of the Gonzaga basketball program was a couple of years into a tenure as the head guy, and seemed to be wrestling with the notion of the advisability of future job opportunities. He asked...

  I’m sitting in front of a computer and trying to describe adequately Gonzaga’s nine-year streak of making the NCAA Sweet 16. A marriage of “stupefying” and “insane” is about the best I can do.      So irrepressible were the Zags in taking out McNeese State and Kansas over the opening weekend, that t...

Behold Gonzaga, forever breaking glass ceilings, always doing something outside the norm.   This season, that means lurking about the ledge of the NCAA-tournament cut, which is quite a change around the McCarthey Athletic Center. It’s been fully eight years since the Zags lived on the bubble, and of course, they haven�...

  I didn’t do much on New Year’s Eve, so belatedly, here’s a toast to the phenomenon of Gonzaga basketball.     Clink.     But accompanying it must be a question: Why the hell would anybody rank Gonzaga right now?     The news that Gonzaga is ranked Number Whatever in the weekly Associated Press po...

  In the runup to the Connecticut-Gonzaga hoops matchup last week at Climate Pledge Arena, the cheap-seat price on StubHub dropped into the 20s.     Too much Husky-centric euphoria, maybe, over their undefeated football season. Too much focus on the sputtering Seahawks. Too much angst spent on a Mariner franchis...

For a good long time now, Saint Mary’s has been Gonzaga’s bete noire in the West Coast Conference, the program that occasionally made a mess of a perfectly good party.   Never mind that the Zags have won about three games in every four played in the long-running subplot of Mark Few versus Randy Bennett. Wh...

  Back in 2010, before Final Fours, before Sweet 16s on demand, before NIL, Gonzaga turned in one of its most forgettable basketball performances of all time, losing 76-41 to Duke at Madison Square Garden. When I wrote Glory Hounds, Zags coach Mark Few and his assistant, Ray Giacoletti, recalled a glum, introspective w...

  Not so long ago, there was a time when Gonzaga couldn’t seem to make March Madness’ Sweet 16.  Now the thing can’t seem to go on without the Zags.  When they gnarled their way past TCU Sunday night, they crashed their eighth straight Sweet 16. That’s third all-time in college hoops, and to underscore ...

  On a trip last week to southern California, we ventured up the coast to Malibu to take the temperature of a Gonzaga basketball program that in 2023 seems to defy definition. But first, I can report that LA traffic is still awful, and the Pepperdine campus is more odd than it is stunning, notwithstanding the beauty just to the ...

John Calipari reminds me of the guy who, buying a used car from a private party, offers $7,800 for a vehicle listed at $8,000. The kosher thing to do ...