Blog
03-29-23
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 Ga...
03-21-23
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,...
03-13-23
Prisoners of the moment, we are. That’s a truism reinforced by the fact that Gonzaga hoops graduated from a collective national ugh earlier this season to the notion that, who knows, might have six ...
02-22-23
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 ...
12-05-22
I’ll have to admit, I’m not much for advanced analytics in college basketball. My expertise in numbers tends to become strained somewhere just past the old maxim that a good free throw shooter will hi...
08-16-22
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 would be to split the difference, settle for $7,90...
06-03-22
A funny thing happened to Gonzaga on the way to the ATM, to find out if there was anything left in the coffers. It looked up to see an exacta hit in the final race. Rasir Bolton decided another year o...
04-12-22
The off-season has begun at Gonzaga, with a twist. This period of self-reckoning, with the usual smattering of national scorn, commences with the buzz that the Zags might be outbound for the Big East ...
03-29-22
It was 23 years ago, in Seattle, that Gonzaga began one of sport’s all-time, improbable arcs. But Friday, were Zags coach Mark Few to have awakened in my town, he would have been jarred by this headli...
03-03-22
Gotta say this for Saint Mary’s: True, most of the time it plays a distant second to Gonzaga in the hierarchy of West Coast Conference basketball. In their two-decades’ jousting history, Mark Few has ...
02-16-22
Five words. Five innocent, but chilling words that frame the future of two Pac-12 basketball programs, and indeed, the entire conference. “I never got a call.” As the college hoops season winds down, ...
01-28-22
Brainstorming how possibly to make sense of the John Stockton lightning bolt of a few days ago, I was alerted to my latest incoming e-mail. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune wrote that hospitals in that ar...
01-20-22
Those Zags, always the show-stopper. They’re at it again, splashing up insane offensive numbers, cozying up to triple digits routinely, sending Drew Timme off to win national player-of-the-week honors...
01-20-22
Those Zags, always the show-stopper. They’re at it again, splashing up insane offensive numbers, cozying up to triple digits routinely, sending Drew Timme off to win national player-of-the-week honors...
12-08-21
A couple of years ago, a provocateur tweeter took note of Gonzaga’s 20 straight NCAA-tournament appearances and single foray to the title game, and tapped sarcastically, “Pretty nice return.” I took t...
11-01-21
These days, there are a lot of things I don’t get. For example, I don’t get how conservative America decided to throw in with an oily, grifting con artist from New York. My latest puzzler is the saga ...
09-10-21
Most of the chatter around Mark Few these days has to do with what he might have done to somebody else when he was picked up on suspicion of drunken driving the other night. Once that was reconciled, ...
08-20-21
When Mike Roth walks out of his Gonzaga athletic director’s office for the last time Aug. 31, he’ll graduate to a lengthy, personal, to-do list. At least he can mark another list “don’t-bother” – the ...
06-08-21
“Just put a quarter in me,” Mike Roth would say self-deprecatingly, in reference to his facility for waxing long in answer to media questions. Well, Roth just announced his retirement after 24 years a...
05-19-21
March 26 – not so long ago, right? It was spring then, it’s spring now. How to get vaccinated, and how to get everybody vaccinated, was an issue. It is now. A certain diminished head of state was bell...
04-07-21
As a kid in the Midwest, my very first brush with college basketball was with the Ohio State Buckeyes, with Jerry Lucas and John Havlicek and Larry Siegfried and Mel Nowell. I believed they hung the m...
03-15-21
The question for Mark Few curled out of Rece Davis’ mouth, needing to be asked yet somehow the uninvited guest at your party. “Would it be a disappointment,” posed Davis Sunday on ESPN, “if you don’t ...
03-05-21
Far beneath the surface of anything that really matters in college hoops is the relationship between Oregon and Gonzaga. The Zags’ Mark Few, of course, is an Oregon grad, and at least during much of G...
02-22-21
This being the era of hot takes, we'll take the bait. Those Zags: If only they could shoot. Hot enough for you? OK, there’s supposed to be a kernel of truth in the hottest of hot takes, and we’re taki...
01-20-21
The conversation began with the obligatory smack chatter. “I haven’t watched you play a whole game,” Ray Giacoletti said over the phone to Mark Few following Gonzaga’s beatdown of Brigham Young earlie...