Blog
06-25-24
It shouldn’t be so much to ask: Couldn’t somebody in charge in college athletics act like the enterprise hasn’t completely lost its mind? We’re about to have athletes get on planes and travel ...
04-15-24
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 a...
03-27-24
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. ...
02-27-24
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 t...
01-03-24
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 Gonza...
12-17-23
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 ...
12-06-23
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 ...
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 ...