Blog
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...
12-31-20
Heard a TV announcer the other night note that Gonzaga was No. 4 in the nation in shooting percentage. Which elicited nothing much more than a “Meh.” After all, two recent Zag squads – the 2019 Elite ...
12-21-20
About the time Gonzaga had rained its 10th trey in the first half against Iowa the other day in South Dakota, Mark Titus of FoxSports tweeted this: “With respect to Baylor, I’m ready to officially dec...
12-08-20
Saturday, Dec. 12 was going to be the day Gonzaga renewed its basketball series with Washington. But that was back about a jillion months ago (seemingly), and several permutations of the ever-evolving...
12-08-20
Saturday, Dec. 12 was going to be the day Gonzaga renewed its basketball series with Washington. But that was back about a jillion months ago (seemingly), and several permutations of the ever-evolving...
11-23-20
With a wing and a prayer, and maybe a rabbit’s foot and a stray four-leaf clover, Gonzaga launches its college basketball season this week. Not that luck is typically in the Zags’ playbook, but it’s 2...
11-18-20
Not to strike a downbeat note on a Gonzaga basketball program with a preseason No. 1 imprimatur, but we start today’s treatise with a question for Zag fans: What’s the most gut-bombing, migraine-induc...
11-18-20
Not to strike a downbeat note on a Gonzaga basketball program with a preseason No. 1 imprimatur, but we start today’s treatise with a question for Zag fans: What’s the most gut-bombing, migraine-induc...
09-09-20
Apparently without a heart, the year 2020 just keeps dealing out haymakers. Two more came the other day, in less than 24 hours, with the passing of two iconic figures whom I knew well – Tom Jernstedt ...
08-22-20
The first date that unsettled the stomachs of Gonzaga basketball fans was Aug. 3, when they sweated out the return of NBA-explorer Corey Kispert. Surmounting that crisis, they look with trepidation to...
06-12-20
Wrote recently here about how the NBA “tournament” in Orlando later this summer (and fall) will affect collegians exploring the league’s draft Oct. 15. So here’s what I’m hearing about the three Gonza...
06-06-20
When the NBA burped up its plan to restart its 2019-20 season the other day, one of my thoughts was: Hell of a way to prepare to win a national championship. The League is planning on taking its sweet...
04-21-20
Had a long conversation late last week with Mike Roth, the Gonzaga athletic director, about the unsettled state of affairs in college athletics. And while he never addressed it specifically, I find my...
03-30-20
When news broke the other day in the Spokane Spokesman-Review about a home-and-home series between Kansas and Gonzaga in the 2022-23 and 2023-24 seasons, it was met with predictable huzzahs from Zag f...
03-19-20
As I’m writing this, between sessions of thatching the lawn, the first basketballs of the NCAA men’s tournament were to be bouncing in Spokane. Thursday and Friday, the best two days of the sporting y...
03-16-20
My last dream on the night before Selection Sunday went like this: The office called and proposed doing a story on how the tournament might have looked, were it not wiped out. When I woke up, I realiz...
03-12-20
So you’ve wondered about those funky, end-of-October closed scrimmages that college basketball teams stage at neutral sites? The ones unfettered by media coverage, fans or fanfare? What must the atmos...
02-23-20
Once the BYU students had stormed the floor, and coach Mark Pope had gotten done lavishing praise on just about everybody in the house wearing a “Y” sweatshirt, a thought occurred to me: BYU’s dominat...
02-17-20
The top-shelf basketball talent from the Seattle area just keeps coming. A year after Jaden McDaniels became a five-star recruit, coaches from around the country are coveting 6-9 Paolo Banchero of O’D...