Gonzaga’s timeless approach could culminate in immortal success
They remain as disruptive as they were during their breakthrough in 1999. They’re just doing so from inside the system now. They’re not fighting for inclusion among the elite anymore. They have become a standard in men’s college basketball, and if they can outlast Baylor in a colossal national title game Monday night, they will become the standard. Even though their name still gets mangled — ZAG, not ZOG, people — they are on the cusp of a championship and an immortality-clinching 32-0 record.
The Bulldogs needed a miraculous overtime buzzer-beater from Jalen Suggs to get here, but don’t reduce the feat to a magician’s work. A refreshingly steadfast approach anchors the Gonzaga program, and it has managed to preserve that ethos throughout its ambition and expansion. While the current team attempts to complete a masterpiece and grab a seat at history’s finest table, the 2020-21 season is best described as the most elegant collage of everything Gonzaga has established over more than two decades.
At its best, this team seems as if it is from another time. But are these Bulldogs from the past or the future? Or both? For 31 unblemished games, they have been a modern throwback in every way. They can shoot, they play at a speedy pace, and they preach floor spacing in following today’s best basketball practices. But they live in the paint and make an unfathomable 55 percent of their field goal attempts.
Their personnel accentuates this timelessness. They are a hybrid of prototypical Gonzaga all-Americans (Drew Timme, Corey Kispert), impact transfers (Andrew Nembhard, Aaron Cook), international recruits (Joel Ayayi), one big-time national recruit (Suggs) and a slew of developmental gems who will grow and carry the program after this season.
There is recruiting, and there is talent evaluation. Gonzaga never just recruits and reaches for the best players it can grab. Beyond scrutinizing whether an athlete can play, Coach Mark Few and his staff ponder how a player fits the program’s culture; how to balance classes with immediate impact players and long-term difference makers; and how to put together the right mix of skill, toughness and athleticism.
Like a hitter with a good eye, they’re not afraid to take pitches. They refuse to take wild hacks at talent, but they still hit plenty of home runs while maintaining a high batting average.
Longtime Gonzaga assistant Tommy Lloyd once explained the approach to me: reach higher but don’t change. Gonzaga likes being Gonzaga. Few, who appreciates fishing alone as much as he does coaching before large crowds, isn’t obsessed with the so-called big time. He likes existing in a basketball lab in Spokane, Wash.
“Honestly, what we do is not that different from the beginning,” Lloyd said. “If you know Coach Few, he’s a pretty simple, straightforward guy. We don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the past, and we don’t look too far in the future. We try to stay the same. Same approach. Same mentality.
“A lot of these programs, they want everything front-loaded. They want everything set up perfectly so that they can go out and win. At Gonzaga, we’ve never front-loaded anything. Things have come to us over time as we’ve earned them — our facilities, our arena. And as we’ve won and gotten access to better players, our approach hasn’t changed.”
Gonzaga has played in 22 straight NCAA tournaments. During that time, many programs outside the power-conference establishment have enjoyed unforgettable runs and bouts of success. But the Bulldogs have been able to sustain it. They have had different waves of achievement, and each time there is a new one, they rise higher.
In 1999, they burst into relevance with an Elite Eight run under former coach Dan Monson, who left for Minnesota after the breakthrough. Then Few took over and advanced to back-to-back Sweet 16s in 2000 and 2001. The program made another jump in 2006 when Adam Morrison became a high-scoring phenom. Seven years later, Gonzaga earned a No. 1 seed in the tournament for the first time in 2013. Four years after that, the Bulldogs made it to their first Final Four and lost to North Carolina in the 2017 title game. This season, they were ranked No. 1 in the preseason, and they have carried that torch all the way to the season’s final evening.
The road hasn’t always been smooth. From 2007 to 2014, Few’s teams failed to advance out of the first weekend seven times in eight tournaments. The Bulldogs became targets of March ridicule. They were considered overrated, over-seeded, the team from the West Coast Conference with an inflated record and not enough consistent competition throughout the season.
They didn’t panic, but Few made revisions when necessary. Gonzaga has gotten more physical and defensive-minded over the years. It has supplemented its skill with a greater emphasis on athleticism. It has become more adaptable and learned to play varying styles of basketball. Now it has put together a monster season. The vibe of the program is the same, though. Suggs made that clear against UCLA on Saturday night. He didn’t show it just with his 40-foot bank shot at the buzzer. His sequence with just under two minutes remaining in regulation may have been more indicative of his commitment to Gonzaga.
That’s when the freshman point guard, who is projected to be a top-five NBA draft pick, blocked the dunk attempt of UCLA big man Cody Riley and then unleashed an unfathomable bounce pass to Timme for a dunk. After Monday, Suggs figures to join Zach Collins, who was a 2017 NBA draft lottery pick, as Gonzaga’s only one-and-done players. He might even be selected higher than Morrison, who went third in 2006. For all the great lead guards Gonzaga has had over the past 22 years, Suggs is a different kind of special. But he has blended perfectly into the program’s culture.
“I could have gone to a lot of places, and people ask me, ‘Why Gonzaga?’” said Suggs, who is from Minneapolis. “It’s not like the Big Ten or Big 12 or anything like that. For the people and for the culture, that’s why I chose to come here.”
When Suggs made the game-winner Saturday, Morrison was doing color commentary on the team’s radio broadcast. As announcer Tom Hudson described the scene, Morrison exclaimed: “Yes! YES! Whoa! Wow!”
Fifteen years ago, he wept on the court after Gonzaga lost a close Sweet 16 game to UCLA. It was his final college game, an abrupt and incomplete finish. It was a moment that many reference when thinking about the agony of this tournament.
If Morrison cried this time, they were happy tears. Look at his old school, still growing. Still Gonzaga.
