Huddle up, West Coast Conference. It’s time to say goodbye to an old friend.
The last WCC regular season game ever for Gonzaga comes Saturday at Saint Mary’s. Perfect. When anyone in the league has made trouble for the Zags, it’s usually been the Gaels. Why not one more for old time’s sake? Matter of fact, if Saint Mary’s wins, the two share the WCC season title. Then comes the conference tournament. Then Gonzaga leaves for the rebooted Pac-12, taking its national profile with it.
How are they feeling about that, all those left behind? No more Mark Few. No more McCarthey Athletic Center, which opened in 2004. AKA The Kennel. The Zags have played 175 WCC games in The Kennel. They have lost 10.
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How should the members bid adieu to the powerhouse that relentlessly dominated their landscape, but also brought their league exposure and raised the bar higher for everyone? This is how it’s been…
Pepperdine’s last victory over the Zags came before Facebook, before Twitter, before Instagram. That was 2002. The Waves have lost 51 in a row to Gonzaga since.
San Diego has gone down 20 times in a row to the Zags. The Toreros are 4-54 against Few.
Loyola Marymount has dropped 35 of the last 37 meetings.
Santa Clara is having a fine season at 23-7. The Broncos might grab their first NCAA tournament bid in 30 years. They’ve played the Zags reasonably tough this season, losing by 12 and eight points. But they’ve still lost 53 of the last 57 games in the series.
San Francisco won national championships when Bill Russell was on campus. Gonzaga would die to be able to say that. But that was eons ago in the 1950s. The Dons have lost 35 consecutive games to the Zags.
Pacific is relatively new to this WCC business, going against Few-coached Gonzaga teams only 23 times. The Tigers have lost all 23, though they made the latest one a 71-62 grinder.
Seattle just joined the WCC this season and while the Redhawks might share the same state with Gonzaga, they haven’t been sharing the same court. When they played Jan. 2 in Spokane, it was the first meeting since 1980. The Zags won but had to go overtime. At home. Clearly, Seattle didn’t get the memo on how things usually operate in the conference. Their second meeting ended 71-50.
Portland gave the Zags their only WCC loss so far this season. Maybe the last one ever. The Pilots confounded No. 6 Gonzaga into 40 percent shooting , and won 87-80 to defeat the highest-ranked opponent in school history. Until that night they had lost 20 games in a row to the Zags and were 2-47 against Few. Coach Shantay Legans admitted to The Athletic, “if you had told me at the beginning of the year that we’d be taking the ball out with under a minute to go, and we’re up 11 on Gonzaga, I’d be like, ‘What reality are we living in?’”
Alas, Portland had to visit The Kennel Wednesday night. The Zags won their final WCC home game 89-48.
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Having inhaled Gonzaga’s dust for decades, what should all those schools do to say goodbye? Offer toasts? Request going-away selfies?
Actually, there’s one school and one coach more than any other to check with at this moment.
Saint Mary’s has been the nut Gonzaga could not routinely crack. Randy Bennett’s teams have beaten Few 17 times, which accounts for 41.6 percent of his conference defeats. The Gaels are 6-6 against Gonzaga over the past 12 meetings. That included clinching the outright WCC season title last year in The Kennel. Few has been named conference coach of the year 14 times, but the past four awards have gone to Bennett. If Saint Mary’s wins Saturday night, this will be at least a piece of four WCC season titles in a row.
So… paging Randy Bennett.
About Saturday night, might that feel a little odd, facing Gonzaga for the last time in the regular season as conference comrades?
“There’s so much going on you’re not really thinking about it, but if you had any time you would be,” he began. “When we were up at Gonzaga I wasn’t really thinking about it and then it came right before the game. We were standing out there and I was like, I’m going to miss this.
“It’ll be the same this week.”
Bennett and Few have been eyeball-to-eyeball for decades. Few took the Gonzaga head coaching job in 1999, Bennett became Saint Mary’s coach in 2001. They have spent much of the first quarter of this century going at one another. Together they’ve won 24 of the past 26 WCC tournaments. Maybe no opponent understands what the Zags have meant to the West Coast Conference more than the guy who has had to try to beat them every year.
“It’s been good for me as a coach and it’s been good for us as a program,” Bennett said. “You have something to measure yourself against and it’s formidable. You have to dot every I and cross every t in your program, whether it’s recruiting, whether it’s coaching, whether it’s strength conditioning, whether it’s culture. Whatever.
“That’s what it’s been like. I have no problem saying it. They’ve made us better because if we’re going to play for the championship we have to be as good as they are, or better.”
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Sure, he knows all about The Kennel. “It’s unlike any other place we go all year. They’re right down on you, they’re very tuned into the game, they’re very organized on their cheering. It’s just different. Not only are they like that, they roll out good players and good teams. It’s a good challenge for your team to be able to stay composed, stay together. Everything you talk about with your team and your program on being good, it gets tested that night.”
Sure, he’ll never forget several Saint Mary’s-Gonzaga games, starting with Jan. 8, 2005. He had lost his first eight tries against the Zags, but the Gaels won that one 89-81. “I could tell you exactly how the game went down, and this is 21 years later. We had to get good enough where our guys believed we could beat them.”
Sure, Bennett is aware there could be post-Gonzaga pains for the WCC.
“We can be fine but some schools have to step up. There are some programs I think have under-achieved that I think can fix it real quick if they’ll make the necessary changes they need to make in their program as far as resource commitment.”
Sure, he’s thought about Gonzaga vs. Saint Mary’s as a non-conference game in the future.
“I could see that. We’d be good with it. I’m not challenging anybody, I’m way beyond that. But it would make sense. They’re trying to find high quality opponents and so are we. You’re trying to find Quad 1 games and there’s one, every year.”
But before that, they must face one another again with conference booty on the line. The Zags can win and wrap up an undisputed season title in their last lap, or lose and share it with their old pals from Saint Mary’s. Won’t be easy. The 26-4 Gaels are unbeaten at home in Moraga, California, just like 28-2 Gonzaga is in Spokane. Incidentally, this might not be their WCC duel. Did we mention they’ve met in 15 of the past 22 conference tournament championship games? One always in the other’s way and it seemed as if it might that way forever. But it won’t.
“Mark and I are good,” Bennett said. “We’re very competitive, we know what’s at stake, we hear all the noise. But at the end of the day we’ve both been raised in this league. We know when each of us had kids and had family and got married. We’ve had a good relationship for a long time. I would just say we’re good friends.
“I don’t think it’s over. The conference rivalry is over, but I think we’ll play again. I think we both have it in great perspective. It’s been great, we enjoyed it, we’re friends. So here we go. We’re playing another important game.”
A good chunk of the WCC record book is in Gonzaga colors. Of 52 season and tournament titles decided since 2000, the Zags won or shared 42. They occupied 27 percent of the first-team all-conference selections. Sitting WCC teams have 52 NCAA tournament victories this century. Gonzaga won 44 of them.
Soon all that will be history, and McCarthey Athletic Center will be someone else’s problem. There’s a coach in Moraga, California who might understand better than anybody how that changes his conference’s world. But for now, there’s one more game to play. Or is it two?
