The logic of Gonzaga’s nonconference scheduling has always been clear: load the calendar with November and December challenges, absorb the bruises that come with early-season experimentation, and enter conference play with a résumé strong enough to fine tune and coast. The 2025-26 slate follows that familiar blueprint. First, matchups with Oklahoma and Creighton before decamping to this year’s Player’s Era Festival, a Las Vegas showcase designed to compress three high quality Quad 1 games into four days. Then, tilts against Kentucky and UCLA in December, and a final showdown with Oregon just before the holidays. It’s yet another non-conference gauntlet that will test both travel legs and fighting spirit. Yet for all of the noise generated by blue-blood opponents and televised showdowns, the trajectory of Gonzaga’s March seeding may depend just as much on how one conference rival sustains its own relevance this season.
It’s an ugly truth of rooting for the Zags: you still need Saint Mary’s to be really good, too.
There are few teams in college basketball more diametrically opposed in every way than the Gaels and the Bulldogs. The Zags like to go fast and get buckets while the Gaels prefer to slow the game to an excruciating crawl, every possession stretched thin, every whistle pulling the game deeper into monotony. The frustration of having to watch such a joyless brand of ball would soften if Gonzaga was always able to impose its will on the Gaels, yet in recent seasons Bennett’s teams have gotten a leg up on the Zags, and each loss lands harder because it comes inside the conference the Zags have owned outright for the better part of thirty years. Year after year the fact of the matter becomes clearer: Gonzaga’s March résumé at least in part depends on the success of another team their fans can barely stand to watch.
For the Zags–Gaels rivalry, the stakes have perhaps never been higher, because this season may also mark the end of one of college basketball’s best matchups, a casualty of the realignment wave that has already scattered so many regional ties and will carry Gonzaga into the Pac-12. For years, the Bulldogs and Gaels have defined the WCC, one through pace and a barrage of offense, the other through control and quicksand; one a joy to watch, the other like trying to read the fine print on a mortgage while passing a kidney stone. For years, it has been two fanbases locked in mutual disdain, sharpened by every February clash, and the possibility that it could dissolve after this year feels less like administrative reshuffling and more like the erasure of one of the sport’s most beloathed fixtures.
So how good will Saint Mary’s be in 25-26:
Well, they were very good last year. Very, very good. Randy Bennett’s last squad was perhaps the best he’s assembled in his career, loaded with veterans, playmakers, and (most importantly) play-stopers, and they carried his plan to near perfection every time they stepped out onto the hardwood. Bennett might look more like a partially melted Wallace Shawn than a basketball coach, but his numbers don’t lie. Saint Mary’s closed the 2024–25 season at 29–6 overall and 17–1 in the WCC, a campaign that included two bruising regular-season wins over Gonzaga. Before Gonzaga ultimately destroyed Saint Mary’s in the WCC Championship game in Las Vegas, those ennervating regular season matchups followed the familiar Bennettball script: slow pace, long possessions, second-chance daggers from relentless offensive rebounding, and enough from both sides to build a wall at halfcourt. It was classic Saint Mary’s, a rock fight twice over, and for Zag fans a reminder that the Gaels’ style may be ugly but it works often enough to inflict real damage against some very good teams. By March the profile was solid: 24th in the AP poll, 16th in the NET, and 25th in KenPom with an efficiency margin over +22, numbers that reflected balance on both ends. Saint Mary’s scored 72.9 points per game while holding opponents to 61.1, winning by nearly twelve a night, and they advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament before falling to Alabama.
Alabama exposed a central flaw to the Bennettball game script. The fastest and most efficient offense in the nation raced out to a 42–29 lead in the first half, and from there the result felt inevitable, because Bennettball cannot chase. Their offense is too slow, too “intentional,” to dig out of holes early, and Alabama’s indifference to Saint Mary’s preferred tempo exposed the flaw that lingers beneath all the efficiency metrics.
The roster churn will be a lot to overcome for the Gaels in 25-26. Augustas Marciulionis, WCC Player of the Year (better, somehow, than the guy who now plays for the Dallas Mavericks and broke damn near every passing record in college basketball last season), is gone. Mitchell Saxen, WCC Defensive Player of the Year and the immovable body in the paint who turned each game into a collision, is gone. Luke Barrett, the veteran forward who gave Bennett a steady hand and a bruiser’s edge on the wing, is gone. Jordan Ross, the freshman phenom with ridiculous upside, is gone, having transferred to Georgia. And with their parting, the Gaels lose both the infrastructure of their offense and the identity of their defense.
But, the recruiting effort put forth by Bennett and his staff this offseason may be the most unimpeachable proof of Saint Mary’s recent rise in public opinion. Bennett pulled two huge pieces from within the conference, landing seven-footer Jazz Gardner from Pacific and WCC Freshman First-Teamer, Tony Duckett from San Diego. The incoming freshman class is headlined by JRob Croy, once a Gonzaga target, as well as four-star forward Dillan Shaw, and near four-star recruit Trent Maclean, a mobile prospect built for Bennett’s system. They join Mikey Lewis, last year’s most reliable deep threat, and Paulius Murauskas, the versatile Lithuanian wing whose experience anchors a roster that looks more or less recalibrated if not extremely promising.
With Murauskas as the offense’s focal point and 7’1” Harry Wessels back once again to foul a lot and grab an occasional rebound, this year’s Gaels look to be longer, more athletic, and potentially more versatile than last year’s squad. Rest assured, however, they will look like a Saint Mary’s team: designed for forty-minute rock fights, capable of grinding tempo to a standstill, and built to sit inside the NET top thirty if the new pieces settle quickly.
The real question for Zag fans, though, is how well the Gaels handle their nonconference run. Last season they stacked some quality wins in November and December, taking on San Diego State, Colorado State, and Utah while finding tests against Pac-12 stragglers and mid-majors strong enough to move the metrics. It was moneyball and bracket-math all season for the Gaels. They split early games well enough to anchor their NET and KenPom numbers before steamrolling the WCC outright. The expectation is the same this year: a measured set of high-major showdowns, a handful of top-100 mid-majors, and the built-in assumption that the Gaels will again feast on the WCC’s middle and bottom. Their résumé strength will be forged before January, and they’ll once again look to rely heavily on wins over Gonzaga to validate their legitimacy. Meanwhile, Gonzaga’s own March ceiling depends on those months delivering the ballast that transforms routine conference wins into Quadrant 1 gold.
What we know about their schedule so far:
Saint Mary’s has confirmed a slate of matchups against Saint Thomas, Ohio, North Texas, and Wichita State in the Battle 4 Atlantis opener, followed by Davidson, Boise State, Florida Atlantic, Northern Iowa, and a yet-to-be-announced date with Arkansas State. For a team trying to stay locked inside the NET top 30, it looks soft. The early mid-major games won’t move the numbers, and only Boise State and Florida Atlantic project as opponents with real résumé weight. Even the Battle 4 Atlantis field, while full of respectable programs, lacks the kind of high-end draw that shapes seeding conversations in March. For Saint Mary’s, this schedule offers little margin: if they drop even one of those low-leverage games, the damage could outweigh the value of winning the rest.
What this all adds up to is the real tension that will characterize the final year of the Gonzaga/Saint Mary’s in-conference rivalry: as much as the Zags need the Gaels to knock off everyone else to keep their own résumé in the protected range, the Gaels need to take down Gonzaga if they have any real shot at March Madness. The NET won’t reward a stack of mid-major wins, the committee won’t elevate a 28–4 record built on soft ground, and the only ticket left on this schedule that can punch them through sits across from them in February. In a twist both cruel and inevitable, the rivalry itself becomes Saint Mary’s only path to national relevance.
No mid-major in the country has navigated roster churn, NIL turbulence, and portal chaos with more consistency than Gonzaga, yet no program of comparable stature relies so heavily on a conference partner to validate its résumé. That reliance is not a failure of scheduling or strategy; it is the unavoidable logic of operating within the WCC.
Which brings us back to the contours of Gonzaga’s 2025 nonconference slate. Las Vegas will provide spectacle, December will offer opportunities to prove or capture their early-season promise, and January will deliver routine. But the true hinge point lies in how Saint Mary’s sustains its season. A Gaels team that remains tethered to the top thirty secures Gonzaga’s seed-line against early blemishes, preserves the committee’s perception of WCC strength, and guarantees that the Bulldogs enter March with the cushion of multiple quality wins. As good as Gonzaga’s metrics were last season, their tournament seeding could have been even more disappointing had the Gaels had a down year themselves. Without that tether, the same schedule transforms into a gauntlet with little room for error once WCC play kicks off. For Gonzaga, then, the most important result of November may not come in Las Vegas or Nashville, but in how Randy Bennett handles its own roster turnover .
2025-2026 will be the most unique (and perhaps final) chapter in one of the best rivalries in basketball. It’s a bit sad, perhaps, but mostly bizarre. It is the strangest allegiance of all, Zag fans hoping the monster is maximally destructive and can stay alive long enough to be slain on center stage one last time.
0 Comments
