Gonzaga has proved itself as a new-era blue blood, national title or not

By Andy Katz
FOX Sports College Basketball Analyst

LAS VEGAS — Gonzaga has been picked to win the West Coast Conference for the 11th-straight season.

The Zags will likely be a preseason top-two team when the Associated Press Top 25 poll is released later this month. And the chance for a No. 1 seed in March Madness is highly likely — again.

Bored with so much success? Never.

Care to pick on the fact they haven’t won a single national championship during this unprecedented run? Well, that’s really a you problem, not a Zags issue.

Deal.

“Staying power,” future Hall of Fame coach Mark Few said on Thursday at West Coast Conference Media Day. “We’ve stayed relevant on the highest national level. That’s the hardest thing to do year in and year out. We’ve stayed relevant.”

If you’ve never been to the Spokane campus, then you can’t really appreciate how unprecedented this run has been since 1999 — even more so over the past decade. The small, Jesuit school in Eastern Washington has grown with the men’s basketball team over the last 20 years into not just a regional destination, but a national one.

The basketball statistics, though, are staggering.

Over the last three seasons, the Bulldogs have the nation’s best winning percentage at 92.8%, with 90 wins and only seven losses. 

They’ve won 67 consecutive games on their home court, the Kennel.

Gonzaga is the only program to have won 25 games in each of the last 15 seasons, and the streak of 25-straight 20-win seasons is second longest in the country to Kansas (32).

It’s the Zags — not Duke, Kansas, Kentucky, Indiana, UCLA, etc. — who have the longest active AP Top-25 streak, at 114 straight weeks.

Ahh … and here’s a good one: The Zags have been ranked No. 1 in 32 of the past 58 AP polls.

“I think (senior) Drew Timme has spent more time ranked No. 1 in his career than he hasn’t,” Few said. “That’s a ridiculous statistic.”

The March Madness numbers are just as impressive. Gonzaga is the only program to reach the last seven Sweet 16s and appear in the Elite Eight four of the last seven seasons. The Bulldogs played for the national title twice — losing to North Carolina in 2017 and Baylor in 2021 in the Indianapolis bubble.

Oh, that year was something else. Gonzaga didn’t lose — not once — before the Baylor game.

“We’re trying like crazy to win a national championship, but we’re not shallow enough to not understand how great the journey has been,” Few said. “That COVID year we had no fans, and that team with Corey (Kispert), Joel (Ayayi) and Jalen (Suggs) played in front of no fans and went undefeated. They never had a bad night. Everyone was trying to knock them off. We’ve stayed relevant at the national level. Other teams have come and gone, but we’ve always been there.”

The one-and-done players are now coming, with Suggs and Chet Holmgren being the latest, and yet the all-American player of the year candidates stay, too, like Kispert and now Timme. Few has had 18 players selected in the NBA Draft, and Timme and Julian Strawther will surely make it 20 in June.

“This is a hard place to turn down,” Timme said of his decision to return to school, which reportedly included a sweet, highly lucrative NIL deal. “We have a standard here. I can count the losses I’ve had on one or two hands. People overlook that all the time. The year we lost to Baylor we won every freaking game except that one. Who does that?”

Not many. 

Since Indiana was the last undefeated champion in 1976, only Gonzaga and four other teams have finished the regular season unbeaten before losing in the NCAA Tournament. 

Wichita State lost in the second round in 2014. UNLV (1991) and Kentucky (2015) made it to the Final Four before falling. And Larry Bird’s 1979 Indiana State squad reached the championship game before enduring its first loss, to Magic Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans.

“Winning the title doesn’t define anything, it’s just the cherry on top,” Timme said. “The ice cream is all the wins. The success and consistency of this program is what we’ve been able to do that no one else has done.”

The Zags play in front of sellouts in their 6,000-seat arena — 267 of them in a row, in fact. And on the road, the Zags are the opposing team’s best game/Super Bowl every time out in the West Coast Conference.

The non-conference schedule continues to show strength, too. Gonzaga and Kentucky announced a six-year series Thursday — with at least one of the games at the Kennel and the opener in Spokane. The Zags will also play games against Michigan State (on a ship in San Diego), Baylor, Texas and Alabama before entering WCC play.

North Carolina, Texas and Michigan State have played on campus, and the Power 5 teams haven’t shied away from games in Spokane and/or Seattle to play the Zags, let alone via a slew of neutral-site games. Gonzaga is a great catch for any non-conference marquee event from Maui to New York.

The Zags earn their seeds with a loaded non-conference schedule and by dominating the conference slate year after year after year.

“The expectation is to win every game here,” Strawther said. “That’s the way it should be.”

And that’s been the goal here for years now, and there is no reason it won’t continue.

Will the Zags ever get that elusive national title? Maybe. But will it change anything if they don’t? 

It shouldn’t alter the perception at all. Few is a Hall of Fame lock. NBA-level talent is still coming. High-level games are on the docket. The critics just don’t get it.

Gonzaga has built itself into a power, a new-era blue blood.

Deal.

Read more:

– Is this the year Gonzaga wins the big one?

– Q&A: Gonzaga’s Drew Timme discusses impact of NIL, more

– 40 storylines to watch, with 40 days to season

– Counting down the top 15 teams: Texas at No. 12

Andy Katz is a longtime college basketball writer, analyst and host. He can be seen on FOX Sports and Big Ten Network platforms, as well as March Madness and NCAA.com, and he hosts the podcast “March Madness 365.” Katz worked at ESPN for nearly two decades and, prior to that, in newspapers for nine years.