Gonzaga's road ends, one exit too early

Dispatches from the long March, Day 7

Drew Timme

Once upon a time, Gonzaga was Florida Atlantic. It was George Mason and Loyola Chicago, too. It showed up for NCAA games in their dark blue road uniforms, the underdog colors. The favorite, according to seeding, always wears white. At times, that just creates an easy target.

It was 1999 when Dan Munson took the Bulldogs to the West Regional and went upset-hunting. The first stop was Seattle, where they surprised a few people by beating Minnesota, then shook the earth when they beat Stanford. They went to Phoenix, where power forward Casey Calvary prepped for the next game by playing Mortal Combat 4, then tipped in the game-winner to send Florida home. Three games, three legitimate upsets for the 10th seeded Zags, and Monson ended every press conference by calmly telling the writers how Gonzaga was pronounced, with the Zag rhyming with Bag.

Gonzaga couldn’t past the regional final, taking a 67-62 loss to a Connecticut team that would shock Duke to win the whole championship. Nice job, guys. Thanks for spicing up the story.

Except that Gonzaga returned the next year, and then the next, and pretty soon the Bulldogs were wearing the white raiment of the upper crust, and now they were the ones covering their eyes with towels, while others like Davidson’s Stephen Curry celebrated the suddenly valuable feat of beating the Bulldogs.

This weekend they got past UCLA, their customary foil, on a 35-foot shot by Julian Strawther. Waiting for them Saturday was — what do you know? — Connecticut. The circle was unbroken. Gonzaga was not. It got inundated by the team that has played better than anyone else in this tournament, and the outcome was clear and bleak from the midpoint of the second half.

In the end Gonzaga missed 60 of 80 shos and lost unconditionally, 82-54. Connecticut will visit the Final Four Saturday with a semifnal game against either Texas or Miami, in search of a fifth NCAA title, which would tie the Huskies with Duke and North Carolina for the most since 1975. That was the year John Wooden stepped down, and the NCAA opened up its Modern Era, inviting conference runnersup to join the party.

Gonzaga has been the best story in the past 25 years of college basketball. It made the most brazen leap from its cozy fieldhouse to a spiffy on-campus arena, from the middle of the West Coast Conference to the No. 1 seed in its regional in four of the past six tournaments. This will be the 13th season in which Gonzaga went into the NCAA tournament with a Top 10 poll ranking. It’s still an attractive Jesuit school in a fresh, picturesque Washington city, several tributaries away from the American mainstream, but it was impossible, without strong drink, to imagine Gonzaga would ever be such a establishment fixture in college basketball.

Mark Few, who became the coach when Monson left for Minnesota after that first run, has been the sky pilot. He has turned down so many “power conference” jobs that he doesn’t get called anymore. He and his staff used to root out “sleepers” from the Pacific Northwest and Canada, opening their doors wide for any discounted prospect. Two years ago Gonzaga signed Chet Holmgren, the best recruit in America.

But that’s the flip side of the journey. Holmgren left after one season. He and Drew Timme, the school’s alltime leading scorer, were bookend big men who seemed insurmountable, but the 2022 Bulldogs lost to Arkansas in the Sweet 16 game. Now Gonzaga is the beneficiary of the transfer portal, which brought Malachi Smith from Chattanooga.

In 2017 and 2021 the Zags landed in the Final Four and won semifinal games both years, most notably beating UCLA with a beyond-halfcourt overtime bucket by Jalen Suggs (who was also a one-and-done). They pushed North Carolina for the title in 2017 and lost, and then Baylor toyed with the Zags in the 2019 final. They always seem to run into someone a little faster, stronger, deeper, more athletic. The bracket rarely falls apart in front of them.

On Thursday, Timme scored 36 as the Bulldogs wiped out UCLA’s 15-point lead and won on Strawther’s rocket shot. But Connecticut had too much of everything, including size on the perimeter, a resourceful, rugged center in Adama Sanogo, and a 7-foot-2 freshman with an unlimited future named Donovan Clingan, who is undoubtedly the best thing ever to come out of Bristol, Ct.

Timme got into foul trouble early. The guards were pushed out of their comfort spots and couldn’t score. The Bulldogs tried to double-team Sanogo and whenever they did, he waited for a teammate to cut and then hit him in stride for untold buckets. Sanogo had a career-high five assists in the first half alone. Unlike UCLA, the Huskies did not let the snowball sit there and lose composition. They kept rolling it, and at one point they led 73-44.

“If you haven’t seen us before, it can be pretty overwhelming,” said UConn coach Danny Hurley, and it’s not arrogant if it’s the cold hard truth. Connecticut has won its four tournament games by a total of 90 points. Last year the Huskies lost, 70-63, to New Mexico State in the first round. Now a scandal forced New Mexico State to end its season in February, and UConn goes to the Final Four as a co-favorite at least, depending on whether Texas gets past Miami on Sunday.

And yet Connecticut knows what it’s like to be Gonzaga. When Jim Calhoun came from Northeastern in 1986-87, he found a team with four consecutive losing seasons and a program stuck in a small, central Connecticut village that had never been ranked higher than 20th in the wire-service poll. There was no natural reason for UConn to win anything. Yet with deliberate speed, Calhoun had UConn in the picture for Big East championships, and he was recruiting nationally (Ray Allen, from South Carolina). UConn finally got to the Final Four that day in ‘99, and this is its sixth trip, with Hurley the third coach to make it. In four of the previous five, the Huskies brought the big trophy back to Storrs, population 15,000.

It was an inglorious way to Timme to leave, after four years of mustache-twirling brilliance. He was college basketball’s closest parallel to Nikola Jokic, a big man who could organize the whole offense. He played with gusto and unassailable confidence, and he scored over 2,300 points even though he never shot 70 percent from the free throw line for a season. But the Bulldogs have lost headline players before and kept driving.

It’s just different when you’re not the bracket buster anymore, but the bust-ee instead. Will there be another Gonzaga among the dark-uniformed insurgents of this March? They are welcome to try. There’s a heartbreak warning when you get on the road, but, even on an overwhelmed Saturday, Mark Few recommends the ride.