WCC Basketball Fans

Gonzaga 68, San Diego 31

How poetic it is that in a game played at Jenny Craig Pavilion, the Gonzaga Bulldogs ensured that they wouldn’t have to carry extra weight heading into the month of March or, for that matter, the 2011-2012 college basketball season.
Yet another West Coast Conference regular season has come and gone, and once again, the boys from Spokane, Washington, have their mitts on a portion of the league’s hardware.

It was a long and arduous journey for Gonzaga in the first two months of 2011. A team that had lost three straight WCC games and was plunged into the very middle of the league standings had little hope of catching Saint Mary’s for a share of West Coast supremacy. The program that had won or shared 10 straight WCC championships was about to lose hold of something it had so regularly claimed. The 2010-2011 Zags were about to be known as the squad that slipped up, the team that tripped, the athletes who acutely failed to maintain a basketball school’s tradition of regional excellence. Sure, Gonzaga was not (and is not) about to contend for the Final Four, but losing the West Coast Conference title to Saint Mary’s would have cut very deep on the GU campus and inside the basketball team’s locker room. When Saint Mary’s carried a two-game lead into February 16, there was no reason to suggest that the Gaels would allow the Zags to wage any kind of comeback, let alone a successful one. Yet, here we stand at the end of February, and lo and behold, Gonzaga is sipping from the cup of championship nectar once more. While it’s true that Saint Mary’s can also call itself a champion of the WCC after beating Portland on Saturday, the Gaels’ inability to snag the outright title makes this moment that much sweeter for the Gonzaga basketball family.

Indeed, on a night that featured little in-game drama, the magnitude of the occasion was still considerable on the Gonzaga bench. A bold bunch of Bulldogs, fresh from a mammoth win at Saint Mary’s on Thursday, did not let down their guard roughly 43 hours after giving themselves a chance to win an 11th consecutive league title. The GU crew took care of business against the San Diego Toreros, enabling the Bulldogs to pull within two titles of UCLA’s 13 consecutive Pac-8 or Pac-10 crowns, a feat the Bruins attained from 1967 through 1979.

As the score indicates, San Diego didn’t do much in the way of scoring. The Toreros hit only 26 percent of their shots and made only three free throws. USD posted a shoddy 19 points in the first half but then dipped even lower – far lower – in an abysmal 12-point second half. The game was a tough pill to swallow for San Diego coach Billy Grier, a onetime assistant to Gonzaga coach Mark Few. USD, ironically enough, had beaten Saint Mary’s on Feb. 16, thereby opening the door for Gonzaga to split the WCC title. Grier helped out his former boss and lent a fascinating added storyline to the West Coast Conference season. When USD beat Saint Mary’s in the league’s biggest upset of the year, the Toreros scored 50 second-half points and shot 52 percent for the game, including 67 percent from three-point range. It’s safe to say that USD couldn’t begin to match those totals against the Zags.

No, Mark Few didn’t arrange a secret pact with Billy Grier, even though some WCC fans might think that way. The bottom line on the West Coast is that San Diego gave Gonzaga an opportunity by beating Saint Mary’s, and the Zags – who had to beat SMC in their own right – took advantage on Thursday. This 37-point win over San Diego was just the completion of a feat that was made possible over the previous two weeks. It’s a feat Gonzaga’s basketball team will savor once this season eventually ends.

Matt Zemek