The Bulldogs are about to once again be America’s most hotly debated college basketball team in March.
The biggest stunner of college basketball’s 2019 postseason to date came Tuesday night when Gonzaga, seeded first in the West Coast Conference and ranked No. 1 in the country, fell to arch-rival Saint Mary’s in the league’s tournament championship game.
For the Gaels, a 21-11 team with an iffy NCAA tournament resume entering the evening, the 60-47 upset in Las Vegas represented an escape from an excruciating five-day buildup to Selection Sunday. After being one of the most debated snubs from the field of 68 a year ago, Randy Bennett’s team is back in the field for the second time in three years, and for the first time as an automatic qualifier since 2012.
For everyone else, Tuesday night was about the runner-up, which tasted defeat in the WCC tournament for the first time in seven years. The immediate reaction was predictably over-the-top. The aftershock doesn’t project to be much more subdued.
With Gonzaga, for whatever reason, everything has to be extreme.
They don’t deserve to be a 1-seed.
This is proof they’re a fraud.
This game means nothing.
They’re still a Final Four lock.
Join a real conference.
Check their recent history.
It’s all ... excessive. Even for March.
The loss would be easier to process if it made more sense. Or any sense.
Gonzaga is college basketball’s best offensive team according to Ken Pomeroy’s adjusted offensive efficiency ratings, and has been for nearly the entire season. They entered Tuesday night averaging just under 90 points per game, and had won their first 17 WCC contests by an average of 27.0 ppg.
Saint Mary’s, meanwhile, is an at best average team defensively that plays at one of the slowest paces in the country, but hadn’t had much success slowing Gonzaga down in either of their first two meetings. The Zags ended the regular season with a 69-55 waltz over SMC where it never like they were truly pushed. That win came less than a month after a 94-46 demolition in Spokane.
That’s right, in the span of six weeks, Saint Mary’s held Gonzaga to 47 points, and also lost to the Bulldogs by 48.
The numbers from Gonzaga’s performance Tuesday night are every bit as unsightly as you’d imagine. They shot 37.5 percent from the field, a season-worst 11.8 percent from three (2-of-17), had twice as many turnovers (12) as assists (6), and saw their efficiency rating for the entire season drop a full 2.5 points, an absurd single-game drop this late in a season.
Gonzaga’s 47 point-total wasn’t just its (easily) lowest of the season, it was its lowest in nearly a decade. The last time the Bulldogs produced a lower offensive output was on Dec. 19, 2009 when they were hammered by Duke, 76-41, in something called the Aeropostale Classic at Madison Square Garden. The last time Mark Few’s team lost by double-digits at the hand of a WCC foe? Feb. 2, 2012, when the Zags lost at No. 24 BYU by a final count of 83-73.
There’s also some recent history that shines a better light on Gonzaga’s woeful performance.
The last time GU lost a game this late in the season that was loaded with as much, if not more, shock value was just a couple of years ago. Carrying a perfect 29-0 record into its final game of the regular season, the Bulldogs were stunned at home, 79-71, by a BYU team that was bound for the NIT. A few weeks later, the Zags crashed their first Final Four and came within a couple of shots (or whistles) of knocking off North Carolina and winning the national title.
Basketball fans across the country who will be filling out brackets in six days are now tasked with figuring out the proper way to digest all of this. Was this the first clear fracture in what will ultimately be a March unraveling? Or was it merely another “get it out of their system” hiccup before the Zags make their doubters look silly again?
It still seems more likely than not that Gonzaga will still be on the top line come Sunday. If they aren’t, it’s impossible to envision them falling any farther than one seed.
What’s clear is that the Bulldogs are no longer going to receive the same level of Final Four/national championship love from the general public as they would have had Saint Mary’s been handled the way they were in the prior two meetings. Is that an overreaction? Perhaps, but the performance was so dismal that it feels equally slothful to claim your confidence in Gonzaga over the coming weeks wasn’t altered in the slightest.
Yes, this was one neutral court performance in a conference tournament against a quality opponent, but when you play in the West Coast Conference, one neutral court performance in a conference tournament against a quality opponent is always going to carry more weight than it does for power conference teams in the same situation. It’s not fair, but it’s also a necessity in the process of trying to adequately evaluate a team with a limited amount of data against the level of competition it’s going to face from this point forward.
Gonzaga’s performance Tuesday night in Vegas made so many things less clear than they were 24 hours before. But it also made one thing undeniably apparent: The Bulldogs are about to once again enter the NCAA tournament in their familiar role as the field’s most hotly debated team.
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