Stan Johnson did not know the history off-hand, so he was unaware that Loyola Marymount had just become the first team to beat Gonzaga at home in 77 tries as he took in the scene in Spokane on Jan. 19.
He was happy, obviously, but Johnson’s mind immediately turned to LMU’s next game. How would his guys handle success? How would they sustain what they are building in his third season at the school?
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“I’ve not even enjoyed it now, to be honest,” Johnson said recently. “I’m too worried about: How can we continue to capitalize? How do we finish the season the right way? I’m trying to build this program and turn it. That’s how my brain works.”
“That’s probably the best environment in college basketball, and it’s not often you go somewhere like that and it’s dead silent,” LMU athletic director Craig Pintens said. “It was surreal.”
Since the start of January, LMU has defeated Gonzaga, Saint Mary’s and BYU, becoming the first West Coast Conference men’s basketball team to beat that triumvirate in the same season since BYU joined the league in 2011-12. Although the No. 10 Zags have seen a dip this year from what we’ve come to expect from their star-studded rosters, the Lions’ run of success highlights how dramatically the non-Gonzaga portion of the WCC has improved to meet the challenge of the 20-time conference tournament champions.
The league sent three teams to the 2022 NCAA Tournament, with Gonzaga winning the league’s automatic bid and Saint Mary’s and San Francisco earning at-large invitations. The WCC will send the Zags and Gaels to the Big Dance again in 2023, with both projected as top-four seeds. It’s also possible there could be a bid thief at the WCC Tournament in Las Vegas. Seven of the conference’s 10 teams finished Thursday night between No. 107 (San Francisco) and No. 8 (Saint Mary’s) in KenPom’s rankings; the six current top-100 WCC representatives would tie a league record if they remain there in the final rankings.
College basketball fans have become accustomed to seeing Gonzaga on the NCAA Tournament’s top seed line. The Zags were the No. 1 overall seed in each of the past two years, a testament to the way they’ve set and then raised the bar for this league. Their dominance has forced others in the league to try to meet that lofty standard, or even just to pull closer to Saint Mary’s and BYU, each of which have three tourney trips in the last decade. It has challenged them to invest more, recruit harder and develop better.
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And the WCC is reaping the rewards.
“What Gonzaga has done is unmatched in college basketball — they basically became a blue blood over a 20-plus-year period,” Pintens said. “When you’re chasing someone who is one of the top programs in all of college basketball … if you come close to that, you’re going to achieve at a high rate.”
Before he took his current job as athletic director at the University of San Francisco last fall, Larry Williams hadn’t worked in the WCC in more than a decade.
“I was at the University of Portland as Gonzaga was on its rocket ship to a No. 1 seed, Final Four consistent performer,” Williams said. “We fought it like crazy back in the day — how do we make this more egalitarian? How do we spread the wealth around? After I left, (the conference schools) made some beautiful decisions. They allowed Gonzaga to run.
“They gave them more of the resources in terms of a disparate distribution of wealth. Gonzaga earned it because they were the ones pulling down the cash. And now, when I arrived back in the league on this campus, I see that all that has really motivated others — to not hold them back. It’s, how do we emulate them? I’m shocked at how much better the league is from top to bottom.”
In 2018, the WCC changed its postseason revenue distribution model to account for Gonzaga’s success. Really, it was about Gonzaga’s leverage; the school reached the national championship game in 2017 and subsequently had an opportunity to join the Mountain West. The WCC did what it took to keep the Zags.
That meant revenue sharing proportionate to performance: The further into the NCAA Tournament that Gonzaga advanced, the higher percentage of the revenue earned it got to keep. In the previously agreed-upon arrangement, the revenue was shared evenly with the entire WCC.
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“You eat what you kill,” former WCC commissioner Gloria Nevarez said of the new model.
The league also changed its scheduling format, going from 18 conference games to 16. That allowed for more flexibility for Gonzaga to play more marquee nonconference matchups, while other programs could schedule a few more winnable games.
And giving programs the ability to tailor their schedules, to a degree, can help with metrics that can impact the entire league. As Nevarez, who is now the Mountain West Conference commissioner, put it recently, the conference “put sunshine” on everyone’s schedules.
“The Big 12, from top to bottom, is a monster, so the Big 12 doesn’t have to do anything unique with their schedule,” said former longtime Gonzaga athletic director Mike Roth. “They’re the best basketball conference in the country, and we haven’t been. So, until the day we get there, we have to make sure our schools are more similarly aligned without dragging the top down. That’s the key. It’s about elevating the bottom up.”
Unequal revenue sharing also lit a fire under Gonzaga’s peers; Williams jokes that it’s the difference between “socialism and capitalism.” Because the Zags got to keep more of their money to reinvest in their own program, other schools had to step up their commitment to the sport.
“The formula actually works to make it competitive,” Williams said. “It incentivizes schools to really get after it.”
Gonzaga used to be the only team in the league that chartered flights for road games. Now, it’s not. The Zags have been the gold standard in terms of facilities and support. Now, Johnson can talk about LMU’s nutritionist and how those efforts have changed players’ bodies. Santa Clara and San Francisco have made significant facilities improvements. All of these efforts have led to improved recruiting, better teams and tougher outs.
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“When I first came into this league in 2015 at San Diego, you used to be able to look at the schedule and pick out a game or two or three … on paper that you could look at and say, ‘OK, as long as we take care of our business we should win,’” San Francisco head coach Chris Gerlufsen said. “You can’t do that now. There’s so much parity and some ridiculously good coaches.”
Gerlufsen worked under Todd Golden last season and saw first-hand the value of analytics and smart scheduling. He plans to continue to put San Francisco in position to earn at-large bids in the future by playing the right type of schedule to meet the needs of his team. And, as Johnson said, because “people are playing high-level games in the nonconference, now when you get in league play, you’re not as surprised when you go up to Spokane or to Saint Mary’s or wherever.”
San Francisco is a good example and a cautionary tale of what success in this league can bring. After Golden guided the Dons to the NCAA Tournament last spring for the first time since 1998, he was hired away by Florida. Mark Few has never left Gonzaga, and he worked with Roth for more than two decades. Even now, his new athletic director (Chris Standiford) is someone he’s known and worked with for three decades.
“It is so difficult to keep it going,” Roth said. “If what we’d been doing was cookie cutter — fill in these blanks, take this questionnaire, if you get nine out of 10 right you’ll be successful — then everybody would be doing it. It’s not that schools don’t want to win. It’s just that they haven’t gotten themselves there because it’s really hard to do.”
In other words, decades of work led to what outsiders may perceive to be an overnight success story. Roth pointed out that Gonzaga didn’t have The Kennel — officially the McCarthey Athletic Center — when it went on its first Elite Eight run in 1999. It was a slow and steady climb, the kind that schools like LMU and USF are trying to make, too.
“People always ask, which comes first: The chicken or the egg?” Roth said. “I always tell people that success in college athletics is the cart and the horse. The horse always pulls the cart, and the horse is winning. If you start winning, resources come more easily.”
But resources do matter. They make a prospective coach realize that the school is aligned and serious about making men’s basketball a priority. They convince good players to come to campus in search of a high-level experience. They make it easier to fundraise the next time.
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So does winning. And, as evidenced by results over the past two seasons, more programs seem capable of doing that at a higher level. Now, the question becomes: Will the rest of the country take notice?
“It really offends everyone in this league when people talk badly about Gonzaga and say, ‘Oh, they play in a league that doesn’t count, that the games don’t matter,’” Pintens said. “I don’t think we’re at that point anymore.”
(Photo: Robert Johnson / Getty Images)
