“Know what the difference between hitting .250 and .300 is? It’s 25 hits. 25 hits in 500 at bats is 50 points, okay? There’s 6 months in a season, that’s about 25 weeks. That means if you get just one extra flare a week – just one – a gorp… you get a ground ball, you get a ground ball with eyes… you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a week… and you’re in Yankee Stadium.” –Crash Davis

LeBron James is such a bum, huh?  He keeps getting the ball in key late-game situations and he keeps failing.  I think he might not have “it” in him.  His blood’s just not cold enough.  In the NBA, you’ve got to have that ice blood.  You’ve got to be that ice-blooded killer in the clutch, and LeBron’s just not that player.  At least that’s what the guys on TV keep saying.  I mean, what are the Heat in last-second shots, 1-19?  They’ve been terrible against the top five teams in the League, so LeBron must not be clutch.  He must not have “it.”  It’s weird, though, because I swear I remember him being the only good player on a Cavs team that went to the Finals in 2007.  I kind of feel like he hit some big shots, game winners even, in the 2009 Playoffs, too.  That was what, two years ago?  LeBron couldn’t have lost “it” already, could he?  The line can’t be that thin, can it?

Oh, but it is.  In the talking-and-thinking-about-sports world, the line between hero and goat, between clutch and not is razor thin.  Just a few years ago, LeBron carried the Cavs on his back and we all said as much.  Now he’s a loser with no heart who can’t lead the Heat let alone carry them.  This same phenomenon has hit the Zags, particularly Steven Gray, this season.  As recently as November, expectations for both player and team were sky high.  Gonzaga returned every key contributor save for Matt Bouldin, and Gray was supposed to lead them to great heights.  (A number of analysts picked the Zags in their preseason Final Fours and a few went so far as to have them winning the title.)  After all, he entered the season a remarkably well-rounded and proven player, and as the only senior on the team, he was all but predestined to be the team’s leader and its star.  In November I wrote about how unfair this was.  To summarize, I think Gray is a complementary player.  No matter what other Zag players did before him, Gray had been nothing more than a really good number two or three option throughout his career, and to expect anything different from him was unrealistic and would set him up to fail.  The overarching narrative at the start of the season, though, had Gray penciled in as the star and team leader and the team would be great because of him.  We saw just how tenuous this line of thinking is by the fourth game of the season.  The Zags were handled by San Diego State and then demolished by Kansas State, Illinois, and Washington State, and suddenly, not only was Steven Gray obviously not the team leader bu his complete lack of leadership was the cause of all GU’s problems.  Indeed, the line between hero and goat was only as wide as that first rough patch.

This is precisely the problem with using such intangibles as leadership to view, discuss, and ultimately rate players.  There’s no middle ground: a player either is a leader or he isn’t.  He can’t be kind of a leader or a leader sometimes.  He either is one or he isn’t, and in the case of Steven Gray, he first was one and now he’s not.  Never mind that the half-court offense has been sluggish at best or that the perimeter defense is predictably porous or that it took Mark Few most of the season to find a workable player rotation.  Gonzaga’s poor play forever took away Steven Gray’s title of team leader and thus forever changed his legacy in the eyes of Zag fans.  That the line is so thin just isn’t fair, but to further the argument, consider the following hypotheticals.  What if Mickey McConnell hadn’t hit that off-balance leaning three in the Kennel and Saint Mary’s hadn’t won that game?  What if the Zags hadn’t laid an egg at Santa Clara or that crazy elbow-leads-to-a-technical rule hadn’t cost them a chance to win the game at San Francisco?  Without those three losses, GU would have been in the driver’s seat in the WCC and there would have been non of the collective hand-wringing that further reinforced Zag fans’ opinions that Steven Gray had a bust of a senior season.   Gonzaga would have finished the conference season undefeated, something only three teams have done under Mark Few, and thus gone down as one of the great Zag teams ever.  We would be celebrating that Steven Gray led the team in points per game, assists per game, and three pointers made (which he did) and was named first team all-district (which he was) and the fact that he was a great team leader and all-time great Zag instead of wishing he played better.  (In a recent conversation with some friends, one of them wondered aloud how good Gonzaga would be if “Gray was still on the team.”  This friend of mine is, I fear, not alone in thinking so.)

It’s that wishing (might better be described as longing) that makes Gray’s individual legacy so unfortunate.  Nobody can appreciate his value on the court because they’re too busy wishing he was more valuable.  And if we aren’t careful, the same fate will befall future Zag players on future Zag teams.  Ask yourself, who’s going to be next year’s go-to player, its “leader,” its 2010-2011 preseason version of Steven Gray?  There are of course plenty of candidates, but are any of them viable?  Will Rob Sacre learn a few post moves and suddenly be explosively quick enough to consistently score the ball down low?  Will Elias Harris be given enough space by the offense to attack the rim?  Will Marquise Carter make the jump from JuCo star to Division I star or Gary Bell, Jr. from high school senior to freshman superman?  If your answer to any of these is yes, just remember that there’s a whole lot of unprovens in each scenario.  Each one asks a player who’s never been the playmaker for a Gonzaga team to be one next year.  Each one pins the hopes of an entire season on the performance of one player.  Each one asks the same thing of other players as was asked of Steven Gray this season: to be something we wanted them to be rather than something they are.  This of course sets these guys up to fail as soon as a few games go the other way.  Then again, maybe those games will go the right way and then we’ll be talking about a great Zag leader on a great Zag team.  The line between the two is pretty thin, after all.

Go Zags.

“Money ain’t got no owners, only spenders.” –Omar Little

In the 1930s, University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins waged a personal war against the encroachment into American universities of what he called “athleticism.” Under the belief that certain sports (particularly football) were cash cows, universities overemphasized athletics until they stopped being mere recreation and become institutions (or isms) instead. Hutchins felt this left universities woefully misguided. Teams were popular with students and the public who filled stadiums every Saturday, and university presidents soon found themselves believing their schools were noteworthy not because of academic reputation but because of their sports teams. “Athleticism” turned the primary business of the university into that of sports promotion in an attempt to draw more and more paying fans. In an article in the Saturday Evening Post entitled “Gate Receipts and Glory,” Hutchins suggested that university presidents had watched athleticism grow over the previous fifty years but did nothing about it. Spectator sports like football simply brought too much money to the table for universities to just run away, so Hutchins offered a solution. Since money causes athleticism and all the misguidance that goes along with it, “the cure is to take the money out of athletics.”( To do this, he proposed to, among other things, universally cap football ticket prices at ten cents each.  Needless to say, it didn’t happen so Chicago decided instead to go its own way and just drop football entirely.)  I agree with Hutchins that money is the problem with college sports, but my solution isn’t to take the money out, but rather to spread it around, particularly amongst those doing the most work: the players.

We all realize how much money is at play in college sports, right?  Don’t we see that the problems Robert Hutchins noticed over seventy years ago are still alive today and that college sports are now as money-driven as ever? Yet we happily watch a coach making two million a year give an interview on a network that paid eleven billion for the rights to broadcast it and will air an advertisement for an insurance giant before showing ten guys run up and down a court with swooshes emblazoned all over their clothes, but we won’t think twice about the fact that those guys are the only ones involved doing anything for free.  That doesn’t seem weird to anyone else?  I know what you all are saying: But they do get paid!  They get a free education!  It’s an amazing gift! Think about how many billions are made in and off college sports.  A college athlete (you know, the one who does all the work and creates all the money?) in a big-time sport is supposed to think that exchange is fair?  He’s supposed to watch everyone, from CBS to Nike to his coach profit off his work and then just smile at his free tuition?  Jason Whitlock calls it a master-slave relationship because that’s his style, and though I wouldn’t go that far, it definitely sounds like a rip-off to me.

Consider the WCC Tournament, which begins this weekend.  Or maybe I shold say, consider the Zappos.com WCC Tournament, which begins this weekend in Las Vegas.  When the conference moved the tournament from campus sites a few years ago, it cited Vegas’ central location and the fairness of playing the thing at a neutral spot.  Soon, the conference started using the images of its players (including Matt Bouldin last season, for example) to market the event which was deemed enough of a success for the conference to keep coming back.  Ironically, though, those very same players whose images were used to market the tournament can’t stop at the sports book on their way to the games without being banned for life for violating NCAA rules.  Meantime, the executives at Zappos or the heads at ESPN (which holds broadcast rights for the tournament) or the coaches who get bonus checks for winning the damn thing are free to keep cashing in without anyone batting an eye.  Even more, thanks to revenue sharing, every school in the WCC takes a portion of the overall tournament profits as well as a share of the money earned by which ever team wins the conference tournament and moves on the the NCAA Tournament.  What do the players get?  The chance to earn a fine arts degree on someone else’s dime!  Yipee!  (It should be noted that even professional leagues won’t put teams in Las Vegas because they’re afraid of the implications.  The NCAA, though, has no problems with it.  Maybe it figures that everyone else it getting ripped off in Vegas, so why not the unpaid athletes as well.)

Such a situation is ludicrous.  So much so, in fact, that if I were an athlete in a big-time revenue sport like basketball or football, I’d hit the streets and convince as many of my teammates and opponents as I could to follow me.  You want to keep making bank off my sweat, CBS/Nike/the WCC?  Then you better pay me, because I’m not playing again until you do.  But since I’m not, I’ll just do the rational thing and offer a solution.  So here goes.

The La Revolucion Fool-Proof Solution to Guilt-Free Exploitation of College Athletes

The idea that college athletes shouldn’t be paid for what they do is based on an outdated ideal: amateurism.  Forever people have held up college athletes as the ultimate amateurs.  They play the game because they love it then they put on their letterman’s sweater and go home with some bobby-socked cheerleader on their arm.  Of course that’s not the case and hasn’t been for years but it’s just the sort of image that gets propped up so people can feel good about ignoring money’s influence and impact on college athletics, particularly big-time college athletics.  But money is everywhere in these sports.  Robert Hutchins tried to run away from it, people now try to hide their eyes when they see it.  Why not just embrace it?  My solution does just that while rewarding college athletes for their hard work on the field (and, as you will see, in the classroom) with something a little more tangible than free tuition.

I propose that every entity that makes money off college athletics (the list, as Goose would say, is long but distinguished) contributes a percentage of its profits into a pot relative to the amount it makes.  CBS or Nike or some other company that makes the most would contribute the most and so on down the list.  The NCAA, conferences, the Orleans Casino, coaches, nobody’s exempt from this.  Once the pot is full, the money gets distributed to athletes in amounts relative to the amount of money their sport helped the above contributors earn (football and basketball the most, then probably hockey or something, then maybe women’s basketball, etc.) as long as those athletes meet both of two criteria:

1) They graduate.  I’m not enough of a radical to say that every athlete should get paid whether they go to class or not.  The point of college is, after all, to get educated.  So, John Wall?  The semester of classes you took at Kentucky last year before dropping out but still being allowed to play in the spring under NCAA rules wouldn’t be enough to get you any money.  (I’m sure you’re crushed.)  Matt Bouldin and Jeremy Pargo, though?  You guys would get yours, and given that you played a highly profitable revenue sport, your paycheck would be substantial.  Congrats on living up to that platitudinous “student-athlete” term the NCAA and its supporters throw around so freely.

2) They pass a test of basic knowledge one would expect to gain during the course of a college education.  If you can write a paper, if you know what a valance electron is, if you know the difference between there, their, and they’re, you should get rewarded for it.  And as someone with two liberal arts degrees, I can say with certainty that the real world isn’t exactly falling all over itself to reward me and my general knowledge.  But it should, just like a stack of money should reward athletes for not only graduating from college but doing so with a big brain.

That’s it.  Pretty simple, huh?  Everyone who makes money off college athletics now would still stand to make plenty under my system, but they’d do so without completely exploiting the athletes.  And, even better, we get to stop pretending that all college athletes are student-athletes and that everyone isn’t making a whole boat load of money off their work.  Call me a communist if you want, but lots of things are communist, including the revenue sharing that lets Pepperdine make money because Gonzaga made the Tournament.  Is it really any more communist to have Pepperdine’s players make money because it was actually Gonzaga’s players who made the Tournament?

Go Zags.

You remember Theo Davis?  He was this big recruit and a big guy and everyone at GUBoards got so obsessed with him but couldn’t say his name because of some rule or something so they cleverly named him Bigs McGee and referred to him as Bigs McGee instead of Theo Davis and they all knew that he was a combo between Ronny Turiaf and Shaq and everyone agreed he was going to be great and nobody could wait for him to finally get on campus and lead the Zags to twenty bazillion national titles?  You remember that?  And you remember Bol Kong?  He was, like, this superhuman who could score from all over the court and had a funny name that everyone at GUBoards cleverly turned into a “BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!” call (Get it? Like when King Kong stomps around because Bol Kong’s last name is Kong?) that got them excited and they all knew that he was a combo between Adam Morrison and God and everyone agreed he was going to be great and nobody could wait for him to finally get on campus and lead the Zags to twenty bazillion more national titles?  You remember that?  And then you remember when neither player lasted more than a season at Gonzaga?  Each got ran off for one reason or another, and neither lived up to even one one-billionth of the crazy unrealistic expectations crazy unrealistic Zag fans heaped upon them? That was awesome.

Hey, look!  It’s Gary Bell, Jr.!

Ah, yes.  Gary Bell, Jr.  2011 Washington Mr. Basketball.  Kentridge High School combo guard averaging nearly 30 points a game.  Just dropped 47 in a play-in game for the state tournament.  Is also his school’s all-time leading scorer.  Can play either guard spot.  Focus of a profile article in the Seattle Times.  Committed to Gonzaga after his junior season and signed his letter of intent this past fall.  Made the day of GU fans everywhere when he did so.  Bell’s bona fides certainly seem to indicate he’ll be a special player, and special is definitely what Joe Zag Fan has already decided he will be.  These days, all it takes to build a legend is one first-hand report, and once word spread that the Zags were interested in Bell, Seattle-area fans sent in their reports and a legend was born.  Bell was no longer just some player Gonzaga was recruiting; he was the player.  Reports pegged him as a sort of hoops-playing Frankenstein’s monster, built with the best pieces of all the great Zags of the past.  Got his playmaking from Dickau, his toughness from Pargo, his range from Stepp, his athleticism from Knight, his work ethic from Pendo.  Give him a few years and he’ll probably show up with Ronny Turiaf’s afro as well, but in the meantime Zag fans far and wide have a veritable running clock counting down until Bell’s first game.  They’ve set the clock and now they just have to wait for it to expire before starting another countdown: to twenty bazillion titles.  Bell’s probably going to have a long and lasting career, but as far as I know, he has yet to play a college basketball game.  Oddly, though, this Gary Bell, Jr. Fact is the one Joe Zag Fan cares about the least and at the moment, it’s the one that’s most important.  To repeat, Gary Bell, Jr. has not played in a college basketball game.  In other words, he’s still in high school, and yet listen to Joe Zag Fan and his jersey’s already retired up in the rafters.  All Joe has to do is close his eyes and see Bell hoisting number trophy twenty bazillion to the sky.  He is, to say the least, excited.

It’s one thing to get excited, though, about a high school basketball player (after all, it takes a series of high school players to make a college team) but it’s an entirely different thing to grow obsessed.  Excited Fan thinks Bell’s career’s going to be fun and leaves it at, “Boy, am I ever excited to see him in a GU uniform!”  Obsessed Fan, on the other hand, follows Bell and Kentridge around as if they were the Grateful Dead, going to the games and then rushing home to write up a report for his buddies on the Internet.  Soon, he comes to believe that all of GU’s current problems (sluggish half-court offense, lack of creativity, imagination, or a perimeter scorer, etc.) would be solved by Bell’s mere presence in the lineup.  Though he might be half-joking when he says that Lady Zag Courtney Vandersloot is better than any point guard on the men’s team, with Gary Bell, Jr. Obsessed Fan is completely serious.

It makes me wonder: are Zag fans excited to see Bell play next season, or are they simply excited to see him take away the frustrations of this one?  No matter how this season plays out, the bulk of it has largely been a lesson in frustration, particularly the guard play.  Even including the recent impressive play from Marquise Carter, Gonzaga’s guards have struggled to defend and really struggled to create offense.  It’s gotten to the point where David Stockton, a former walk on, is at many times the best option.  (In any of the past years, Stockton was the guy carrying Santangelo’s or Dickau’s or Stepp’s or Raivio’s or Pargo’s gym bag.  Now? He’s the guy running the offense.)  The obsession by itself is probably not that big of a deal.  I mean, all college fans everywhere obsess about recruits.  It’s a little creepy, but probably not much more than that.  But combined with the sense of confusion Zag fans feel about their team’s current point guard situation, that obsession has turned very much unhealthy.  Zag fans are so desperate for the type of point guard to whom they’ve grown accustomed that they’ve pinned ridiculous, ridiculous expectations on Gary Bell, Jr.  At this point, even if he has the remarkably steady (numbers wise) career of Jeremy Pargo, it won’t be good enough.  I wonder if the remarkably gaudy numbers Dan Dickau put up in his career would even be acceptable.

This is what Joe Zag Fan does, though.  He builds up a player to ridiculous levels, then bases his entire lasting opinion of that player on whether or not he lives up to those expectations.  In November I wrote about Steven Gray and the mantle of leadership Zag fans and coaches called upon him to wear.  Never mind that he never showed any of those mythical leadership qualities in three years at Gonzaga; he is supposed to be a leader now because he’s a senior and seniors are supposed to be leaders.  Gray had been a complementary player his entire career and he is, for the most part, a complementary player now.  And if there were another solid scoring option on the team this season, I’d venture a guess that people would be saying how great a complementary player he is.  But nobody can look at his current season in those terms because they’re still looking at him as the failed team leader.  That’s not fair for Gray just like the expectations heaped on Theo Davis and Bol Kong weren’t fair for them.

So how is doing the same fair to Gary Bell, Jr.?

Go Zags.

“You just got lesson number one.  Don’t think; it can only hurt the ball club.” –Crash Davis

In case you missed the raining frogs and sulfuric fireballs signaling the Apocalypse, Saint Mary’s beat the Zags in the Kennel last Thursday, all but ending the latter’s decade-long control of WCC regular seasons and essentially locking up this season’s title for themselves.  That Manny Arop and Mathis Keita never even found the floor during the most important game of the season (and depending on how things shake out, maybe the most important regular season one in program history) rightly confused Zag fans, as did the fact that Sam Dower and his sudden Adrian Dantley impression hadn’t been getting serious time all season.  And all the confusion apparently compelled Spokesman-Review sports columnist John Blanchette to write a column.  It was much anticipated, but in large, I don’t think we really learned anything new.  Underclassmen struggle to get playing time in Mark Few’s system?  Knew that.  Outside of the starting five and maybe the first guy off the bench, the rest of the team struggles to get minutes as well?  Knew that.  Sometimes a guy plays a lot, the next game he doesn’t play at all?  Knew that, too.  To me, this whole thing has very little to do with “the rotation,” no matter how confusing it is that it seems to be chosen by drawing names from a hat.  (Besides, anyone who watched the Zags lose to Steph Curry and Davidson in the 2007 Tourney while Micah Downs played only seven minutes knows the rotation didn’t just start being confusing.)  No, what worries me the most is the fact that Mark Few’s playing-time philosophy as described in the Blanchette piece doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for error.  And unfortunately, this season, we might be seeing that chance become a reality.

First, a breakdown of Few’s philosophy.  According to assistant coach Ray Giacoletti, there’s “a shorter leash” for bench players than starters.  Though Few’s never going to pull a guy for one mistake, if he makes a couple stupid ones in a row and he’ll find himself on the bench because as Giacoletti notes, when the subs come in, they’re “right in the crux of the game” and nobody wants things getting quickly out-of-hand.  As well, “the rotation” is dictated largely by game-to-game things such as match ups.  Such it is that Mathis Keita might match up really well against one team but not so well against others, so he plays one game and doesn’t play the next.  And finally, that same rotation gets shaped by the roster as a whole.  When the frontcourt is an area of strength, for example, frontcourt players will find less time coming off the bench than they maybe would normally.  This last point is the most important because it is the one upon which the other two are based (a coach would be forced to gamble with match ups or overlook mistakes if he were dealing with an area of weakness), so it will be at the center of our discussion.  And because it is this perceived strength in the frontcourt that’s at the core of Few’s philosophy, we’ll use it to focus on Sam Dower.

To do that, let’s start with the floor time of two recent Gonzaga big men, Cory Violette and Ronny Turiaf, during their freshmen seasons.  Violette’s playing time during his freshman season of 2000-2001 can best be described as up-and-down.  His minutes played ranged from zero to 29 before averaging out at 11.7, and his minutes percentage (that is, the percentage of total game time he was on the floor) only twice topped 50%.  GU’s frontcourt that season was maybe one of its deepest ever, with Casey Calvary and Mark Spink earning the bulk of the minutes and Anthony Reason, Alex Hernandez, and Zach Gourde filling valuable role time.  There was no space for the freshman Violette, so he spent most of his time on the bench.  Ronny Turiaf came the next season into a somewhat different situation.  Calvary and Spink both graduated, and though Reason, Hernandez, Gourde, and Violette all returned, there was neither the depth nor the solid proven low post threats of 2000-2001.  Turiaf the freshman was then forced into a much greater role than Violette the freshman.  He averaged 19.5 minutes per game, topped out at 29 (against WSU), played less than ten only three times, and never played less than seven.  In contrast to Violette’s 29% the year before, Ronny spent an average of 47% of all the minutes the Zags played that year on the court.  Now in the end, both players had great careers and should be considered among the top four or five big men in Gonzaga history.  The development strategy for each does not appear to have been that different from the basic philosophy outlined in John Blanchette’s his column, and for each, that philosophy seems to have worked.

Which brings us to Sam Dower.  To this point, the coaching staff is applying the same basic philosophy to Dower as it did to Cory Violette.  He’ll get some minutes here and there, but otherwise, his job is to learn to play Division I basketball.  Not sure we can necessarily argue with that, but the whole course hinges entirely on Gonzaga’s frontcourt being an area of strength.  Is it?  Relative, maybe, but actual?  I’m not so sure.  Elias Harris is much more suited to a wing-type role where he can drive the lane and create for himself.  But this season he’s been thrown into a power forward spot in an offense that’s at times so stagnant that there’s no open space into which he can work.  Rob Sacre has improved nicely over the course of the season and become a little more of a scorer (rather than a guy with a poor field goal percentage and a point total inflated by free throws), but still, when it comes to low post options, he’s really all the Zags have had.  This became clear in the above mentioned loss to Saint Mary’s when the Gaels’ few big men quickly got into foul trouble, but Gonzaga couldn’t really take advantage.  Think an effective, confident, and experienced Sam Dower alongside Sacre wouldn’t have helped there?  Instead, they each got plenty of floor time, but almost none of it together.  The frontcourt, in this case, never had a chance to be a strength and in the end, it only was one on paper.  The Zags lost a nailbitter, and in the end, maybe their season.  I wonder if things had been different had Sam Dower been prepped all season to play alongside Rob Sacre instead of just learning how to be his understudy.

What the future holds is anyone’s guess.  Sam Dower could develop into one of the great Zag big men and we’ll look at this season and say that like Cory Violette and Ronny Turiaf, his development was handled perfectly.  But the thing about freshman Violette and freshman Turiaf is that they each played on WCC championship teams who also made the NCAA Tournament (Violette’s team went to the Sweet Sixteen).  All season, Dower was kept out of the lineup because the staff thought the team’s overall strength in the frontcourt made his skills expendable.  The fact that other players took up the slack down low meant that whatever mistakes he made in practice or whatever match up seemed unfavorable would be taken seriously.  In the process, though, the Zags have floundered.  With three conference losses they’re almost assured of losing the WCC regular season title for the first time in a decade, and overall are in more than serious danger of missing the Tournament for the first time this century.  If they have a strength, it is in their size, but if that size is never on the court at the same time, it is only a strength on paper.  So, for the sake of this season, I hope the path the coaching staff has chosen to take with Sam Dower, the one that was willing to keep him off the court instead of on it, was the right one.

Go Zags.

When I first thought of relaunching the blog in a weekly column format, I did so because I thought the way we talk about Gonzaga basketball, the Great Zag Discussion if you will, was really one-sided, really happy-go-lucky, and really reactionary.  Largely to blame (maybe entirely to blame) is the GUBoards message board and the near complete monopoly it has over that discussion.  (To put things in perspective, at any one time, individual posts routinely get over 1,000 page views within a few hours of being posted.  The highest number of page views this column has ever had on any single day is 190.)  I’ve long been an outspoken opponent of this monopoly under the argument that discussion should never be monopolized, especially not on a Gonzaga discussion board.  After all, the university once called its students “the people the world needs most” and now urges them to “be inspired.”  It requires those students to take a core curriculum based on critical thinking and reasoning, and the least we can do as fans is have discussions about the Zags that reflect that educational goal.  Largely, though, GUBoards has failed to do that since its inception nearly a decade ago.  And this week, as news broke that Matt Bouldin tested positive for a banned substance and was released from his Greek team, the moderators again showed that they are all too willing to control the direction of a discussion they’ve already monopolized.  When someone put up a post with a link to Howie Stalwick’s story on Bouldin’s case, it was promptly moved to an out-of-the-way location where it would be nearly impossible to find.  And that’s where it is still, even now that KREM2 News in Spokane confirms that Bouldin used an over-the-counter nasal spray he bought in the US and is not even banned by the NBA.  The fear is, I guess, that people will immediately rush to judgment or start in with a slew of theories and that wouldn’t be fair to Matt Bouldin or his situation.  That’s probably true, but then again, if an environment of adult discussion was cultivated at GUBoards from the start, one that encouraged people to use their brains and pose new ideas and reconsider old ones, nobody would have to be so afraid.

GUBoards has always been a poor reflection of our human intellegence, and this is just another example of why it’s a poor reflection of Gonzaga as well.  How are we supposed to talk about the Zags like the people the world needs most if the ones in charge of the discussion won’t even let us try?  Zag fans, you’re better than this, and you’re better than GUBoards.

I’m ending this week’s column here out of protest.

Go Zags.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Gonzaga fans’ tendency to use an intangible (leadership) to rate players (namely at the time, Steven Gray).  It is unfair, in my mind, to decide a player’s worth based on something that is both unmeasurable and completely subjective.  So no, I didn’t think leadership mattered when I defended Steven Gray against the Leadership Police back then, and I don’t think it matters now that it has somehow wriggled its way back into the Great Zag Discussion.  Just the other day, with timing that can best be described as baffling, a commenter on the Gonzaga hoops blog The Slipper Still Fits worried that the Zags didn’t have a leader.  How ever this is still anyone’s concern is beyond me, but I’ve railed against leadership’s validity for too long to do it again here.  But another issue became apparent from the ensuing comments: that Jeremy Pargo’s Gonzaga career has never been fully appreciated.

If you don’t remember, Pargo was a four-year point guard for the Zags.  He won West Coast Conference Player of the Year honors as a junior (and probably should have won it as a senior as well), and during his career, his teams won 103 regular season games and went to two Sweet Sixteens.  His resume is great, or at least as good as any other player in the Mark Few era, but during his career, I don’t think he was ever as beloved as the others who came before or after him.  Instead of thanking their lucky stars that Pargo took over games when everyone else on his team was all too willing to stand and watch, Zag fans called him a ball hog.  Instead of marveling at a player who could get to the rim and dunk on anyone, they called him a showboat when he ran back down the floor with his tongue hanging out.  Instead of cornily saying he has “Zag Hair” when he showed up for a Tournament game with his name cut into his hair, they wrote him off as a sort of anti-Zag with a me-first attitude.  So what, though?  Opinions are opinions, and there’s no rule saying Zag fans had to like Jeremy Pargo the player as much as I did.  But what happens when they start comparing Pargo’s career to those of other Zags and determine that the things they disliked about him were the exact things they liked about the other guys?  What if subjective terms such as leadership stop being just meaningless and become instead a window into ourselves?  Better yet, what if Jeremy Pargo was and is underappreciated because he’s black?

Let me first say that I understand discussing race is a complex issue, but I don’t understand why it has to be such a divisive one.  Just because I think race affects your perceptions doesn’t mean I think you’re a racist; it just means I think you’re a human.  It’s when we continue to hold on to our conceptions in the face of arguments that show them to actually be misconceptions that we become racist.  Now, to Jeremy Pargo.  Though I’ve long thought Pargo was never fully appreciated because he was black and from Chicago and played unlike any other Zag under Mark Few (and was thus scary), a comment in the above-mentioned discussion on leadership at The Slipper Still Fits brought the issue back to my attention.  I’m going to print the comment without the commenter’s name because I don’t think he or she meant anything malicious by it, but I’m going to print it in its entirety and then analyze one of its key arguments because it shows not only an important way in which we look at the Zags of the past, but also how we will look at them in the future.  The comment (emphasis is mine, and consider the whole thing [sic]):

“[Rob] Sacre is leading this team on the floor when he’s out there. I know some of you aren’t happy if he doesn’t get 20/20/10 but not too many players put up those kind of numbers for a single game much less every game. I wish I knew what you want outa these guys. Frankly when Pargo was here you saw such a deferential bunch on the floor that no one could figure out who was in the driver’s seat. I thought Matt did a nice job last year but some of you never accepted him as a leader until he was gone. (don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you got till its gone). Sheesh — open your eyes and see what is out there to be seen. You may not like the style of leadership but . . . there’s about as many ways to lead as there are styles. For my money, what Rob did at Baylor sent a statement to everyone and he’s been at it ever since. Oh, might I add, we have had some small success since the time he asserted himself. One guy does not a team make — even if Matt came close sometimes last year. I for one am very happy with Rob and the leadership he provides. You can embrace things the way they are or you can dream on. If you ever had anything to do with a basketball team you should know every year is different even if the players are exactly the same.”

A leader, he/she argues, is the one that carries his team on his back, asserts himself, is “in the driver’s seat.”  Fine.  Whatever.  I don’t think leadership exists in sports, or at least if it does, it’s not as important as talent, so what do I care if someone thinks a leader also drives the team bus?  But here, the commenter claims that Matt Bouldin (and Rob Sacre**) drove his team’s bus, so to speak, while Jeremy Pargo just plowed through all the stops as his teammates ran alongside knocking on the door and begging to be let on.  He didn’t lead so much as the other players deferred to him. (Indeed, the term deference only describes the way Pargo’s teammates treated him, because Bouldin’s followed him willingly.) Deference here implies that everyone stood around and watched while Pargo did his thing, regardless of the coaches’ game plan or what was best for the team.  In basketball parlance, this makes Pargo a ball hog, and in a sport as team-centric as basketball, a ball hog is the worst kind of player.  He’s an individual in a game that needs all five players working in synch.  He’s heisting shots even when he’s double-teamed.  He’s refusing to pass to an open teammate, let alone create offense for a checked one.  And this tag was with Pargo during his playing days as well.  Fans called him a ball hog even in the middle of a senior season during which he had, by far, the highest assist rate on the roster and took less shots than every starter except for Steven Gray.  Even in the face of numbers that argue to the contrary, to some Zag fans at least, Pargo was nothing more than a streetballer.  This is a stunning double standard; white players don’t get called ball hogs if they shoot too much but are instead celebrated for driving the team bus.

Before considering the Matt Bouldin example, consider Adam Morrison.  We all know that Morrison never saw a shot opportunity he didn’t like.  He was plenty successful as a scorer (28.1 points per game his last season), but he was never accused of being a ball hog, at least not pejoratively, even though his 617 shots from the field in 2005-2006 accounted for a full 49.5% of the Zags’ total shots that season.  Instead, any would-be critics praised his “knack for scoring” or laughed about his single-minded focus on offense.  Did Morrison get let off the ball hog hook just because he scored a lot of points?  I doubt it.  (And if so, how come Allen Iverson doesn’t get let off the same hook?)  As for Matt Bouldin, I’m a huge fan.  All the things people liked about Bouldin’s game at Gonzaga I liked as well.  (Plus, we’re both from Denver and if you know anything about me, you know that goes a loooong way.)  But to say he carried a team on his back while Jeremy Pargo didn’t is simply not fair.  And to argue that Pargo was a ball hog if Matt Bouldin wasn’t is just not right. (In his senior season, Bouldin had a lower assist rate and took nearly 100 more shots than Pargo did in his, for example.) If anything, neither was a ball hog, but this idea that Pargo somehow was is based on the idea that players “like” Pargo are always ball hogs and are never leaders.  That’s a problem.  And in the end, it’s the problem with leadership overall.  Because the term is subjective, we have preconceived notions of what a leader is and what a leader is not.  Leaders have to be some version of a person whom we would like to follow, and for a lot of us, this isn’t a black player, and it’s certainly never a player we think plays streetball.  In this sense, Jeremy Pargo never had a chance.

Again, I say all of this not to call Zag fans racist because that would be, I think, untrue. My goal instead is to get us to consider the fact that for Gonzaga basketball to make the next big step (whatever that step may be), it will need players like Jeremy Pargo.  It will need guys who came up hard in tough neighborhoods and who had to battle every day to make sure they didn’t become another stereotype and bring a corresponding level of toughness to a program that doesn’t right now have it.  If and when that happens, all Zag fans everywhere will need to come to terms with players who, for the most part, don’t look like them.  What becomes of the beloved Zag Material myth then?  What happens to quaint ideas of leadership when we can’t look out at the court and see the Matt Christopher novels that first shaped those ideas in the first place?  I hope we at least start thinking about it.

Go Zags.

**This space is far too small for me to get into it here, but the difference in the way white fans perceive an athlete like Sacre (happy-go-lucky, engaging, from Vancouver, etc.) and the way they perceive one like Pargo is as important as the way Pargo is viewed against his white counterparts.  WEB Dubois wrote of an “unforgivable blackness” in reference to boxer Jack Johnson.  That term may be more accurate in this case than we are willing to admit.

Now that the conference season is upon us, the Great Zag Discussion has naturally shifted to the present and future of the West Coast Conference.  I would like to carry on that discussion here by first posing a series of related questions:

1. On February 16, 2002, Pepperdine visited The Kennel with a chance to both sweep the season series with the Zags and take a two-game lead for the regular season conference title.  Gonzaga won that game, in the end going away, and power in the WCC stayed fully in Spokane as Pepperdine’s program fell off the map.  Another consistently good team would obviously be great for the conference and to that end, has the level of competition in the West Coast Conference improved since that game?
2. Brigham Young is set to join the WCC next season.  Conventional wisdom says that BYU will challenge Gonzaga at the top, and maybe be able to do so more consistently than any other program in the WCC.  Conventional wisdom also seems to assume that another team at the top of the conference can only be a good thing for those other programs.  (That is, another consistently good program is another good target towards which the other programs can aim.)  Does BYU’s presence mean an improvement in the conference overall?
3. I think we all assume that a competitive WCC is good for Gonzaga.  Is it?

First, the issue of the overall improvement of basketball in the WCC.  Better competition in the conference is a nice idea, if only because we would then no longer have to hear people write Gonzaga off for its “weak conference.”  And for most Gonzaga fans, the weak conference argument is a real killer.  They seem to connect the perceived legitimacy of Gonzaga to that of the WCC, leaving them with an inferiority complex unsuitable for a program that cemented itself as legitimate long ago.  (For my money, the WCC’s years of refusal to stage a fair conference tournament and the recent decision to sell Gonzaga’s pretty amazing TV deal with Fox Sports off to ESPN were/are far more harmful to GU than any collection of conference bottom feeders ever could be.)  They end up jumping on the bandwagon of any team that looks ready to challenge Gonzaga at the top, figuring that new challengers mean more competition for Gonzaga, thus more legitimacy.  History has shown, though, that power (relative to Gonzaga, that is) in the WCC is unsustainable.  The Pepperdine program of the early 2000s is a shell of its former self (don’t forget that it was Pepperdine who gave the WCC its first multi-bid year in the Tournament, and even knocked off Indiana in 2000), and Bill Grier’s San Diego went from Tourney Cinderella in 2008 to sub-300 RPI today.  There’s nothing to suggest anything different will become of either Portland or Saint Mary’s, other than wishful thinking and anti-cynicism.  Forget history, though, because even statistics suggest that the WCC has not only not improved over the last decade, but has actually gotten worse.  Since 2002-2003, Ken Pomeroy’s formula has rated the WCC, on average, the 12th toughest conference (out of 33) in the country.  This means the conference is at the top of the middle third of all conferences, which is not bad.  Breaking those eight years (not including this season, in which the WCC is currently rated 11th) in half, though, tells a different story.  From 2002-2003 to 2005-2006, Pomeroy gave the conference end-of-season ratings  of 11th, 12th, 10th, and 12th, respectively (average: 11.25).  Compare that to the four seasons from 2006-2007 to 2009-2010, in which the ratings were 14th, 13th, 13th, and 14th (average: 13.5).  In the first four seasons, a total of two WCC teams finished with sub-200 RPI (and two more finished with RPI of 197 and 198).  Since then?  Fourteen.  Even with a few years of multiple Tournament bids thrown into that last half of years, it’s hard to argue in the face of statistics that, top-to-bottom, the WCC isn’t getting worse, let alone progressing.

Into all this steps BYU.  For Gonzaga fans used to futilely defending the West Coast Conference, BYU is a godsend.  Not only does BYU’s national name add instant credibility, but its history seems to indicate it will be the consistently strong challenger Gonzaga has been missing.  Even if Portland and Saint Mary’s fall off (as I suspect they each will), there’s a better than good chance that BYU will be able compete every year.  Gone goes the revolving door of power.  But there are two rubs here.  First, if improving the WCC overall is the goal, I’m not sure having BYU around guarantees it.  Gonzaga has been the undisputed king (sometimes overwhelmingly so) of the conference for years, and as I argue above, this has done nothing to improve the level of play in the WCC from top to bottom.  If one consistent power couldn’t do it, then why are we to assume that two could?  Second is the issue of BYU’s long term intentions.  Even with a huge basketball arena, football is the school’s unquestionable cash cow.  The Cougars are about to move on as a football independent basically only because they could not quickly enough get into a conference with an automatic birth in the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), and the hunch has to be that they won’t stay there for long.  College football is just too lucrative and BCS money (upwards of a million dollars per school in a BCS conference per season) too enticing for them to stay independent forever.  If a BCS conference came up with an offer to join, BYU would be insane to turn it down, and if and when that offer comes, the school would be compelled to move its other sports as well, including basketball.  (Think the Big 12, for example, isn’t a better place to play basketball than the WCC?)  Where would that leave the WCC?  Right back to where it started, most likely: an average overall conference dominated by one team but otherwise filled with bottom feeders and sometime contenders.  Yet another example of the unsustainability of non-Gonzaga power in the West Coast Conference.

So how does Gonzaga fit into all of this?  At least by the numbers, the WCC has not improved in the last decade, but does that even matter?  There’s a general belief that Gonzaga would be better prepared for the NCAA Tournament if the competition in the WCC was stronger.  The argument is that no matter how tough their non-conference schedule is, the Zags get made fat and lazy by their conference schedule and arrive in the Tournament ill prepared to knock off, say, Syracuse.  Seems valid enough, but I wonder just how much better the conference would have to get in order for it to actually make a difference.  We can all agree that playing in the ACC is good Tourney preparation for Duke, but can we say the same of, say, the Mountain West Conference for BYU?  Ken Pomeroy has the MWC rated seventh toughest in the country (it’s usually rated anywhere from seventh to ninth), and with the conference’s makeup, it’s probably the highest the WCC can reasonably aspire.  Most people argue that BYU will indeed be instant competition for Gonzaga at the top of the WCC, but since 2003, the Cougars have won one Tournament game, a double-overtime win over Florida last season.  During that same stretch, the entire conference has won ten Tournament games total, and no Mountain West team made a Sweet Sixteen (the starting line for a deep Tournament run).  The WCC, on the other hand, had two teams make Sweet Sixteens: Saint Mary’s once and Gonzaga twice.  So I ask again, are the Zags better off in an improved WCC?  Would they be ready to beat Syracuse in the Tournament if they played Wyoming twice in a season instead of Pepperdine?  Who knows, but I don’t care to find out.  Wyoming on its down years is much better than Pepperdine on its down years, and on its up years is good enough to beat Gonzaga.  Do we want that?  I know don’t.  It’s great to competitively want the Zags to take on all comers and leave them in their dust, but as a fan, I just want my team to win.  And as a Zag fan, I just want the team to win the WCC and make the Tournament every year.  It doesn’t matter against whom they play.  No, from where I sit, an improved WCC will just mean more teams who can beat the Zags during the conference season and in the conference tournament, keeping them out of the NCAA Tournament all together.  That would be some real crappy irony.

Go Zags.

Almost entirely, milestones in sports are meaningless.  The idea that a player or a team getting to point x or point y actually matters was invented by sports writers who, as is their nature, needed something about which to talk.  Because sports fans are forever all too willing to talk about whatever sports writers tell them to, those made-up milestones (also referred to as “plateaus,” as in, “Congrats, Jimmy!  You’ve finally made it to the top of the plateau!”) get talked about and talked about until pretty soon, they morph into actual ways of measuring an athlete.  Don’t have 300 career wins, Mr. Baseball Pitcher?  Good luck making the Hall of Fame any time soon.  Fell just short of 1,000 yards rushing for the season, Mr. Football Running Back?  You’ll have to forgive us if we laugh at your terribleness. Of course none of these arbitrary plateaus actually determine an athlete’s worth, but we keep talking about them as if they do.  And like every milestone, Mark Few’s 300 career wins (a number he reached just last week) is totally meaningless as anything other than a talking point for Joe Zag Fan in all his forms.  Then again, because it is Joe Zag Fan doing the talking, those 300 wins, and the way Joe believes in their validity as a measuring stick, mean everything.

Make no mistake: Joe Zag Fan loves Mark Few.  Like, a lot.  I’m certainly not going to begrudge him for that (even if I find his love totally creepy in a bordering-on-cultish kind of way); Few’s teams have won a lot of games, and if Nuke LaLoosh has taught us anything, it’s that winning is better than losing.  The fact that Joe bases his opinion that Mark Few’s one of the country’s greatest coaches (with some Joes going so far as to proclaim that they wouldn’t trade Few for any other coach in the country, which is completely bat-poop crazy, considering “other coaches in the country” also includes Mike Krzyzewski) on his win total is bothersome, though, for two reasons.  First, I’d argue that if there is a way to statistically measure a coach’s greatness, the amount of games his team wins is not it.  It probably sounds silly considering the point of a basketball game is to win it, but there are way too many other forces that come into play in a basketball game to say that the winning coach is the one who coached the game better.  Besides the facts that in any given game, a star player could be injured, an entire team could catch ebola, or little rain drops could fall from the arena’s ceiling onto a free throw shooter’s head mid-shot, there are referees who can change a game late or a lucky bounce one way or the other or one team just being flat out way better.  Much like a starting baseball pitcher and his win totals, a head coach has no control over the outside forces.  All he can do is put his team in the best position to win and hope for the best.

Secondly, after looking deeper at Few’s 300 wins, it’s apparent that the number is not only an arbitrary milestone in a meaningless stat category, but also pretty wildly inflated.  If a basketball coach’s job is to win games, then Few has obviously done well for himself.  But how are we to argue that all wins are created equal when they are so clearly not?  Consider Ken Pomeroy’s RPI rankings, generally considered to be one of the most accurate and fair way to ranking teams.  For the uninitiated, Pomeroy takes a range of statistics from each college basketball team and enters them into a formula “to show to how strong a team would be if it played tonight, independent of injuries or emotional factors.”  For all its flaws (among them the fact that teams still have to actually play, and no formula in the world can judge exactly what will happen in a game), when extended over the course of a full season the system is pretty fair and definitely more valid than the traditional poling systems.  And according to Pomeroy’s system, since the 2002-2003 season (the archives only go back that far), almost 90% of Mark Few’s wins have come against teams with sub-50 RPI.  What’s more, about 80% have come against sub-100 teams.  Considering the general weakness of the WCC teams on Gonzaga’s yearly schedule, this is not necessarily Few’s fault, but over 200 of the teams he has beat were in the weakest two-thirds of all teams in the country at the time he beat them.  That he won a bunch of games against teams Gonzaga was better than, and many times much better than, is hardly an indicator of Few’s coaching greatness.  For my money, the only number of wins that matter is six, as in, it takes six wins in a row to win a national title, and the only coaches who are truly great are the ones who’ve done so.  These are the ones who get the great players on their respective teams to buy into their system and navigate them through an incredibly difficult tournament in which anything can happen and even one poor decision from a coach can mean elimination.  I’ve already acknowledged that I think it will be next to impossible for Gonzaga to ever win one, but consider that in his career, Mark Few is 4-10 against coaches who have won a national title.  (He’s also 0-3 against those who’ve won Olympic gold medals, for what it’s worth.)  Given these new insights, I’m not sure how we can just blindly assume that Few is a great coach, let alone one of the best in the country.

But blindly assume we do.  I have no idea what quirk of psychology makes Joe Zag Fan feel the need to fight to the death for Mark Few’s honor.  Maybe it’s the fact that as the undisputed face of the program, Few’s very presence on the bench makes Gonzaga (and Joe) relevant, but either way, Joe gets incredibly defensive whenever anyone questions Few’s greatness.  As is his nature, though, he never backs up his belief with anything, offering instead only the same tired groupthink.  John Blanchette, sports columnist for the Spokesman-Review, tweeted after the Baylor win that the Few skeptics should check themselves, and that the game was “superbly managed.”  Nothing in the way of analysis, just a smug “I told you so.”  (Apparently, Blanchette’s journalism degree was awarded by the John Wooden School of Basketball.)  Likewise, after the Wake Forest win one of the headmen at the GUBoards message board called the Few skeptics “morons” for daring to question the head coach.  (The post was promptly locked, which is a time-honored move by the rest of the headmen when they realize one of them writes something that will shortly be attacked.)  What was moronic about the skeptics?  Who knows.  But they were definitely moronic.  And if they weren’t such morons, well, they’d know how much MARK FEW RULES!  Or something.  At least the Few skeptics can point to vaguely analytical arguments like the daffy and predictable end-of-half plays Few always calls or the blown 17-point second half lead against UCLA in the Sweet Sixteen.  The only thing close to analyzing the supporters do is blaming the players when things go wrong and praising Few when they seem to go right again.  The whole thing makes people forget about even the most basic lessons of Philosophy 101 (aka, Critical Thinking), and what’s crazier is that even some of my own friends like to get in on the act.  After last season’s game against Colorado in Maui, a game which the Zags won but also looked dreadfully unprepared against a below-average team, I emailed around my belief that Mark Few was outcoached by Steve McClain (who, if you’re scoring at home, is a journeyman currently working as an assistant at Indiana).  These friends of mine are universally and across the board smarter than me, but their reply emails only cited Few’s winning percentage and number of overall wins before eventually settling on the falsehood that I wanted Few fired.  Oh, Joe!  You’re so crazy and you so refuse to cite anything except that which is easily at your fingertips to make your arguments.  I don’t want Mark Few fired, you crazy idiot!  I just think he’s not as good of a coach as you think he is.  Sue me!

In the end, the way Joe Zag Fan treats Mark Few is the way he treats his entire fandom.  Because Joe’s only been around since the late 90s, he doesn’t know any other Gonzaga head coach besides Mark Few, and because Gonzaga has known nothing but success under Few, Joe figures all of that is because Few is a great coach.  Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t, who knows.  I don’t even like basketball as a sport, truth be told, so I’m far from the best person to break down film to illustrate the fundamental greatness of an offensive set.  But if Joe wants me to take him seriously when he rambles about how superbly managed a Mark Few-coached game was, I’m going to need to see some evidence.  Show me that Mark Few’s teams execute better on offense than, say, Jim Calhoun’s.  Show me that his teams have better defensive fundamentals than, say, Lute Olson’s.  Show me one of his practices to prove that he’s a better teacher than, say, Mike Krzyzewski.  All those coaches have won national championships, you see, and Mark Few’s got a losing record against each of them.

Go Zags.

“Planet earth was my place of birth/Born to be soul controller of the universe.” — Rakim

Now that this season’s wheels have fallen off and all seems lost, Joe Zag Fan comes in two forms: Pissed Guy and Resigned Guy.  Living by the motto, “Crap, these guys are terrible,” Pissed Guy has decided that the Zags are, well, terrible.  He focuses on their faults, which (especially the more he focuses on them) are many, and looks ahead at the coming schedule and predicts twelve losses at the least.  They’ll probably miss the Tournament, and will be passed up in the WCC by Saint Mary’s, which is way tougher, greater, awesomer (and more Australian) than these Zags could ever dream of being.  On the other hand, Resigned Guy has also figured this season is lost, but he’s quickly moved from that realization onto the one that next year’s team will be totally kick-ass.  He thinks this year’s Zags are just three recruits (currently playing high school basketball for some high school team in some high school basketball gym somewhere) away from righting the ship.  He’s resigned to the opinion that this year’s team has a ceiling somewhere around a first round Tournament exit, but that’s OK because next year’s will be back to competing for the world.  Any of this stuff is probably natural for a program ten games into a downturn; I’m sure Joe Tarheel Fan came in pissed and resigned editions a few years ago as well.  But I feel like with Joe Zag Fan, the issue is much more an issue of makeup, and that makeup is a result of something Joe never addressed at his birth: his expectations for the team and where his idea of success fits within those expectations.

I don’t think it’s overly hyperbolic to argue that Gonzaga’s ability to stay relevant on the national scene is one of the most improbable happenings in recent sports history.  College basketball Cinderellas are a dime-a-dozen anymore, but in this day and age, for a Cinderella to move into the viable contender category is nothing short of amazing.  We live in a college sports world in which schools throw an ungodly amount of money into their sports programs, and in which big schools have far more money to throw.  These are the schools with new stadiums and arenas and practice facilities (often paid for by the state, but that’s another story) that big time athletes want.  Gonzaga, though, has been able to not only stay on the scene but remain sustainable there with far less resources, and for that, there is no precedent, at least not in recent memory.  Even today, outside of Boise State football, there’s no other example of a big-time sports program going from nowhere to the top and staying there.  (The Boise example is even arguable.  Consider that the Broncos’ win over Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl was in 2007; for Boise State to duplicate Gonzaga’s relevance, it will have to compete nationally every year until 2018.  Could happen, but it’s highly unlikely, especially in a sport so ludicrously rigged as college football.)  So as the Zags built upon that 1999 Elite Eight run, neither the program nor its fans had anybody around to show them how to act.  Mark Few and his staff blazed their own path by recruiting overlooked and international players, but the fans went a different, less defined route.  Without actually openly expecting as much, Joe Zag Fan just assumed that sometime in the near future, Gonzaga would get to a Final Four, and sometime after that would win a national title.  After all, the elite teams in college basketball get to Final Fours and win them, and Gonzaga’s an elite team in college basketball now…right?

You can’t really blame Joe for thinking so, what with a Gonzaga game on ESPN every five minutes and Nike outfitting the Zags (as well as traditional powers Duke, Syracuse, Kentucky, and Michigan State, all of which have won national titles) in its newfangled Aerographic uniform editions and all.  But if Brett Favre’s taught me anything (besides don’t text people pictures of my pee pee), it’s that just because people in the sports world talk about something doesn’t mean it’s important.  And in the world of college basketball, just because people mention you in the same sentence as Duke doesn’t mean you’ve got a right to the same set of expectations.  The problem for Joe Zag Fan isn’t that he has the same set of expectations as Joe Duke Fan, though.  Instead, the problem is that he never properly set expectations in the first place.  He saw his team on ESPN and heard them mentioned in the same breath as the elites and just assumed the Zags were on the same level, and that that same level meant an eventual national title.  For a long time, I was in this same boat but I realized last season that such a title will never happen, at least not with the way college basketball currently operates.

To be honest, if Today Me were transported back in time, I would probably think the Zags’ eventual title hopes were very real.  Now, though?  Virtually non-existent, and here’s why.  First, in 2006 the NBA instituted a rule that prohibited any player from being drafted until he was a year removed from his high school graduation.  Whatever the league’s real intentions were, the new rule forced all those players who would have gone straight from high school to the NBA into college, if only for a year.  As was the case with Kentucky last year, the stage was then set for one school or another to load up its roster with as many of these players as possible in the hopes of a quick title run.  Doing so means forgetting all pretenses of “academics” (John Wall, for example, earned just enough credits last fall–also the minimum allowed by the NCAA–to be eligible to play in the spring, and then dropped out after Christmas.  And…student-athletes!), something not all colleges are willing to do.  A once improbable Gonzaga title run now has to run through a landscape filled with mercenary-heavy goon squads.  No small task, to be sure.  Running concurrently with (and perhaps caused by) the draft rule is the increasing connection of AAU programs to some of the elite college programs in the country.  AAU teams have of course long been feeders of elite college talent, but within the last few years, college coaches have actively sought out (often by creating for them previously nonexistent positions) AAU coaches, bringing them onto their staffs and creating pipelines to their own programs.  (Ask Michael Beasley why he went to Kansas State, for example.  Then, go ahead and ask about three current K-State players why they went there.  It’s the same reason.)  I suppose coaches figure that they need that great AAU talent in order to compete, and if they don’t do whatever they can to get it, someone else will.  Now, not only does Gonzaga have to navigate the aforementioned mercenary goon squads, but it has to try to recruit that vital play-making star when that player has virtually no chance of wearing a Gonzaga uniform.  The deck is so stacked against a title run that literally everything has to go perfect, or better than perfect, for it to happen.  And worse, it’s been that way for a few years without anybody realizing it.

We always hear that hope makes being a team sports fan great.  We have to hope that our team has a chance every year, otherwise what are we doing?  Why go to games, why watch them on TV, if they don’t mean anything?  I no longer think Gonzaga will ever win a national title (at least not until the NBA allows high school seniors to enter the draft and the recruiting landscape gets the corresponding shake-up), but rather than leaving me hopeless and depressed, that realization was strangely liberating.  It was the first time I actually noticed that I had never set clear expectations for the program, and once I knew what I didn’t expect anymore, I could finally get down to figuring out what I did.  Here’s what I came up with:

1. A WCC regular season title every season.  This is non-negotiable, and if it doesn’t happen, it means the rest of the WCC has caught up, and that’s only possible if GU has stood still.  Lots of crazy stuff can happen in the conference tourney, but over the course of a season, the better team’s going to prevail, and Gonzaga should always have the better team.
2. 20 wins a season.  If the Zags get here, it means they dominated the WCC like they should and won at least a few of their tough non-conference games.  That’s not too much to ask, I don’t think.
3. Staying out of the mercenary business.  I’m fine when a player like Austin Daye comes into the program with ideas of leaving early if all goes according to plan, but the day Gonzaga signs a player who makes no bones about taking the John Wall Course Schedule is the day I’m done.

That’s it.  Seems simple, and doable, enough.  Some might argue that I’m giving up, but I don’t think I am.  I look at it along the same lines as a fan of a middle-of-the-road English soccer team would look at things.  There’s no possible way his team can compete with the resources of Manchester United, so why expect them to?  Just set different, more realistic expectations, and then sit back and enjoy the ride.

And who knows, the Zags just might find a miracle and knock the big boys off the top.  Think of how awesome that will be.

“He who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present controls the past.” –1984

I grew up a Bronco fan in Denver.  Aside from making me more arrogant and self-important than I probably have a right to be, this means a couple of things.  For one, I’ll be naming my first born son/daughter John Elway and he/she will grow up to be the second greatest human ever (behind his/her name sake, of course).  Second, and most importantly, I’m destined to live out my life with memories of the original John Elway’s greatness and have subsequent expectations that whichever player currently plays quarterback for the Broncos will match that greatness by his third snap in uniform.  This will leave me forever unsatisfied, but I’ll keep doing it.  As a fan of a team with a good yet limited history and a superstar playmaker in its past, this is, as they say, my cross to bear.

Of course, I’m not the only one.  Sports fans in this country are really bad at getting over superstars.  Maybe its the fault of ESPN and its constant celebrification of athletes or just a result of a culture that reveres the individual.  Either way, we are forever putting athletes not only on a pedestal but above the game and even the sport.  (In his book about the Cuban sports machine, Pitching Around Fidel, SL Price argues that sports in Cuba are by design so mass-participatory that no athlete, not even the very great ones, are bigger than the sport they play.  There’s something very quaint, and awesome, about that.)  Add to this that uniquely American love of nostalgia and we are a people not only obsessed with the superstars of today, but those of yesterday as well.  At the expense of enjoying the actual game, we consume ourselves with the every move of this player or that.  We judge which players we like or dislike based entirely off our memories of the guys who came before them, then we make the current players and coaches miserable wondering aloud why they can’t be better, work as hard, have as much fun out there, or show as much leadership as the guys we watched in the past.  Dealing with past-obsessed Boston Celtics fans so exhausted then-coach Rick Pitino that he unleashed a classic rant in their direction, reminding them that,  “Larry Bird’s not walking through that door.”  Pitino was eventually fired in Boston, becoming yet another example of a coach who failed to live up to the wild expectations of the fans of a tradition-rich team.  (Maybe Pitino can come back and yell at the Bronco fans who wrote off former coach Josh McDaniels from day one because he wasn’t, I guess, the 1998 version of Mike Shanahan.  McDaniels just got fired for not winning games, but the fan base by large never gave him a chance to do anything different and it made them miserable for two seasons.  But I digress…)

On that note, there’s been a lot of talk over the past few days that this year’s Zags are in trouble.  The weakest team in years, maybe the weakest that Mark Few’s ever had, some say.  “A program in decline,” they call it.  A .500 record against a schedule that, though brutal, Few-coached teams have seen before has led many to decide that Few’s a bad coach, a bad recruiter, a bad motivator.  GU might not–GASP!–even make the Tournament.  All this glass-half-exploded-by-a-negative-grenade talk has of course been followed by a bunch of chiding from fans on the other side of the spectrum, ones who say that these Zags are “young” and urge patience because they will surely “figure it out.”  They’ve got games at home!  Few and his staff will set them straight!  This rough patch is only a test designed by the schedule makers to get the team ready for March!  It’s this kind of us-versus-them that defines the way people talk about the Zags in any situation.  There’s never any middle ground: the sky is either falling or it’s blue as ever; Meech Goodson either rules or he sucks; Steven Gray is either a leader or he’s not.  Right now is just another one of those times.  The Zags are either on the decline or they’ll be just fine.

This is all of course silly, but the modern (post-1999) history of GU basketball is so limited that Zag fans can’t think of things in any terms other than good and the opposite of good.  Pessimistic fans see a losing streak and automatically fear the worst, while optimistic ones figure the Zags will figure it out because they always have.  Both sides, though, are looking at this season under the umbrella of the same history and that history is filled with superstar-type playmakers.  Throughout the decade, fans have grown so used to players like Matt Santangelo and Dan Dickau and Adam Morrison and the like carrying teams that it’s shaped the way they look at every team.  They see past Zag teams as a collection of grit and heart and leadership (intangible alert!) when in actuality (outside of 2005-2006 and maybe 2002-2003), they were a group of solid players carried by one or two great ones.  Every point guard now gets compared to Dan Dickau (good luck, Meech!) and every big man to Ronny Turiaf.

Take this year’s team, for example.  Immediately, fans (and some commentators) looked at the big-time recruits and the returning players and assumed that the Zags had a chance to do something special.  Steven Gray got tagged right away as the leader, and people figured he’d be the sort of superstar playmaker they’ve grown accustomed to having, even if he’d never shown any real signs of becoming one in three years.  Rob Sacre was the next great Gonzaga big man, even though he’d never been anything other than a one-post-move-having pump fake machine his entire career.  Someone on GUBoards with access to preseason practices even compared Sam Dower (you know, the redshirt freshman?) to JP Batista, all before he even played a college game.  Everyone looked at this year’s Zag team in comparison to every other Zag team.  Expectations flew to crazy high levels, and all that was left to do was just sit back and wait for the tournament glory to pour in.  But something funny happened on the way to the coronation: none of those guys turned out to be who they were pegged to be.  Sam Dower, Freshman, is most definitely not JP Batista, Rob Sacre is still a pump fake machine with one post move (ask yourselves, Zag fans, if you needed a bucket down low, would you trust Sacre to get it?  Me either.), and Steven Gray is not a playmaker.  I love Gray a lot, and I think he’s going to have a solid NBA career, but he’s much more suited for a complimentary role (he’d have been great on that 2005-2006 team) rather than a carry-the-team one.  Yet the pessimistic Zag fans keep thinking that he should already be the classic example of a Gonzaga-style playmaker and the optimistic ones keep thinking that he’s going to be in a few weeks.  Both sides are so used to seeing one or two players carry otherwise good teams to greatness that that’s the only point of reference they have.  They expect Mark Few’s offense to actually work because they’re used to seeing it run by Dan Dickau’s floppy-haired dreaminess.  They expect a low-post game because they’re used to seeing the in-the-paint stylings of  JP Batista.  They expect a bucket when they need it because they’re used to seeing the ghost of Adam Morrison’s mustache in their dreams.  Even as this season heads down a dark road of despair no Zag fan with a memory shorter than ten years has ever seen, nobody can realize that those things, to borrow from Rick Pitino, aren’t walking through that door.  Thus, the sky-is-falling/no-it’s-not battle where there’s no middle ground whatsoever.

I’d like to propose we find a middle ground in the following ways.  First, it should be acknowledged that this Zag team will make the Tournament.  Call it a guarantee if you’d like, but the only reason anyone’s scared of not making the Tournament is that they think the WCC is improved throughout and is “dangerous.”  It hasn’t and it isn’t.  There’s not a single team in the WCC that can match up with San Diego State and Washington State, let alone Illinois and Kansas State, and people who tell you otherwise are only doing so because the idea of a good WCC makes them feel better.  Even if Steven Gray is not the playmaker we’ve grown accustomed to having, he’s still better than almost every player in the WCC, and Elias Harris is probably even more so.  Rob Sacre, for all the flaws in his game, is the best big man in the league, and that stands for something.  I still wouldn’t trust anyone on the team to get a bucket if the Zags absolutely had to have one, but I still trust them to roll through a conference that is still quite below-average.  Second, it must be realized that even if this GU team is top-to-bottom better than maybe any other Zag team ever, it’s weaker at the very top.  Even though I’m a stated opponent of intangibles in sports, the impact of a truly great playmaker on any team at any level in any sport cannot be discounted (see: Rockies, Colorado), and this team just doesn’t have any of those.  It’s a solid overall group without a great player, which makes it just like about 30 other teams in college basketball.  The teams that make the Final Four, just like the teams that make the Final Four every year, have good cores surrounded by a team-carrying playmaker or two.  Getting to that point means catching lightning in the bottle along the lines of Adam Morrison, and if we keep looking at GU teams like we looked at Adam Morrison’s teams, we’re expecting to catch lightning in the bottle year after year.  To put it another way, if great playmakers were so easy to come by, every team would have one.  They don’t, and this Zags team certainly doesn’t.  Maybe next year’s or the year after that will, but not now.  Maybe it’s time we realize that before we turn into those bitter, overzealous, never satisfied, and pathetic Bronco fans, waiting in vain for the next John Elway to come in and save the day.

Go Zags.