By Jeff Faraudo
#WCChoops Columnist | ARCHIVES
While the Gonzaga men made news over the weekend by losing for the first time in nearly three months, the Zags’ women just kept chugging along.
Coach Mark Few’s squad had its 40-game West Coast Conference regular-season win streak halted at Provo, Utah, losing 91-78 to a BYU team that brought high-level execution and aggression to the Marriott Center. The Zags need one win this week to secure the outright WCC title and, at least for now, appear to still be a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament.
With far less fanfare, coach Lisa Fortier’s Gonzaga women locked up their fourth straight WCC title and stayed on course to earn a special reward.
The Zags (27-2, 16-1 WCC) are hoping to demonstrate to the NCAA selection committee they are among the nation’s top 16 teams. If they achieve that, they would become the first team from a mid-major conference to host first- and second-round tournament games since the NCAA returned in 2016 to awarding those assignments based on seeding.
“I think it would be really impactful. It gets you a little bit of a nice recognition,” Fortier said last week. “I kind of downplay it (to her players), but they're smart and they read stuff.”
The competitive advantage of playing potentially two games in front of enthusiastic home fans at the McCarthey Center speaks for itself. By comparison, a year ago, Gonzaga was given a No. 5 seed and sent to Corvallis, Ore., where it lost in the second round to No. 4 seed and host school Oregon State.
At this point, the Zags appear to be in good shape. The selection committee made its first “reveal” of the top 16 teams early this month and placed Gonzaga at No. 12, which would translate to a No. 3 seed. They are No. 12 in Monday’s latest RPI computer rankings, which the committee uses as one factor in selecting and seeding teams.
The Zags are listed as a No. 4 seed playing at home in ESPN analyst Charlie Creme’s latest bracket projection.
Gonzaga’s two defeats were separated by 82 days. The Zags lost 76-70 in overtime to fourth-ranked Stanford back on the road back on Nov. 17. After winning their next 21 games, they were upended 70-60 at Saint Mary’s on Feb. 8.
Without a marquee victory, it’s tempting to cite Stanford as the highlight of Gonzaga’s resume. “That Stanford game was close but at the end of the day it wasn't a win,” Fortier said.
Instead, Gonzaga’s consistency and dominance in the WCC are the hallmarks of a superior season. But even Fortier understands the Zags have less wiggle room this season in the WCC, which wasn’t as strong as usual.
“There’s not a lot of room for error in our conference this year just based on the RPI of the other teams,” she said, alluding to the fact that only one other WCC team (BYU, No. 80) is among the top-100 in the RPI. “Even though every game is tough, the RPI does not help us.”
Gonzaga absorbed a blow on Feb. 1 when senior guard Katie Campbell, the team's second-leading scorer, was lost to a season-ending knee injury.
“We need to show who we are after Katie Campbell’s injury,” Fortier said. “We’ve been guarding, which is important. I think it’s going to be OK.”
The Zags are 7-1 since Campbell went out, aided by a balanced scoring approach. Freshman guard Kayliegh Truong has started the past six games. “She’s doing a lot, as much as a freshman who has been playing all year but all of a sudden is in a tremendously different role can do,” Fortier said.
The regular season ends for Gonzaga on Saturday, when it travels to Portland. Then it’s off to Las Vegas, where the Zags hope to claim the WCC tournament title that BYU took from them a year ago.
If they complete that equation, the Zags should be sleeping in their own beds for when the NCAA tournament begins.
Last week’s Big Thing: No. 23 BYU handed second-ranked Gonzaga its first WCC loss of the season, ran its own win streak to eight games and presented coach Mark Pope with his 100th career win by posting a 91-78 victory on Saturday night. The Cougars (23-7, 12-3), who got 61 points from Yoeli Childs (28), Jake Toolson (17) and TJ Haws (16), leaped four spots from No. 18 to 14 in the NET computer rankings, virtually assuring they will have a spot in the NCAA tournament field. The Zags (27-2, 13-1), who lost for the first time since Nov. 29, also saw an end to their 18-game road win streak.
“That was unbelievable, just the fight that we had,” Childs said afterward. “I’m trying to be in the moment, but this team has such big goals that I can’t help to think how encouraging this is for our future — for making the run that we want to make and doing the things that we want to do.”
Gonzaga coach Mark Few gave all credit to the Cougars. “They were just playing with much more spirit, and much more passion, and they were off-the-charts tougher than we were. We got out-toughed in every phase of the game tonight,” he said.
This week’s Big Thing: A lot of Gonzaga’s impressive win streaks were snapped at BYU, but one big one remains — the Zags enter the week having won 37 consecutive home games, the longest active streak in the country. Gonzaga can clinch the regular-season title Thursday at home against San Diego before closing the WCC schedule at home Saturday against long-time rival Saint Mary’s. The Zags crushed Saint Mary’s 90-60 in Moraga on Feb. 8, but the Gaels beat them in the 2019 WCC tournament championship game and twice in the past four meetings at Spokane.
Gaels, where art thou? The WCC remains positioned to land three men’s teams in the NCAA tournament field. Saint Mary’s (23-6, 10-4) is projected as a No. 8 seed by Joe Lunardi of ESPN and No. 9 by Jerry Palm of CBS Sports. The Gaels have a regular-season split with BYU and sit at No. 32 in NET rankings, in part thanks to a 40-point victory over Pac-12 leader Arizona State on a “neutral” court at Phoenix on Dec. 18.
Meek’s Pilots are not mild: Two women’s teams have made impressive turnarounds this season, including San Diego, which transformed a 2-16 WCC record a year ago into an 11-5 mark so far this season. But 2018-19 was an anomaly for coach Cindy Fisher’s program, which enjoyed five straight 20-win seasons not so long ago.
No team has reversed the long stretch of futility that Portland has engineered. First-year coach Michael Meek’s squad is 18-10 overall, 11-6 in the WCC, and has won four in a row. He inherited a program that hadn’t enjoyed an overall winning record since 2009-10 nor a WCC winning mark since the year before that.
Portland’s one remaining regular-season game: Saturday at home vs. recently crowned champ Gonzaga, against whom they lost by just five points in Spokane back on Dec. 29.