By Jeff Faraudo
#WCChoops columnist | ARCHIVES
 
Not even the NCAA tournament has been exempt from the pandemic: Virginia Commonwealth had to bow out of its opener against Oregon on Saturday due to COVID-19 issues within its program.
 
Unbeaten and top-seeded Gonzaga (28-0), which faces Creighton (22-8) on Sunday in the Sweet 16, had five games canceled in December because of its own COVID complications. 
 
But coach Mark Few, whose team is four victories from completing college basketball’s first unbeaten season since Indiana did it in 1976, believes the extraordinary challenges of this year have steeled his players’ determination.
 
“I literally think they could handle anything, maybe even being ship-wrecked on a deserted island. They’d figure it out,” he said after Gonzaga’s 87-71 second-round victory over Oklahoma on Monday.
 
“There’s been a positive aspect to this. We’ve drawn so much closer, all of us, within our little core group, because of this. It’s really helped in building chemistry,” Few said. “If anything, the COVID situation, as screwed up as it’s made it for us as far as a sense of normalcy, it’s really drawn us closer. This group embraced that and ran with it and they play that way, too.”
 
HOW THE BRACKET UNFOLDS FROM HERE: Next up for Gonzaga in the regional semifinal is Creighton (Sunday, 11:10 a.m., CBS), which has advanced past the second round for the first time since 1974, when the tournament had just 25 teams. The Zags, by comparison, have reached the Sweet 16 for the sixth straight time.
 
The fifth-seeded Bluejays, regular-season runner-up in the Big East Conference, are “an absolute elite offensive team,” Few said. All five starters score in double figures and they average nearly 10 3-point baskets per game. Creighton starts just one player taller than 6-foot-5 — 6-7 forward Christian Bishop — so the defensive matchup against 6-10 Drew Timme could be challenging.
 
The programs have split eight previous meetings, with Gonzaga winning by double digits in games played in December of 2017 and ‘18. Those were the only two times they have squared off in more than 40 years. 
 
If the Zags advance to Tuesday’s regional final, they’d face the winner of the Pac-12 duel between Oregon (21-6) and USC (24-7). Gonzaga has a one-game winning streak against the Ducks and Trojans — the only victory it owns against either program.
 
The Zags are 1-9 all-time vs. Oregon, with a 73-72 overtime win two seasons ago at Paradise Island in the Bahamas. Corey Kispert scored 17 points and Joel Ayayi had 13 for Gonzaga. Few is 1-1 vs. Oregon, including the Ducks 70-64 win in 1999, his first season as coach.
 
USC won the only two matchups vs. Gonzaga, both games played in the early 1990s.
 
TWO IN ZAGS’ CORNER & ONE WHO IS UNSURE: Sister Jean, the 101-year-old chaplain for Loyola Chicago, is one of two high-profile fans who picked Gonzaga to win it all in her NCAA tournament pool. The other is President Obama.
 
Jimmy Kimmel was less than impressed. “President Obama went out on a limb,” Kimmel said. “He took No. 1 seed Gonzaga to go all the way, which is interesting because Gonzaga, as I’ve pointed out in the past, is not even a school. It doesn’t even exist.”
 
Of course, Kimmel has had fun with this routine before in his late-show monologue, and he revived the bit last week, joking that Gonzaga is a team but not a university. He went so far as to cite a story by local CBS affiliate KREM 2 titled, “Where in the world is Gonzaga University?”
 
“The local news station in Spokane is unable to find this made-up school. And Obama picked them to win,” Kimmel said. “Obama, Gonzaga . . . they’re all in on it together.”
 
CONVINCING NORFOLK: After Gonzaga won its 12th straight NCAA opener with a 98-55 breeze past 16th-seeded Norfolk State, guard Kyonze Chavis conceded the Spartans hadn’t faced a team quite like the Zags.
 
“The game speed was like 1,000 miles per hour,” Chavis said. “They were moving a lot. The ball was moving. It was just a reality when you got out there on the court. It was just playing against a bunch of pros, actually.”
 
BULLDOGS, YES. OTHER DOGS, NOT SO MUCH: Junior guard Joel Ayayi, asked during a Thursday morning media session about his feelings toward dogs, acknowledged he never was partial to them while growing up in France.
 
“I don’t hate dogs,” he said. “We don’t know what they think about. That itself is kind of a risky play to have something or someone in your house you don’t know what they think of at any time. They could come and bite you — you never know.”
 
SEVEN WHO ARE DONE: The WCC qualified eight teams to the postseason — four each among the men and women, including two from each gender in the NCAA tournament. But by Wednesday night, only the Gonzaga men still were standing.
 
Here’s a quick recap of how the other seven closed up shop for the season:
 
— BYU men (20-7): The Cougars made it back to the NCAA tournament for the first time in six seasons, but their 73-62 loss to UCLA in the first round ended their season with consecutive defeats for the first time in two seasons under coach Mark Pope. Facing the Bruins at historic Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis may have been an unfair setting: UCLA coaching legend John Wooden played a high school game in the building the year it opened in 1928.
 
— Saint Mary’s men (14-10): The Gaels lost 69-67 to Western Kentucky in their NIT opener, closing out a rare clunker of a season by their standards. One bright spot in the season finale: Sophomore small forward Alex Ducas, who missed 10 games due to injury, scored 11 points and shot 3 for 5 on 3’s after going 0 for 9 from deep in four previous games since returning from a bad ankle.
 
— Pepperdine men (15-12): The Waves finished on a high note, sweeping three games to win the CBI tournament. Senior point guard Colbey Ross had 15 points and seven assists in the 84-61 title-game victory over Coastal Carolina and wound up his prolific career with 2,236 points, 854 assists and 450 rebounds — the first player in Division I history to reach 2,200/800/400.
 
— BYU women (19-6): The Cougars used 28 points from Paisley Harding to upset Rutgers upset fifth-seeded in the opening round of the NCAA tournament. Hoping to advance to the Sweet 16 for the third time in program history, BYU held a four-point lead with 5 minutes left against No. 3 Arizona in the second round before falling 52-46. 
 
Coach Jeff Judkins called it “a hard season but a really fun season,” and announced the entire team plans to return next season. That includes seniors Harding — whose husband Connor plays for the BYU men — along with Tegan Graham and Maria Albiero.
 
— Gonzaga women (23-4): Seeded No. 5 in the NCAA tournament, the Zags had won 22 of their previous 23 games. Clean and efficient all season, they had mostly themselves to blame for a 64-59 first-round upset loss to No. 12 Belmont, which scored its first-ever NCAA win. The WCC champs shot 55 percent and forged a 37-18 rebounding edge but had 20 turnovers and forced just six. Belmont outscored Gonzaga 25-5 off the giveaways.
 
— USF women (16-11): The Dons, who far outperformed their last-place projection in the preseason WCC coaches poll, lost 90-82 to Cal Baptist in the second round of the WNIT. Freshman guard Ioanna Krimili, the WCC’s Newcomer of the Year, scored 30 points and finished the season as the conference’s top scorer at 18.9 per game.
 
— Portland women (14-13): The Pilots ended their season with a 67-64 loss to Cleveland State in the championship game of the WBI, but not before establishing a couple milestones. Senior Maddie Muhlheim set a school-record with 227 career 3-pointers. And sophomore Alex Fowler, one of two All-WCC players expected to return next season (along with Haylee Andrews), became the fastest to 1,000 career points since the Pilots moved up to the Division I level 35 years ago.
 
STAT OF THE WEEK: .491 — Gonzaga’s field goal percentage in its win over Oklahoma. It was a season low for the Zags, but only 11 of 340 Division I teams shot better than that for the season. Gonzaga leads the nation in field-goal accuracy at .549.
 
QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “That team, it’s going to take a handful to beat them boys.” — Charles Barkley on unbeaten Gonzaga